A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right, 1933–1973 2019033680, 9781138624115, 9781138624122, 9780429436895

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A.K. CHESTERTON AND THE EVOLUTION OF BRITAIN’S EXTREME RIGHT, 1933–1973

Arthur Kenneth (A.K.) Chesterton was a soldier, journalist and activist whose involvement with fascist and extreme right-wing politics in Britain spanned four decades. Beginning with his recruitment to Oswald Mosley’s ‘Blackshirts’ in the 1930s, Chesterton’s ideological relationship with fascism, nationalism and anti-Semitism would persist far beyond the collapse of the interwar movements, culminating in his role as a founder of the National Front in 1967. This study examines Chesterton’s significance as a bridging figure between two eras of extreme right activity in Britain, and considers the ideological and organizational continuity that existed across the interwar and post-war periods. It further uses Chesterton’s life as a means to explore the persistence of racism and anti-Semitism within British society, as well as examining the political conflicts and tactical disputes that shaped the extreme right as it attempted to move ‘from the margins to the mainstream’. This book will appeal to students and researchers with an interest in fascism studies, British political history, extremism and anti-Semitism. Luke LeCras holds a doctorate in history from Murdoch University in Western Australia, where he has taught undergraduate courses in global and modern European history. His research interests include fascism and right-wing extremism, nationalism and populism in contemporary British politics.

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

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: Latin American Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism The Corporatist Wave António Costa Pinto The Far Right and the Environment Politics, Discourse and Communication Edited by Bernhard Forchtner Vigilantism against Migrant and Minorities Edited by Tore Bjørgo and Miroslav Mareš Trumping Democracy From Ronald Reagan to Alt-Right Edited by Chip Berlet A.K. Chesterton and the Evolution of Britain’s Extreme Right, 1933–1973 Luke LeCras For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/RoutledgeAdvances-in-Sociology/book-series/SE0511

A.K. CHESTERTON AND THE EVOLUTION OF BRITAIN’S EXTREME RIGHT, 1933–1973

Luke LeCras

First published 2020 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 © 2020 Luke LeCras The right of Luke LeCras 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: LeCras, Luke, author. Title: A.K. Chesterton and the evolution of Britain’s extreme right, 1933–1973 / Luke LeCras. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. Identifiers: LCCN 2019033680 Subjects: LCSH: Chesterton, A. K. (Arthur Kenneth) | Fascists—Great Britain—Biography. | Right-wing extremists—Great Britain—Biography. | Right-wing extremists—Great Britain—History—20th century. | Fascism—Great Britain—History—20th century. | Racism—Great Britain—History—20th century. | Antisemitism—Great Britain— History—20th century. | Great Britain—Race relations. | Great Britain—Politics and government—20th century. Classification: LCC DA574.C48 L43 2020 | DDC 320.53/3092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019033680 ISBN: 978-1-138-62411-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-62412-2 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-43689-5 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS

Acknowledgementsvi Abbreviationsvii Introduction

1

1 Born in war: life before politics, 1899–1933

8

2 The blackshirt life: the British Union of Fascists, 1933–1938

30

3 My country right and wrong: fascism after Mosley, 1938–1939

56

4 Drawing room fascism: the After-Victory Group, 1943–1946

66

5 Sound the alarm: Candour and the League of Empire Loyalists, 1953–1967

90

6 Forward the extremists: the National Front, 1967–1973

115

7 What is behind it all? Racism, anti-Semitism and conspiracy after 1945

131



Conclusion: evolution, stagnation and the ‘fascist ghost’ after 1945

155

Bibliography161 Index167

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful first and foremost to Professor Nigel Copsey at Teeside University, Dr. Graham Macklin at the University of Oslo and Craig Fowlie at Routledge for showing interest in my work and allowing me to contribute to the series. I would also like to thank my doctoral supervisors – Dr. James Crossland, Professor Michael Durey, Professor Michael Sturma and especially Dr. Andrew Webster – for their continuing feedback and guidance, as well as my examiners – the aforementioned Nigel Copsey, Professor Emeritus Colin Holmes at the University of Sheffield and Professor Andrew Bonnell at the University of Queensland – for their challenging yet encouraging feedback. Since 2015, I have been fortunate to attend conferences of the Australasian Association for European Historians, which have introduced me to many brilliant colleagues and provided a collegial environment to discuss and develop new ideas. Special thanks are due to Evan Smith, Kylie Galbraith and Lauren Piko for their words of encouragement and welcome insights into contemporary British history. The primary research for this book was made possible by the many library and archival staff who assisted me throughout the United Kingdom and Australia. Special thanks to Lizzie Richmond at the University of Bath Special Collections, for compiling an excellent catalogue of A.K. Chesterton’s papers and for allowing me to photograph a large proportion of the archived material for future reference. I would also like to acknowledge Dr. David Baker and Professor Roger Eatwell for compiling and donating the materials now housed in the Chesterton Collection. I would like to extend my sincerest gratitude to all the family and friends who have supported me during the research and writing process. Special thanks must go to Jill Rainnie, who graciously accommodated me during my time overseas; to my brother Caleb for his encouragement; and to Tessia, for her kindness, love and patience. Last but not least, I am forever grateful for the unwavering support of my parents, John and Annette LeCras, to whom I dedicate this book.

ABBREVIATIONS

Chesterton Collection: University of Bath Special Collections GB 1128, Catalogue of the papers and correspondence of Arthur Kenneth Chesterton (1899–1973) BL: British Library, St. Pancras PA: Parliamentary Archives of the United Kingdom TNA: National Archives of the United Kingdom USSC: University of Sheffield Special Collections WCML: Working Class Movement Library

INTRODUCTION

Most political movements of the extreme right have remained on the fringes of history, unable to replicate the disastrous triumphs of interwar fascism in Italy, Germany and Spain. This is especially true in Britain, where the history of fascist and extreme right movements has widely, though not universally, been characterized in terms of failure and marginalization.1 With so many of its parties resigned to a small and struggling existence, studies of the extreme right in Britain are invariably drawn to individual stories. For several decades after 1945, the history of fascism in interwar Britain was all but synonymous with the biography of Sir Oswald Mosley, its most successful and reviled exponent. Only in the 1980s, with new sources and perspectives, did British fascism develop a historical profile independent from Mosley – though the outsized presence and influence of ‘the Leader’ can still be discerned in recent scholarship.2 Among the figures who travelled in Mosley’s wake through the political wilderness of right-wing extremism in Britain, A.K. Chesterton was not the most notorious, well-connected or intellectually sophisticated. Nor does he necessarily represent the individual whose ideological legacy weighs heaviest upon right-populist or neo-fascist movements to have emerged in Britain since the Second World War. Instead, Chesterton’s significance derives from the depth and longevity of his career, which encompassed two of the most prominent extreme right parties to arise in 20th-century Britain: the British Union of Fascists, founded by Sir Oswald Mosley in 1932, and the National Front, for which Chesterton served as founding chairman in 1967. Like many activists of the war generation, Chesterton lived a life parallel to politics that was remarkable in its own right. He was a teenage soldier in East Africa and the Western Front, a decorated veteran of both world wars, an accomplished journalist and playwright, a pugnacious critic and, for many years, an erratic drunkard. A 1996 biography by Dr. David Baker, Ideology of Obsession, ties these experiences to Chesterton’s political development, culminating in his involvement

2 Introduction

and disillusionment with Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) in the 1930s.3 Based on the author’s doctoral thesis completed in 1982, Baker’s study is rich in biographical and analytical detail but focused primarily on the processes by which Chesterton became an archetypal British fascist. This book builds upon Baker’s work regarding the origins of Chesterton’s ideology by turning to its development and consequences throughout the post-war era. Beyond simply completing the biographical picture, however, this study emphasizes Chesterton’s status as a transitional figure who played a substantial role in the survival and evolution of Britain’s extreme right across two distinct periods. With the emergence of a new wave of scholarship concerned with Britain’s extreme right after 1945, there is all the more reason to consider the full contributions of a man who sustained the movement during an early stage of its ‘long march through the cold-night’.4 To properly evaluate Chesterton in this regard, we need to briefly consider some of the historiographical issues that arise from moving between the history of interwar fascism and that of the post-war extreme right. Several early studies of fascism in Europe limited their focus to a discrete ‘epoch’ which ended with the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945.5 Since the 1990s, however, a decade that saw renewed growth for parties of the extreme right in Western Europe, the idea of fascism as a limited, purely ‘epochal’ phenomenon has widely fallen from favour. Roger Griffin’s definition of generic fascism – ‘a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism’ – is the most influential definition among Anglophone scholars, particularly those concerned with fascism after 1945.6 Griffin’s interpretation emphasizes the capacity for fascism to adapt to the different national and historical conditions of the ‘post-fascist’ era, all the while maintaining the same ideological core of ‘palingenetic ultra-nationalism’.7 An alternative ‘fascist minimum’ proposed by Roger Eatwell also makes a conscious attempt to account for post-war movements, placing emphasis upon their serious proposals for a ‘third-way’ between liberalism and socialism.8 Even Robert Paxton, for whom fascism denotes a series of ‘mobilizing passions’ more than an ideology, derives a definition from the interwar European movements that can be applied in ‘other times and other places’.9 Even prior to the emergence of a ‘new consensus’ in the understanding of generic fascism, the concept of a persistent and adaptable fascist essence was implicit within many studies of Britain’s extreme right.10 This was true not only for the raft of works concerned with Mosley and the BUF but for analyses and post-mortems of the National Front, both of which burgeoned during the 1980s.11 Fascism, particularly as defined by Griffin’s ideal type, now provides the theoretical underpinning for a wide range of studies encompassing the BUF, the ‘para-fascist’ groups predating Mosley, the contemporary British National Party (BNP) and the small but enduring ‘groupuscules’ of British neo-Nazism.12 Scholars of both interwar and post-war British fascism have proved highly receptive to other innovations of the new consensus, with its emphasis on fascist culture and fascism as a ‘political religion’.13 The most notable exceptions to these trends are the small number of works which specifically emphasize the ‘rightist’ character of the interwar and post-war

Introduction  3

movements rather than their generically fascist qualities. Alan Sykes’s concise study largely eschews the concept of British fascism and instead focuses on a continuous tradition of the ‘radical right’ tracing back to the late 19th century.14 Likewise, Martin Pugh’s study of interwar fascism in Britain finds its antecedents in the Edwardian Radical Right and emphasizes the extent to which parties like the BUF were shaped by their relationship with conservatism.15 As its title connotes, this book considers Chesterton specifically within the framework of the extreme right, yet another term whose definition and parameters are vigorously contested. To the extent that a consensus can be established, the literature dealing with the extreme right describes a ‘political family’ whose members exhibit the same ideological traits. Nationalism, xenophobia, racism and hostility towards liberal-democracy are among the most commonly identified features of extreme right-wing ideology in Britain and Europe, though as is the case with fascism, there is no universally accepted definition or criteria.16 Elizabeth Carter, for example, dispenses with specific ideological features and focuses on the negative principles of right-wing extremism: a rejection of the democratic state and constitutionalism (‘extremism’) and a rejection of human equality, ‘a feature that makes right-wing extremism right-wing’.17 Like another leading scholar of the contemporary extreme right, Cas Mudde, Carter rejects the ‘reductionist’ view of the post-war movements as solely defined by their attempts to resurrect or parody interwar fascism.18 There are two questions likely to be raised regarding the terminology used to describe Chesterton’s political milieu throughout this study. Firstly, why refer to the evolution of the ‘extreme right’ in Britain rather than the ‘radical right’ or ‘far right’ described in other texts? Secondly, given the prevalence of fascism as an ideological and organizational current in Chesterton’s life, why not refer solely to a concept of post-war British fascism? Regarding the first question, there have been many attempts to discretely categorize the far, extreme and radical rights, though these definitions vary according to the national and historical context in question. In the 1980s, the radical right gained currency as a description for radical conservatism and the ‘New Right’ represented in Britain by Margaret Thatcher. More recently, however, the term has undergone a resurgence in the burgeoning literature surrounding the ‘populist radical right’, which Mudde defines as yet another political family exhibiting nativist, authoritarian and populist tendencies.19 In contemporary Britain, the most prominent manifestation of the populist radical right is the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), formed by disaffected members of the Conservative Party in the early 1990s. Unlike its counterparts on the extreme right, UKIP has managed to cultivate an enduring electoral presence while largely avoiding the fascist and neo-Nazi affiliations that have long plagued the BNP.20 A formal distinction between the far right and the extreme right is more difficult to ascertain. Demonstrating one way such a distinction can be made, Carter rejects the far right as a category better suited to describing a point on the political spectrum rather than an ideological family.21 For the most part, however, the far

4 Introduction

and extreme right are referred to by historians and political scientists interchangeably to describe the same broad family of parties and ideological movements. This study’s preference for the latter term is mostly pragmatic, therefore, as many of the themes and ideological features described in the literature concerned specifically with the extreme right bear particular relevance to A.K. Chesterton’s ideological interests. These not only include the core elements listed in most definitions of the extreme right – nationalism, hard-Euroscepticism, racism and authoritarianism – but also the more esoteric themes such as anti-communism, anti-Americanism and cultural pessimism.22 Within historical literature, there is also an established precedent for using the extreme right as a category encompassing both the fascist and ‘post-fascist’ eras, making it an ideal frame of reference through which to consider Chesterton’s career. Regarding the second question, it has been observed that in the recent stampede to define and explicate populism and the contemporary extreme right, scholars have tended to disregard the relevance and conceptual value of generic fascism.23 Bearing this in mind, it would be absurd to consider Chesterton’s involvement with the extreme right without grappling with fascism, both in the generic sense and as an epochal aspect of 20th-century British politics.This is not only because of Chesterton’s time as a self-professed fascist revolutionary in the 1930s but because of his subsequent involvement with the first wave of extreme right parties to emerge in the post-fascist era. More so than their populist or ‘post-industrial’ successors in the 1980s, these movements were ideologically and organizationally entangled with the legacy of interwar fascism.24 Chesterton’s post-war experiences provide a good illustration of how the struggle to transcend the failures and ill-associations of this legacy was central to the development of Britain’s extreme right after the BUF’s disintegration in mid-1940. My use of the extreme right as a framing concept is not intended to downplay the significance of fascism in Chesterton’s ideology, therefore, but to highlight its distinct presence among the various ideological and political forces at work during his lifetime. Approaching fascism as a subset of the extreme right is not without its own controversies, since various interpretations stress the syncretic, centrist or even leftwing characteristics of fascist ideology. It is common for parties of the extreme right to reject the fascist label while also declaring themselves ‘neither left nor right’, a strategy adopted by both populists and neo-fascists in search of political legitimacy.25 While fascism’s exact relationship to rightism remains in dispute, there are strong practical reasons to treat fascism and the extreme right as mutually inclusive categories.26 Robert Paxton has observed that, whatever their initial sympathies with the revolutionary left, fascists were invariably compelled to seek political advancement through alliances with the right – a pattern which Pugh compellingly illustrates in his study of Britain’s interwar movement.27 Similarly, the fate of extreme right movements in the post-war era has been heavily determined (often in a negative sense) by their relationship with sympathetic or disenchanted conservatives and their ability to carve out political space alongside the mainstream right.28 Chesterton’s interactions with the outside edges of British conservatism,

Introduction  5

primarily during the latter half of his career, provide another important dimension to his influence on the extreme right’s reconstruction after 1945. The discussions of fascism throughout this book are broadly informed by Roger Griffin’s ideal type, which, as demonstrated in Baker’s study, provides a valuable heuristic tool for understanding Chesterton’s revolutionary outlook as a member of the BUF. Moving beyond the interwar period, Griffin’s work also proves useful in conceptualizing aspects of Britain’s extreme right after 1940: its ‘ideological heterogeneity’ and ‘organizational complexity’; the growing prevalence of transnational networks and pan-European identity; and the persistence of ‘nostalgic fascist’ groups seeking to resurrect the interwar movement in all but name. In an effort to move beyond the abstract, ideological dimensions of fascism in Chesterton’s experience, I have also endeavoured to draw on perspectives not strictly contained within the ‘new consensus’, particularly those which emphasize the organization and methods of fascist movements seeking political power and influence. Robert Paxton’s definition of a dynamic, adaptable fascism, defined by its adherents motivating passions and political behaviours, has been poorly received by some scholars of British fascism.29 Like the definitions of fascism provided by Stanley Payne and Michael Mann, however, Paxton’s approach highlights themes that, although not strictly implied by the pursuit of cultural redemption and national rebirth, were integral to Chesterton’s experience as a fascist in Britain: violence, paramilitarism, the leadership principle and the cooption of conservative allies and fellow-travellers.30

Notes 1 See Mike Cronin ed., The Failure of British Fascism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). 2 The two most extensive accounts of Mosley’s life and political career are: Robert Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990); Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt (London:Viking, 2006). For some comments on Mosley’s influence on the early historiography of British fascism, see Richard Thurlow, ‘The Black Knight’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 9, No. 3 (1975), pp. 15–19. 3 David L. Baker, Ideology of Obsession (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996); David L. Baker, ‘A.K. Chesterton: The Making of a British Fascist’ (PhD Diss., University of Sheffield, 1982). The title for Baker’s work is derived from an early consideration of Chesterton by Richard Thurlow, ‘Ideology of Obsession: On the Model of A.K. Chesterton’, Patterns of Prejudice,Vol. 8, No. 6 (1974), pp. 23–29. 4 See Nigel Copsey and Matthew Worley, ‘Introduction’, Tomorrow Belongs to Us: Britain’s Far Right Since 1967 (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 1–8. 5 The earliest and most influential work to posit this interpretation of fascism was Ernst Nolte’s Three Faces of Fascism (Holt: Reinhart and Winston, 1963). 6 Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 8–14. For later works by Griffin which elaborate on his interpretation, see: International Fascism (London: Arnold, 1998); Roger Griffin, Fascism and Modernism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 7 Roger Griffin, ‘Fascism’s New Faces (and New Facelessness) in the “Post-fascist” Epoch’, Roger Griffin, Wener Loh and Andreas Umland eds., Fascism Past and Present, West and East (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2006), pp. 29–67. 8 Roger Eatwell, ‘Towards a New Model of Generic Fascism’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Vol. 4, No. 2 (1992), pp. 161–194; Roger Eatwell, ‘The Nature of “Generic Fascism”: Complexity and Reflexive Hybridity’, Antonio Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis eds.,

6 Introduction

Rethinking Fascism and Dictatorship in Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), pp. 67–87. 9 Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (London:Viking, 2004), pp. 172–205. 10 Roger Griffin, ‘The Primacy of Culture: The Current Growth (Or Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascist Studies’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 1 (2000), pp. 21–43; Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 21. 11 On the historiography of the BUF, see Jakub Drabik, ‘British Union of Fascists’, Contemporary British History,Vol. 30, No. 1 (2016), pp. 1–19. For Britain’s extreme right after 1967, see Craig Fowlie, ‘Britain’s Far Right Since 1967: A Bibliographical Survey’, Copsey and Worley eds., Tomorrow Belongs to Us, pp. 224–267. 12 For a consideration of Mosley’s party in relation to generic fascism, see Gary Love, ‘ “What’s the Big Idea?” Oswald Mosley, the British Union of Fascists and Generic Fascism’, Journal of Contemporary History,Vol. 42, No. 3 (2007), pp. 447–468.The most widely cited work on British fascism is Richard Thurlow’s Fascism in Britain (London: I.B.Tauris, 1998); on the British National Party (1982–present), see Matthew J. Goodwin, New British Fascism (London: Routledge, 2011); Nigel Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 13 On the prevalence of culture within the ideology of British fascism, see David D. Roberts, Alexander De Grand, Mark Antliff and Thomas Linehan, ‘Comments on Roger Griffin, “The Primacy of Culture:The Current Growth (Or Manufacture) of Consensus Within Fascist Studies” ’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 37, No. 2 (2002), pp. 259– 274. For a wide range of cultural perspectives on interwar and post-war British fascism, see Julie V. Gottlieb and Thomas Linehan eds., The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the FarRight in Britain (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004); Nigel Copsey ed., Cultures of Post-War British Fascism (London: Routledge, 2015). 14 Alan Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 15 Martin Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! (London: Pimlico, 2005), pp. 7–20. 16 For an extensive discussion of these methodological and definitional problems, see: Cas Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 5–24; Elizabeth Carter, The Extreme Right in Western Europe: Success or Failure? (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 13–63. 17 Elizabeth Carter, ‘Party Ideology’, Mudde ed., The Populist Radical Right, p. 61. 18 Carter, The Extreme Right in Western Europe, pp. 17–18. 19 Cas Mudde ed., ‘Introduction to the Populist Radical Right’, The Populist Radical Right: A Reader (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 22–35. 20 See Robert Ford and Matthew J. Goodwin, Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (London: Routledge, 2014). 21 Carter, The Extreme Right in Western Europe, p. 24. 22 Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right, pp. 11–12. 23 See the following: Nigel Copsey, ‘ “Fascism . . . but with an Open Mind.” Reflections on the Contemporary Far Right in (Western) Europe’, Fascism, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2013), pp. 1–17; Mark Mazower, ‘Fascism and Democracy Today: What Use Is the Study of History in the Current Crisis?’ European Law Journal,Vol. 22, No. 3 (2016), pp. 375–385; Andrea Mammone, ‘The Eternal Return? Faux Populism and Contemporarization of Neo-Fascism Across Britain, France and Italy’, Journal of Contemporary European Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (2009), pp. 171–192. 24 Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right, pp. 14–16. 25 Paul Hainsworth, The Extreme Right in Western Europe (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 13–17; Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right, pp. 15–16; Mudde, ‘Introduction to the Populist Radical Right’, p. 25. 26 Hainsworth offers a concise formulation of this idea: ‘It can be argued that although fascist and neo-fascist parties are located on the extreme right, not all right-wing ­ extremist parties or movements are fascist or neo-fascist.’ See The Extreme Right in Western Europe, p. 17.

Introduction  7

27 On the broader subject of fascist and Nazi sympathizers within the interwar British right, see Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right (London: Constable, 1980). 28 Carter, The Extreme Right in Western Europe, pp. 102–105. 29 David L. Baker, ‘Generic Fascism: An Off-road Vehicle Mired in the Conceptual Mud: Or Speeding Down the Highway Towards a Greater Understanding of Nazism?’ Griffin, Loh and Umland eds., Fascism Past and Present,West and East, pp. 285–291, cf. 286. 30 Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), pp. 3–19; Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 219; Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 5–24.

1 BORN IN WAR Life before politics, 1899–1933

Arthur Kenneth (A.K.) Chesterton was born on 1 May 1899 in Krugersdorp, South Africa. His father, Arthur George Chesterton, worked as a mine secretary at the Luipaards Vlei gold mine on the Witwatersrand but descended from a distinguished family that included the acclaimed author and poet G.K. Chesterton.1 In October 1899, following the outbreak of the Second Boer War, Chesterton and his mother Harriet were forced to flee the country and stay with relatives in England. While attempting to join his family, Arthur Chesterton contracted pneumonia while travelling between Johannesburg and Mozambique, dying at the age of 28. A.K. Chesterton returned to Krugersdorp along with his mother and paternal uncle after the war’s conclusion in May 1902. Shortly thereafter, his mother remarried to a Scottish mine administrator named George Horne.2 The family eventually resettled back on the Witwatersrand near Johannesburg, where Chesterton began to attend preparatory school. In 1911, at the age of 10, Chesterton was sent abroad by his mother and step-father to stay with his paternal grandfather in Herne Hill, England. He completed his preparatory education at a college in Dulwich, before attending the Berkhamstead School in Hertfordshire. In October 1915, Chesterton was visited in England by his mother and step-father, whom he persuaded to take him back to South Africa. Anticipating his literary and journalistic inclinations, Chesterton’s mother had intended for him to find work in a newspaper office upon arriving in Johannesburg. Instead, shortly after disembarking, Chesterton ‘slipped away’ to join the recruitment drive taking place for the South African army. After overcoming his mother’s opposition and gaining the approval of his step-father, Chesterton was accepted into the South African army aged only 16, and within months began taking part in the campaign through German East Africa.3 Taking the full scope of Chesterton’s life into account serves to reinforce the argument, made by David Baker some years ago, that his political extremism cannot

Born in war  9

be accounted for by a pathology or pattern that developed during his childhood or early adulthood.4 Nevertheless, there are several aspects of Chesterton’s life before politics that are worth reexamining in light of his post-war career: his experience of formal education and the racial hierarchies of colonial South Africa; his involvement in the Great War and his struggle to readjust to civilian life after 1919; and his brushes with political thinking and activism prior to diving headfirst into fascist activism in the 1930s. These experiences not only provide insight into why Chesterton was drawn towards the extreme right initially, but why he was driven to persist in the movement long after 1940. Chesterton’s early education was marred by disruption, a result of his stepfather’s frequent need to relocate for work.5 He recalled having little enthusiasm for most academic pursuits, having concluded at an early age that education was ‘a ritual totally irrelevant to my life’.6 There is a temptation to speculate, as Chesterton’s wife did, that the limits and discontinuities of this education made him vulnerable to fringe politics and obsessive conspiracy theories.7 It seems unlikely that further schooling would have inured Chesterton to fascism, however, given that many leading members of the BUF were highly educated and yet found themselves in the same radical firmament.8 Likewise, there is little to suggest that formal education would have inoculated Chesterton against racism, and anti-Semitism in later life. This was evident during his time as the head of the League of Empire Loyalists, whose middle- and upper-class members proved highly receptive to Chesterton’s conspiratorial, racially determinist worldview. The circumstances of Chesterton’s early life clearly account for his basic understanding of patriotism and national identity, which in turn provided the core of his political ethos as a fascist and British nationalist. Chesterton recalled that his patriotic sentiment was first aroused while attending Brightlands school at the age of 11: ‘I fell deeply in love with England, and that passion, despite all disappointments, has increased with every year of my life. England then, I decided, come hell or high water was my country’.9 Along with this early infatuation with British culture, Chesterton’s sense of nationalism was shaped considerably by the time he spent in South Africa, as he detailed in another volume of memoirs: ‘England is the land of my aspiration and my race, as well as most of my adult life, but by birth I belong to Africa’.10 Hence, from an early age Chesterton was imbued with a sense of ‘imperial nationalism’ – an ideal in which every colony and dominion was representative of the English people’s achievement in spreading civilization to the wider world.11 Colonial experience was something that Chesterton shared with many prominent members of the BUF, who were similarly drawn to Mosley’s movement after a period of ‘restlessness’ spent in Britain’s overseas territories.12 Experience in Southern Africa was strikingly common amongst the upper ranks of the party, with at least five members having served in the Boer War.13 Even after his break with Mosley, Chesterton continued to associate primarily with those who shared his affinity for the Empire. After 1953, he maintained a small network of Britons ‘at home and abroad’ that served as his core base of support for two decades.14 The idea of the ‘greater Britain’ acquired by Chesterton at an early age thus remained central to

10  Born in war

his political ideology in later life, even as imperialism faded from relevance in both global affairs and the ideology of the extreme right. Reflecting on Chesterton’s colonial upbringing leads inevitably to the question of how race factored in to his worldview from an early age. The colonial settlements of South Africa and Rhodesia, where Chesterton spent most of his early childhood, were organized along strict racial lines. Wage and employment disputes were a common source of racial tension on the Rand, with white miners threatened by the influx of cheaper labour in the form of indigenous Africans or imported Chinese workers.To alleviate conflicts, the mine owners turned to measures that either segregated black workers entirely from their European counterparts or implemented an industrial colour bar which restricted them to unskilled labour. Under this system, white workers like Chesterton’s father and step-father held supervisory roles overseeing administrative duties and maintaining machinery, while African workers were confined to the manual tasks of extracting and hauling ore.15 The ubiquity of the colour bar system in South Africa was such that, when Chesterton first arrived in England aged 11, he was taken aback by the ‘strange sight of white men working with picks and shovels and doing a multiplicity of other jobs with which I had never learned to associate them’.16 On the domestic front, as well, Chesterton’s upbringing was skewed along racial lines. Servants were a ubiquitous presence in a childhood home where, in his wife’s phrase, ‘coloured labour was cheap’.17 The continuation of such arrangements in the later stages of Chesterton’s life are one example of how, like the idea of empire itself, colonial racism remained a feature of his worldview from childhood onwards. Racism accordingly formed an integral part of his political ideology, first as a follower of Mosley in the 1930s and later as a progenitor of Empire loyalist movements in Britain and the Commonwealth. The paternalistic, colonial framework of Chesterton’s upbringing also provided a base for the conspiratorial and pseudo-scientific notions of race he developed in later life, though not all aspects of Chesterton’s racial thinking can be easily traced back to some facet of childhood experience. Anti-Semitism, the cornerstone of Chesterton’s ‘ideological obsessions’ as an adult, was not readily apparent in his work prior to joining the fascist movement.There was ample opportunity for Chesterton to have been exposed to these notions during his time in South Africa, however, which carried a long and ignominious tradition of anti-Semitism from the 19th century onwards.18 Unlike the other dimensions of Chesterton’s racial thinking, there is little direct evidence to suggest that experiential prejudice lay at the heart of his anti-Semitism. In later life, Chesterton himself dismissed the idea that his thinking on ‘the Jewish question’ was a legacy of his upbringing, despite acknowledging a social climate of anti-Semitism: ‘as a young boy in Johannesburg I went to school with scores of Jews, and, so far from being aware of racial antipathy, I not only had some among my friends but resisted the pressure of elders who tried to make me give them up’.19 Without evidence to the contrary, there is little reason to doubt Chesterton’s assertion that anti-Semitism was not merely a ‘hangover’ from his early life.Yet it is also

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fair to assume that, like the ‘Africans’ and ‘Chinese’ he encountered as a child on the Witwatersrand, Jews were perceived as a distinct and separate facet of a society ordered along lines of race. As with other forms of racism, therefore, the ingrained prejudices and hierarchies of colonialism made it easier for Chesterton to adopt anti-Semitism as a facet of his political worldview.

The Great War, 1915–1918 Chesterton’s decision to fight in the First World War was unremarkable for one of his generation and temperament. He had grown bored and restless in his life as a schoolboy, subscribed to an earnest but unreflective patriotism, and looked to war with the same romantic anticipation as thousands of other underage recruits.20 Though his mother initially reprimanded him for attempting to enlist without her knowledge, Chesterton was broadly encouraged by his family, including his stepfather, who was already acquainted with the harsh realities of army life.21 Chesterton’s first deployment, with the 5th South African infantry in East Africa, provided him with an atypical introduction to the war. In contrast to the fields of Europe, fighting in the jungle took place between mobile bands rather than static trench positions, requiring forced marches between encounters with the enemy. Two of the major battles alluded to by Chesterton in his memoirs took place in early 1916, as part of the South African army’s push southward into German territory: Salaita Hill on 12 February, and Latema Nek on 11 and 12 March.22 The greatest threat to soldiers in East Africa was not enemy action but disease, with malaria and dysentery being responsible for the majority of casualties incurred by British forces. In addition to suffering from the side effects of quinine administered to stave off illness, Chesterton endured a period of starvation when his regiment was cut off from supplies by a swollen river during the rainy season.23 Chesterton’s campaign in East Africa ended when, still aged only 16, he collapsed from fever while marching through the ‘vast wastes of East Africa’. He was saved only by the intervention of two local porters who carried him over the Kipengere mountain range to safety, wherefrom he made his way back to his family’s home in Johannesburg.24 Somewhat remarkably, after a short period of convalescence, the 17-year-old Chesterton resolved to rejoin the war effort by training as an officer with a cadet battalion in Ireland. After receiving his commission, Chesterton was transferred to the 2/2 London Regiment, Royal Fusiliers, to spend the remainder of his war fighting in Europe. While his recollections of the East Africa campaign could be vaguely romanticized, Chesterton was reticent to discuss his experiences in France: The Western Front was no nursery or hot-house for the cultivation of eccentrics, and, even had it been, my memories of its battles are too poignant for me to have sought them out to describe them in this book. When a boy of nineteen, for instance, leads an assault on the outer defences of the Hindenburg line and for the last fifty yards or so reaches his objective scarcely once

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touching the ground because of a vast carpet of dead German bodies and of British bodies killed in previous attacks, then and in later life he has no urge to dig in his mind for recollections of humorous interludes – of which there were many – between the occasions of butchery.25 In this passage, Chesterton alluded to his experiences during the Battle of Épehy, fought over 18 and 19 September 1918 as part of the final effort to break the German defensive line across the Western Front. On the morning of the 19th, Chesterton was put in command of a platoon sent to reinforce an assault on a German position known as the ‘Poplar Trench’. For his part in the successful eight-hour assault, conducted at close range with hand-bombs and bayonets, Chesterton was awarded a Military Cross for bravery.26 Years after the battle took place, he recalled suffering from nightmares that reinforced the image of casualties incurred by both sides at Épehy: ‘a carpet of dead bodies stretching to infinity’.27 Long stretches spent under ‘the all-pervasive atmosphere of death’ had an impact on Chesterton’s psyche that would linger for the remainder of his life: The pessimism was not explicit and it was not morbid. Life welled up in me too strongly for that. Nor was the gaiety forced. No, the pessimism, born in the circumstances of the time, was implicit. Not a single one of my war-time friends survived the war. I never thought I would survive it. Death, its grotesque attitudes and sickly-sweet odours, was familiar to me. I was very far from being in love with it. But I assumed that the next day, or the day after, or the week after, it would catch up with me.28 When the armistice was declared, Chesterton was in Belgium marching with his regiment in the wake of the retreating German army. After a period of service with the occupation army on the Rhine, Chesterton returned to Johannesburg shortly prior to his 21st birthday, having achieved the rank of second lieutenant. Against his expectations, Chesterton had survived the war – but he had not emerged physically unscathed: gastric illness and malaria lingered from the East Africa campaign, and a gas attack that had knocked Chesterton unconscious in France left him with permanent respiratory problems. These physical ailments were accompanied by the acute yet poorly understood psychological trauma inflicted upon combatants of the Great War. For Chesterton, this manifested in a decades-long struggle with alcoholism punctuated by ‘nervous breakdowns’ or bouts of ‘neurasthenia’; such incidents were recalled in his memoirs as ‘jags’ of suicidal alcoholism, a consequence of ‘taught strung nerves and a system shaken by dysentery and malaria incurred in the war’.29 This condition would dog Chesterton during and after his time with the British Union of Fascists, leading to speculation that he was mentally unsound and had been ejected from the movement due to drunkenness.30 Despite his justly earned reputation as an drunkard among the Blackshirts, however, there is nothing to suggest that Chesterton’s political thinking was itself the product of alcoholism or mental defect.31

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The transformative effect of the Great War – in particular, the rapid transition of boy-soldiers into a new generation of men – was one of the founding myths of the British Union of Fascists.32 Mosley’s experiences as a member of the Royal Flying Corps and his brief deployment as a front-line officer featured prominently in his self-image as both a rebel politician during the 1920s and an anointed fascist leader in the 1930s. Robert Skidelsky accordingly wrote that Mosley had emerged in 1918 as ‘A boy turned overnight into a man – and a very old one, as if a lifetime had been compressed into a moment’. A similar significance can be gleaned from Chesterton’s wartime experience, which thrust him brutally into adulthood. In his work as a propagandist for the BUF, Chesterton would lend his own experiences to the argument that fascism’s revolutionary ideals had been born out of the sacrifices of the ‘Front Generation’, and that men like he and Mosley had been driven to radicalism in order to create ‘a land fit for heroes’.33 Writing for Blackshirt in 1937, Chesterton recounted his sense of disillusionment when encountering the civilian world for the first time after the war. Back in London he was dragged, bored almost beyond endurance, to see where a bomb had dropped in a neighbouring park and to listen to a dissertation on the privations and dangers suffered by the civilian population. . . . Next day a stockbroker friend of the family called rejoicing at the prospects of the future. ‘You must settle down, young fellow me-lad, and begin to make some money’.34 As his wife later recalled, ‘the lack of comprehension, even among kindly people, of what he and the whole army in France endured daily left him bitter’.35 The most scorn was reserved for an older generation that seemed incapable of grasping the war’s epochal significance, like the former army chaplain brought to speak with Chesterton as one soldier to another: ‘It is up to you and I’, [the chaplain] said, ‘to do what we can to help this country settle down into the good old ways before the war’. He was aghast at the other’s contemptuous gaze. ‘Magnificent! Exactly as though nothing had happened, I suppose?’.36 The difficulty Chesterton faced in reconciling the memory of war with civilian existence put him in company with the larger cohort of ex-soldiers whose coming-of-age during the Great War drew them towards radical ideas and movements that rejected traditional notions of order and societal progress.37 His narrative of post-war disenchantment also aligned with Mosley’s claim to have been driven to fascism by the decadent and stagnant world he encountered after the armistice: ‘Smooth, smug people who had never fought or suffered, seemed to the eyes of youth – at that moment age-old with sadness, weariness and bitterness – to be eating, drinking, laughing on the graves of our companions’.38 There is some need for caution when approaching the retrospective accounts of wartime experience given by British fascists during and after the heyday of the BUF. Mosley, in particular, had an incentive to play up the significance and profundity of his time in the trenches: at first to bolster his case against the ‘Old Gangs’

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in Parliament, and later, to rationalize his opposition to war with Nazi Germany.39 Chesterton, too, seemed to append greater political significance to his wartime experience after joining the BUF than in the decade prior, though this was likely due to his own hesitation to dredge through the memories of the war. His path to political activism was also much less direct than that followed by Mosley and other members of the ‘Front Generation’: John Beckett founded a left-wing veterans group and worked with the Independent Labour Party before gaining distinction as a young Labour MP in 1925.40 Although too young to have fought in the war, William Joyce found his way quickly into politics upon arriving in England, joining Rotha Linton-Orman’s British Fascists in 1924.41 By comparison, Chesterton’s post-war experience was more akin to that of the ‘fascist wanderer’ described in W.F. Mandle’s 1966 survey of the BUF leadership: a man who, in his own words, spent ‘years wandering through the infinite labyrinths and waste-spaces of the war’s aftermath’.42 Chesterton’s first venture after returning to South Africa in 1920 was to seek his fortune prospecting for diamonds on the Kimberly. When this failed, Chesterton sought more steady employment on the Rand, hoping to follow his father and stepfather by working as a mine administrator. After being found medically unfit for work underground, however, Chesterton was led back to Johannesburg to pursue journalism, the profession that his mother had envisioned for him prior to the war. His columns as a reporter for The Johannesburg Star offered the first real signs of a political worldview in development, though they scarcely dealt with politics in the conventional sense. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that one can consider these early cultural and philosophical musings as evidence of an organic, protofascist ideology. In a column published in 1921, for example, Chesterton mounted a defence of ‘war and warriors’ that criticized the ‘petty’ concerns that had arisen in the world since the armistice: Gone was the infinite camaraderie of the trenches, gone was the glamour of a heroism that was real, gone was the peace and the wide visions of the battlefield – all gone into the dark abyss of the past.The voices of united empires and nations were silenced and in their place arose the babble of the disunified League of Nations. The sanity and straight-issues of the armies ceased to exist, and the world was plunged upon the nightmare laps of the futurists and their raving affiliates. Single steadfast principle stopped dead and handed over to countless legions of poor weak little principles.The thunder of a great dispute was silent, and instead arose the shrill voices of a million million petty little quarrels.43 Though written more than a decade prior to his encounter with Mosley, this was an argument that would later reoccur throughout Chesterton’s propaganda for the BUF. The brutal simplicity of war had produced ‘a real unity, a real brotherhood’ that exalted virtues of bravery, sacrifice and selflessness. Peacetime demanded none of these virtues, encouraging pettiness and complacency, and leaving society to

Born in war  15

decay into a state of dreary commercialism. ‘The ledger book and the shop counter utter but commonplace melodies’, Chesterton wrote, ‘but the guns of war thunder out the music of the spheres’.44 Several of the movements and ideas that fascism sought to negate also appeared as subjects of criticism in Chesterton’s work during the 1920s. He mocked the pacifist movements that had emerged since 1918 for their naivety in pursuing ‘the obliteration of everything on the face of the earth in any way connected with, or even vaguely reminiscent of the waging of war’. In a precursor to his derision of socialists and liberals during the 1930s, Chesterton cautioned against the wave of ‘pacifist fanaticism’ that threatened to abolish the virtues learned during the war.45 Unsurprisingly given his nationalist and Empireloyalist views, Chesterton was also critical of the attempts to secure peace through the League of Nations, or any other internationalist body that might usurp the British Empire.46 The other recurring target of Chesterton’s columns for the Star was ‘rationalism’, a philosophy he saw as underpinning the various efforts to constrain human nature in the name of modernizing the world and securing peace. Chesterton’s attacks on rationalism reflected his commitment to those ‘splendid and indispensable’ parts of human society that liberals and communists alike sought to bypass. In some instances, his work revealed a concern that scientific progress and encroaching modernity marked the onset of a particularly dangerous form of ‘despotism’: Religious despotism, as an example, did in some way strive to make a man feel god-like, military despotism as another example, did at least seek to make a man feel heroic, but this despotism of science, instead of giving to man a feeling that he is the king of creation with an inherent sense of the poetry of life, attempts to make him feel a worm, a parasite.47 Criticisms of ‘theory’ and other manifestations of rationalism did not necessarily put Chesterton on an unswerving path towards fascism. The cultural and intellectual currents that fed into European fascism were wide-ranging, and not necessarily appealing to Chesterton’s tastes: in the early 1920s, for example, he expressed contempt for futurism, a movement that had considerable influence on the development of Italian Fascism.48 There was, however, a clear link between Chesterton’s early rejection of rationalism and his gravitation towards the extreme right, a sphere of political thought which emphasized action and passion rather than pure reason.49 By rejecting the idea that human nature was subject to purely rational explanation, Chesterton also rejected the assumptions of liberalism and Marxism, which regarded human nature as essentially materialistic and subject to change through the application of reason. For all their benefits to humankind, Chesterton argued, scientific and technological progress needed to be cultivated carefully and balanced with a concern for ‘the soul of man’.50 Rationalism’s failure in this regard was its tendency to marginalize or negate the aspects of culture and society that Chesterton saw as transcending the essence of human life: ‘the thing that liberates our souls and leads us into the realm of the infinite’.51

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The tinge of anti-intellectualism that ran through Chesterton’s early journalism also echoed his dim view of formal education. In England, Chesterton had found meaning and enjoyment on the sporting field rather than in the classroom; as a child on the Witwatersrand, many of his formative experiences had taken place around the mines or the surrounding wilderness far outside the confines of traditional schooling. It is not surprising, therefore, that as a young adult he showed disinterest and even contempt towards intellectuals who seemed intent on reducing life to the ‘volumes of pedantry’ that had driven him from school at age 15. In one telling example of this attitude, Chesterton’s column in the Star admonished a South African professor of philosophy whose work explored the psychology of humour: is this a fair specimen of the twentieth century wisdom which our pedants are serving out to twentieth century youth? If so, it were better to abandon our Chair of Philosophy and send the students out into the fields to enjoy the vigours of a virile life near to the bosom of nature!52 The same preoccupation with physical and spiritual (rather than purely intellectual) development appeared prominently a decade later in Chesterton’s propaganda for the BUF, where he counselled young fascists to ‘keep fit, physical and mentally. . . . Fascism is the doctrine, not of talk, but of action’.53 Youthful vigour and vitality were also prominent features of the new social order in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany which British fascists sought to emulate. While travelling through Germany in 1937, Chesterton approvingly described the advances in education that emphasized ‘character’ over pure intellect and cultivated ‘sun-tanned vigorous young men getting down to the tasks of the day with efficiency and joy of life’.54 Midway through his tenure as a reporter with the Star, Chesterton came face to face with another manifestation of the post-war crisis, the surging revolutionary left. As a child, Chesterton had witnessed one of the early strikes by white workers protesting against the use of cheap ‘coloured’ labour in the Witwatersrand gold mines. This unrest, and the intervention of the military to defend the mines against sabotage, was an early precursor to the violent unrest that reached its zenith shortly after his return to Johannesburg. The tension began in earnest during the early 1920s, sparked by a week-long strike by African workers that ended with forceful intervention by the military and police.55 Discontent among the white trade unions was then compounded by a drop in the price of gold, which led the Chamber of Mines to propose a reduction in wages and a loosening of the ‘colour bar’, the law that prevented African workers from assuming supervisory roles reserved for white miners. A strike by white workers on 28 December 1921 stopped all work on the mines by January the following year, and industrial action soon gave way to full-blown rebellion as the strikers formed armed resistance groups known as ‘commandos’.56 This was met in turn with correspondingly aggressive measures by police and local volunteer regiments, who attempted to stave-off the uprising until a proper military response could be launched.

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In his memoirs, Chesterton pointed to March 1922 as the start of a ‘terror’ carried out by the rebels against the local population. This claim bore some truth, as the lead-up to that month had seen a spate of violent assaults carried out by white miners against their African counterparts.57 On 6 March, the miners called for a general strike; this was followed by an outbreak of rioting that prompted the implementation of martial law on 10 March and the personal intervention of Prime Minister Jan Smuts on the evening of Saturday 11 March. Smuts’s arrival in Johannesburg coincided with that of the Durban Light Infantry, the military force deployed to quell the rebellion. It was at this stage that Chesterton claimed to have become personally embroiled in the quelling of the revolt, having been sent by the Star to cover the military’s assault on the rebels. He encountered a contingent of the Durban Light Infantry whose commander (a colonel Molyneaux) recognized him from the First World War. Molyneaux informed him of the need for experienced officers and requested assistance in the fight against the rebels. Chesterton agreed and took command of a platoon after acquiring a uniform from a local theatre.58 On March 14, Chesterton and his platoon carried out an ambush on the rebels’ position, deploying a machine gun in a nearby building and then charging the rebellion’s headquarters, the Fordsburg Trades Hall, with rifles and bayonets.59 It is hard to verify whether Chesterton was as deeply involved in the events of March 1922 as he claimed. He ranks no mention in historical studies of the revolt, though the sequence of events described in Chesterton’s memoirs corresponds roughly with Jeremy Krikler’s authoritative account. His story is plausible, therefore, even if it involved the small role played by ‘civic guards’ mobilized to aid the military.60 More importantly, Chesterton’s subsequent interpretation of the rebellion had an important bearing on his political affiliation with the extreme right. During his time as a propagandist for the BUF, Chesterton would invoke his experience on the Rand as a kind of cautionary tale for those who sympathized with the ideas of class warfare advanced by British socialists. In September 1936, for example, he gave a sensationalistic account of the ‘Red Methods’ employed by the rebels, comparing them to the methods employed by anti-fascists in their encounters with the BUF: ‘The same Red types who bathed the Rand in blood are to be found in Britain. They throng Blackshirt meetings to try to break them up, knowing that on no condition will Fascist power tolerate their foulness’.61 Robert Skidelsky remarked upon the irony of Chesterton, a man later obsessed with the machinations of Jewish international finance, having once fought on behalf of mine owners which included J.P. Morgan and Ernest Oppenheimer.62 This was to misunderstand the nature of Chesterton’s attitude towards capitalism and his alienation from the political left, however. On a philosophical level, Chesterton was never able to abide the materialistic precepts of Marxism, which called into question his romanticized beliefs in heroism and national destiny, nor could he abide the class conflict demanded by socialism and communism. His support for the miners’ protest evaporated, therefore, once the strike evolved into full-blown revolt. Later, while attempting to draw working-class support for the BUF in the 1930s, Chesterton felt compelled to distinguish the bulk of the aggrieved workers

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from the ‘gibbering sub-humans’ drawn to the strike by the ‘pathology of Communism’.63 A similar impulse to detach the strike from its underlying class dynamics clouded the account in his memoirs: The miners were well paid and had no manual labour to perform, but it can be no fun spending one’s working life underground, anything up to three miles below the fresh air of the surface, and this may be part of the reason for the outbreaks. But it did not explain the support they invariably received from the thousands of riff-raff who emerged from the White slums around Johannesburg and the other Reef towns.64 Chesterton’s interpretation of the Rand Revolt provides further insight into the way that race and the dynamics of colonialism shaped his early political leanings, far more than any deep consideration of class or economics. His awareness of racial hierarchy and conflict in South Africa stemmed back to a childhood on the Witwatersrand: Sunday after Sunday the veld beyond our house was the scene of pitched battles between hundreds of Africans and Chinese, with the mounted police again intervening to disperse the Chinese mobs. It has been my experience in many parts of Africa that in any tense three-cornered racial situation involving Europeans, Africans and Asians, there has been an affinity between Europeans and Africans and a shared hostility towards Asians.65 Chesterton offered no exact explanation for this dynamic but concluded that ‘the reason why must be sought, if not in psychology, then in chemistry’, the implication in either case being that conflict would inevitably arise from the intermingling of different races. The only mechanism capable of preventing racial friction in Chesterton’s view was the enforcement of social, political and industrial segregation as ordained by the colonial system. Hence, it was a sense of racial (rather than class) solidarity that made him sympathetic to strikers protesting the removal of the colour bar: ‘a very proper step to take, since white standards of life in Africa must be safeguarded’.The addition of conspiratorial anti-Semitism to Chesterton’s thinking during the 1930s also allowed him to reinterpret the revolt as evidence that racial integration and communist upheaval were plots instigated by Jewish finance.66 The overt implications of this mindset upon Chesterton’s politics would become clearest after 1945, when the imperial system enforcing this racial and economic order began to fracture. In the short term, however, the brush with violent revolution prompted Chesterton to take stock of his post-war career. The Rand Revolt had the effect of unsettling me. It was not that it inspired in me any desire for further military adventures: I had had enough fighting to last a life-time. But the break with routine compelled me to look afresh at the way I had been living. . . . I wanted to live with aspiration but

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Johannesburg – the Johannesburg of those times – was no nursery-bed for aspirations. Whiskey filled the void.67 Not long after order returned to the Witwatersrand, Chesterton was fired from the Star as a result of a drunken dispute with an editor. After a brief stint labouring as part of a government relief program, he eventually sought shelter with his recently widowed mother and half-sister in the Sundays River Valley.There he was able to maintain a small sideline as a freelance journalist while working on his mother’s poultry farm, though Chesterton felt the arrangement was to be short-lived:‘my mother and I, let it be admitted, had never been able to hit it off for long’. By 1924, he resolved to leave South Africa and return to England in the hope of furthering his career as a writer.68 Despite his suspicions of intellectualism and the limits of his formal education, Chesterton had long maintained an avid interest in culture and the arts. References to the romantic poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Homer’s Iliad and Shakespeare’s plays appeared throughout his columns for the Star.69 Besides demonstrating his deep interest in the classical Western canon, these articles also showed glimpses of the broader sense of impending crisis and cultural pessimism that would come to dominate Chesterton’s worldview prior to joining Mosley. As early as 1921, he began to express concern over the cultural malaise that appeared to have settled over the world since the end of the war: If it is true that the war with Germany and her allies is the greatest in history, it is probably equally true that the reactionary period in which we are living at the present day is the most miserable, the most despondent and the most confused age through which humanity has ever had to pass. Never before perhaps has such a dreary ennui closed over the soul of man, probably never before has such a black night darkened his mind.70 In search of an adequate response to the post-war cultural crisis, Chesterton began exploring many of the positive themes that informed his cultural and political thought as a fascist: romanticism, vitalism, a triumphant belief in human destiny and the veneration of individual heroism and artistic genius. He defended Shelley against his modern critics, arguing that ‘we possess no poet living with such a genius’.71 Chesterton also devoted a number of articles to criticizing the professional critic, a figure he regarded as having become ‘obsessed with the knowledge that he has, metaphorically, to pull everything to pieces’.72 The critic, Chesterton argued, too often privileged his own intellect and interpretation over the inherent meaning of the work under consideration. He contrasted these faults with the approach of a layperson: The ordinary man . . . is different. He knows nothing of technique, nothing of criticism. His impulse – a simple, beautiful impulse – is to appreciate, not to find fault. . . . It cannot be denied that the average man has a lot to learn before he will be admitted into the very empyrean of Beauty, and his study of

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the technique of art must be accompanied, therefore by a profound study of human life, so that his perspective is maintained. But only the great men are fit to guide him, not the little men with vast pretensions.73 The most recognizable influence on Chesterton’s thinking about the ‘great men’ was Thomas Carlyle, the Irish historian whose 19th-century works would also be cited as a philosophical inspiration among fascists in Europe.74 However, his phrasing also suggested the influence of another writer whose work exalted the wisdom of everyday existence and the English ‘common man’.75 Chesterton admitted dryly in his memoirs to having ‘lived in the gigantic shadow cast by Gilbert Keith Chesterton’, whom he first encountered as a schoolboy in England.76 There the ‘great man’ had been accompanied by his brother Cecil, the figure who Chesterton claimed had the greater influence upon his own life: Gilbert, I reflected, was the genius filled with splendid dreams . . . but Cecil was the man with his eye on the ball. Soon afterwards, when Cecil’s name became headline news because of his being prosecuted on a charge of criminal libel against Godfrey Isaacs, I became convinced that he was the man I must choose as my own exemplar.77 Chesterton referred in this passage to the ‘Marconi scandal’ that began in 1912 after allegations of insider trading between the Marconi telecommunications company and members of Herbert Henry Asquith’s Liberal government.78 Cecil Chesterton’s investigations into the matter, published in The New Witness, implicated several high-profile figures, including then Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George. In a court case the following year, Cecil was sued for libel by Godfrey Isaacs, the managing director of the Marconi company. Though he lost the case, Cecil maintained that the allegations were a genuine example of conspiracy between figures in government and big business. Later interpretations of the scandal would suggest that the Chestertons and Hilaire Belloc, editor of The New Witness, had pursued the case on anti-Semitic grounds and labelled Isaacs part of an international Jewish clique.79 The shadow of anti-Semitism lingering over the Chestertonian tradition raises the question of how much political inspiration A.K. Chesterton drew from his extended family, and how his obsession with ‘international finance’ can be compared with this lineage. Cecil and G.K. Chesterton each showed signs of having imbibed vague stereotypes of a stateless Jewish race that circulated throughout British and European culture in the early 20th century.80 Maisie Ward’s biography of ‘G.K.C’ paraphrased his views on the ‘real Jewish question’ as they were presented in an address to the Jewish West-End literary society: ‘They represented one of the highest of civilized types. But while all other races had local attachments, the Jews were universal and scattered.They could not be expected to have patriotism for the countries in which they made their homes: their patriotism could be only for their race’.81 His literary work also contained crude caricatures of Jewish financiers, with

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one passage in his poem ‘The Silent People’ depicting a crippled England leaning for support on a lawyer and ‘a cringing Jew’.82 Sympathetic biographers like Ward have been inclined to view G.K. Chesterton as driven by a personal dislike of individual wealthy Jews rather than a prejudice against the Jewish people as a whole.83 A more recent biography by Ian Ker conceded, however, that when viewed from a modern perspective, his published recriminations of high-profile Jews appeared ‘utterly anti-Semitic’.84 The latent anti-Semitism of Cecil Chesterton was more readily apparent due to his aggressive pursuit of the Marconi case. His reporting leading up to the libel trial in 1913 was rife with assertions that the media had been compromised by international finance: ‘The public is still kept for the most part in ignorance of the whole vile machinery of how these things are negotiated, how the press is alternately bought and bullied. . . .The responsibility of this lies with the tiny handful of men who control our Press’. He also made specific reference to the Jewish familial ties that allegedly undergirded this conspiracy, indicting ‘Samuel, the PostmasterGeneral, and his cousins in the City who pulled the wires over Indian silver and Indian loan, the Amsterdam Jews, with whom these cousins maintained such curious and suspicious secret relations’.85 Even after the Marconi scandal died down, Cecil Chesterton’s writing occasionally veered into the territory of conspiratorial anti-Semitism. In his posthumously published History of the United States, for example, he pointed to the prevalence of Jews among the ranks of Socialist and Anarchist parties in America: ‘These parties, in contrast to most of the European socialist parties, have shown themselves violently anti-national and what we now call “Bolshevist” ’.86 The presence of these tropes within G.K and Cecil Chesterton’s work is easily explicable, given the ambient background of anti-Semitism that pervaded the literary and intellectual culture of England in the 20th century. Many of these same notions of ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’, financial conspiracy and left-wing subversion would later be amplified, into the more virulent and overtly political anti-Semitism of Britain’s extreme right.87 In retrospect, A.K. Chesterton claimed to have been inspired in his own political and journalistic career by Cecil’s crusade to uncover the Marconi scandal: I was in the Army of the Rhine when I heard of Cecil’s death in a military hospital in France. Presumptuously, perhaps, I wrote a letter to Gilbert expressing the hope that his brother’s fight against contemporary evils, especially the conspiracies of international finance, would not be allowed to lapse. The posts were haywire at the time and it is possible that my letter was not received. More probably Frances [G.K. Chesterton’s wife] thought it was not the kind of epistle with which her husband should be troubled. Answer came there none.88 In addition, Chesterton recalled that during his last visit to Beaconsfield after returning to England in 1924, he had been stymied in his attempts to engage

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his cousin on the subject of politics; likewise, he claimed that other members of the journalistic circles revolving around ‘G.K.C.’ and Hillaire Belloc were unwilling to publish political works for fear of inciting another scandal. ‘It was inevitable’, Chesterton nonetheless concluded, ‘that sooner or later I should feel impelled to carry on Cecil’s crusade from the point where death had forced him to abandon it.’89 If this were true, the development of Chesterton’s anti-Semitism would be much easier to account for – a relatively short leap from veiled intimations of ‘international finance’ in the Marconi era to the racially charged campaigns against the ‘Jewish menace’ mounted by the BUF. From the available evidence, however, there is almost no sign of Chesterton speaking or writing on matters relating to international conspiracies or the ‘Jewish question’ prior to 1934. If anything, Chesterton’s aspirations after arriving in England in 1924 seem to have reflected the literary bent of G.K. rather than Cecil’s muckraking journalism. Unable to secure steady work in Fleet Street, Chesterton was led to Stratford-Upon-Avon, where he began reporting for the local newspaper. This position in turn introduced Chesterton to Archibald (‘Archie’) Flower, a prominent figure in local politics and chairman of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. With Flower’s encouragement, and in spite of his earlier work decrying the professional critic, Chesterton embarked upon a promising career in theatrical criticism. Life at the heart of the Stratfordian theatre industry proved gratifying for Chesterton who, besides his general craving for literary and artistic stimulation, had long regarded Shakespeare’s works as England’s unsurpassed cultural achievement: ‘Shakespeare and Shelley, as it happens, had long been my outstanding literary heroes. . . . Nothing in Shakespeare’s poetry has ever become stale for me’.90 With further assistance from Flower, Chesterton was able to parley this enthusiasm into the founding of the Shakespeare Review, a journal which ran from 1926 to 1928. The historiography surrounding Chesterton’s involvement with the BUF has placed much emphasis on the connection between his cultural criticism and ideology as a fascist. Baker places particular importance on Chesterton’s relationship with a Shakespearean scholar, Professor G.Wilson Knight, using their correspondence to trace a developing theme of cultural despair.91 There were undoubtedly aspects of Chesterton’s time ‘among the actor laddies’ that hinted at his political development, just as his work as a journalist in the early 1920s showed that he was far from apolitical before encountering Mosley. In Stratford, Chesterton gained a reputation for aggressive polemics, most of them directed at productions he regarded as perverting or misunderstanding the true nature of Shakespeare’s works. In particular, Chesterton was hostile towards productions that attempted to modernize Shakespeare’s plays in a way that obscured their English pedigree; in the case of Macbeth, for example, he strongly disapproved of any production that removed the play from its Celtic roots.92 His view of individual characters revealed a preference for willfulness, vitality and heroism, and a corresponding disdain for weakness and effeminacy. Hamlet was ‘a man bursting at the seams with lust for action, and yet restrained by the still more powerful forces of Destiny . . . a great man with tremendous force of

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personality’.93 Brutus from Julius Caesar, on the other hand, was a ‘blatant prig and humbug and [a] run-to-seed liberal decadent’.94 The Shakespeare Review ceased publication in 1928 due to a lack of reliable funding, prompting Chesterton to leave Stratford-Upon-Avon in search of further opportunities. For two years, he made his living as a freelancer in London, before eventually securing a position in Devon as editor of the Torquay Times. In 1932, with encouragement from Wilson-Knight, he was able to publish his first book: a collection of critical essays and reviews from his time as a critic entitled Adventures in Dramatic Appreciation. Amongst this collection were Chesterton’s reviews of three works inspired by the Great War, peppered with his own recollections of the Western Front: the theatrical adaptations of R.C. Sherriff ’s Journey’s End and Lawrence du Garde Peach’s Home Fires, as well as the 1930 film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Alongside its vivid descriptions of the physical and psychological horrors of trench warfare, Chesterton’s laudatory review of Sherriff ’s work concluded with a recrimination of the civilian world that had so quickly forgotten the sacrifices of its defenders: ‘the soaring faiths and heroisms were interred with the corpses on the battlefield, and the civilian world settled down smugly to forget all about them. . . . Advertisement and pretence counted for everything, manhood for very little’. This passage recalled Chesterton’s earlier allusions to the ‘dreary ennui’ of post-war society, though his reflections on the state of England in peacetime now appeared explicitly political: ‘self-seekers and skunks’ had risen to power, while former soldiers struggled through ‘long years of suffering’.95 Fascistic themes had become visible in Chesterton’s writing by the time he left Stratford. Most importantly, before even crossing paths with Mosley, he had come to share one of the core ideals underpinning the early fascist movements in interwar Europe: that the men in the trenches had achieved a kind of unity and transcendence that could never be realized under liberalism. For more than a decade after leaving the army, Chesterton was not closely involved with politics in the traditional sense. It was only after arriving in Devon in the early 1930s that he began to take an interest in civic matters, embroiling himself in a series of municipal disputes, founding a ratepayers’ organization dubbed the Torquay Citizens League and gaining a degree of local notoriety in his crusade against ‘corruption in high places’.96 Although this period seems like a significant milestone in Chesterton’s path towards the politics of the extreme right, he would subsequently dismiss its importance as one of the ‘many illusions’ that had waylaid him on the path towards fascism.97 Chesterton gave only a brief recollection of this period in his memoirs, ‘since nothing is more boring than the re-telling of old municipal battles’, though in a nod to the controversies of his later career, he alluded to the ‘bitter hatred and smearing’ that had resulted from his activism in Torquay.98 The enthusiasm and talent that Chesterton displayed in artistic pursuits prior to his time in the BUF lends itself to a characterization put forward by Richard Thurlow in the foreword to David Baker’s Ideology of Obsession: a tragic figure whose life was derailed by political extremism, and whose literary gifts and work ethic were

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squandered as a result.99 Thurlow also concluded that Chesterton’s thinking, like that of other fascist ideologues, showed a blurring of the lines between politics and aesthetics, resulting in a worldview that was fundamentally detached from empirical reality.100 This ‘tragic’ interpretation of Chesterton’s political turn is no doubt influenced by the memories of his wife, Doris Terry, whose correspondence and recollections provide rare glimpses into his life just before fascism. The two met through a local dramatic society in Torquay for which Chesterton was acting president and bonded over a shared passion for Shakespearean theatre. In September 1933, shortly after Chesterton had left Torquay to join her in Kingston-Upon-Thames, the couple married.101 By sheer coincidence, they then moved to a flat that lay across the road from the former Brightlands Training College, a property that had served as headquarters for the BUF since its founding in October 1932.102 Chesterton’s initial impressions of the group he encountered at ‘Black House’ were mixed: although many of the Blackshirts appeared fresh-faced and naïve, his visits to the BUF headquarters also brought him into contact with older members of the movement who shared his military experience and journalistic expertise.103 There are no records of when or under what circumstances Chesterton first encountered Oswald Mosley and it is thus unclear how much the BUF leader’s personal appeal factored into his decision to join the movement. Given Chesterton’s underlying predilection towards the ‘great men’ of history, however, it is easy to understand how he could have come under the sway of Mosley – a physically striking and charismatic figure who at the time appeared to be rapidly gaining ground in his charge against the ‘Old Gangs’. Another key figure in his decision to join the party was Rex Tremlett, the BUF’s deputy head of publications and a man with whom Chesterton had a great deal in common. Hailing from South Africa, Tremlett had also attended school at Brightlands College and worked as a prospector and a newspaper editor in Johannesburg before travelling to England and joining Mosley in early 1933.104 Imperial roots, like military experience, provided an important dimension to the fraternity that developed within the BUF’s inner circle.105 Doris Chesterton was shocked by her husband’s interest in the BUF, having ‘never talked deeply about politics’ during the course of their relationship. A pacifist and Fabian socialist, she would later organize pacifist meetings at the same time as Chesterton was marching with the BUF.106 Prior to their move to Chelsea, Doris had assumed that her husband’s political leanings ran leftward; shortly prior to their marriage, he had described himself as a ‘socialist’ and claimed to have voted for Labour in the 1929 general election.107 If this were true, it would only make Chesterton one among many fascist wanderers who tended leftward before joining the BUF. John Beckett, Mosley’s director of propaganda and perhaps the most plausible representative of ‘left-wing fascism’ in the BUF, maintained that the party represented workers’ interests better than its socialist opponents. Chesterton did not share Beckett’s distinguished background in left-wing politics but expressed similar sentiments and a desire for social reform that accorded with his wartime ideals of collective struggle and sacrifice, a kind of ‘trench socialism’.108 It is thus entirely plausible that, even with his eventual drift towards the politics of the extreme right,

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Chesterton would have cast his vote for the more radical of the factions contesting the 1929 election.109 One unresolved mystery that surrounds Chesterton’s decision to join with Mosley in 1933 is the extent of his familiarity with fascism in Europe. On his honeymoon, Chesterton and his wife met with Archie Flower to discuss the possibility of his returning to Stratford-Upon-Avon to work as the editor of the Stratford Herald. During the course of the conversation, Doris Chesterton recalled her husband made ‘a brief defence of Hitler’s record in Germany’, the Nazi Party leader having been appointed as Chancellor in January that year.110 Chesterton did not read Italian or German and, unlike Mosley or Beckett, had no opportunity to see fascism in practice before encountering the BUF at its headquarters in London. Any familiarity he had with fascism overseas was therefore likely to have been acquired in a general fashion through the news media. That Chesterton felt compelled to offer a defence of Hitler’s record in 1933 would suggest that he was already aware of the uneasy responses to fascism, Nazism in particular, among the press and political establishment in Britain. Chesterton was certainly not alone in holding sympathetic or ambiguous attitudes to fascism before 1939.111 Aside from a philosophical interest in fascism or corporatism, however, there were experiential factors that could have driven Chesterton to regard fascism in Europe as a role model for British patriots. Chief among them was his sense of identification with other members of the ‘Front Generation’, which made him sympathetic to the displays of militaristic, resurgent nationalism that were emanating from the continent. In his review of All Quiet on the Western Front, for example, Chesterton had mused that his own memories seemed to match those of the soldiers depicted in Erich Remarque’s story: ‘We did not know the war from the German side; we did not guess, even, how pathetically close it was to our own experience’. He was likewise inclined to see the response to the ‘dreary old cupidity and stupidity of civil life’ that emerged from Weimar Germany as parallel to his own feelings of alienation from interwar Britain, albeit without the same echoes of ‘fundamental emotionalism’ that drove the German military ethos.112 Whatever Chesterton’s understanding of fascism before his arrival at Black House, it is not difficult to explain his decision to join the BUF. Ideologically, the movement aligned with many of the ideals he had independently developed as a writer, critic and disaffected veteran in the years after 1918. Significantly, as highlighted in David Baker’s work, Mosley’s vision of a corporatist ‘land fit for heroes’ offered a positive and transcendent remedy for the sense of despair and disillusionment that had clouded Chesterton’s view of post-war England. Despite its foreign influences, which would prove increasingly problematic in the years after Chesterton’s arrival in 1933, the ethos of the BUF was interwoven with the ideals of British nationalism, imperial restoration and cultural regeneration. Lastly, Mosley’s party offered a practical outlet for Chesterton’s considerable energy as a writer, speaker and organizer. His decision to turn down Archie Flower’s offer of work in Stratford and accept a comparatively meager salary of £5 per week from Mosley in November 1933 showed the extent to which politics had come to displace his other interests.113 Although it

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would subsequently be viewed as a tragedy, therefore, Chesterton’s decision to join the extreme right was not accidental or impulsive. It was the culmination of a long process of personal disillusionment and ideological development, reinforced by an impending sense that Britain’s ‘national survival’ was at stake.114

Notes 1 Chesterton Collection B. 3-B. 7, ‘Blame Not My Lute’ (139pp. typescript), nd. ca. 1973. Hereafter BNML, p. 12. In answer to ‘the inevitable question’ of his relationship to G.K. Chesterton, A.K. Chesterton explained: ‘Yes, his father [Edward Chesterton] and my grandfather [Arthur Chesterton] were brothers, so that we are – or were – first cousins once removed’. 2 BNML, pp. 10–13. 3 BNML, pp. 22–26. 4 Baker, Ideology of Obsession, pp. 202–203. 5 Chesterton Collection A. 13, ‘Text of an Interview with Mrs. Doris Chesterton’ (8pp. typescript), 9 May 1978, p. 1. 6 BNML, p. 20. 7 Chesterton Collection A. 20, Doris Chesterton, ‘Testimony of the Aunts: Memories of conversations with older members of the Chesterton family’ (10pp. typescript notes), c.a. 1979, p. 7. 8 W.F. Mandle,‘The Leadership of the British Union of Fascists’, Australian Journal of Politics and History,Vol. 12, No. 3 (1966), pp. 360–383, cf. 361–362. 9 BNML, Ch. 3, p. 4. 10 ‘All Aboard for Addis’, p. 3. 11 On the relationship between English and British nationalism, see Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 187–196. 12 Mandle, ‘The Leadership of the British Union of Fascists’, p. 369. 13 Mandle, ‘The Leadership of the British Union of Fascists’, pp. 365–366. 14 ‘Constitution of the League of Empire Loyalists’, quoted in Hugh McNeile and Rob Black, History of the League of Empire Loyalists and Candour (London:The A.K. Chesterton Trust, 2014) Appendix 3, pp. 133–141. 15 For a brief overview of this system on the Witwatersrand, see Jeremy Krikler, The Rand Revolt (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2005), pp. 22–35. 16 BNML, p. 21. 17 ‘Testimony of the Aunts’, p. 2. ‘The term ‘coloured’ is no longer appropriate and is quoted throughout this book solely to reflect its use in a previous era. 18 Milton Shain, The Roots of Anti-Semitism in South Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1994), pp. 49–77. 19 A.K. Chesterton and J. Leftwich, The Tragedy of Anti-Semitism (London: Anscombe, 1948), p. 10. 20 The common motivations for British army volunteers during 1915–1916 are discussed in Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies 1914–1916 (Barnsley: Pen and Sword, 2014), pp. 165–187. 21 BNML, pp. 24–25. 22 For an overview of this part of the East Africa campaign, see Hew Strachan, The First World War in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 138–141. A third battle referred by Chesterton as ‘Sokomasai’ may have been the engagement at Kahe, South of Mount Kilimanjaro, on 18 March 1916. 23 ‘Testimony of the Aunts’, p. 8.There is no specific time frame given for this incident, but this period of starvation was likely caused by the onset of the March–May rainy season in East Africa described in Strachan, The First World War in Africa, p. 141.

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2 4 ‘All Aboard for Addis’, p. 14. 25 BNML, p. 33. 26 W.E. Grey, 2nd City of London Regiment (Royal Fusiliers) in the Great War 1914–1919 (London: Headquarters of the Regiment, 1929), pp. 377–379. 27 BNML, p. 94. 28 Candour, July 1972, pp. 165–167. 29 ‘All Aboard for Addis’, pp. 19–20. 30 TNA KV2/1345/8a., Letter from Major-General Sir Vernon Kell, 28 May 1940. 31 For a lengthier discussion of Chesterton from a psychological perspective, see Baker, ‘The Making of a British Fascist’, pp. 23–27. 32 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 17–25. 33 Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, p. 66. 34 Action, 13 November 1937, pp. 10–11. 35 ‘Testimony of the Aunts’, p. 10. 36 Action, 13 November 1937, pp. 10–11. 37 On the relationship between the ‘Front Generation’ and interwar politics, see: Dan White, Lost Comrades: Socialists of the Front Generation (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1992); Richard Bessel, ‘The “Front Generation” and the Politics of Weimar Germany’, Mark Roseman ed., Generations in Conflict:Youth Revolt and Generation Formulation in Weimar Germany 1770–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 121–136. 38 Oswald Mosley, My Life (London: Thomas Nelson, 1968), p. 70. 39 On the myth and reality of Mosley’s wartime recollections, see Dorril, Blackshirt, pp. 20–35. 40 Francis Beckett, Fascist in the Family (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 63–76. 41 Colin Holmes, Searching for Lord Haw-Haw (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 42–44. 42 Action, 13 November 1937, pp. 10–11. 43 BL Add MS73480, fo. 21, ‘To The Glory of Mars’, Johannesburg Star, nd. ca. 1921. 44 BL Add MS73480, fo. 21. 45 BL Add. MS 73480 B, fo. 12, ‘The Archangel of Peace’, Johannesburg Star, nd. ca. 1922. 46 BL Add. MS 73480 B, fo. 6, ‘Not a Superman’, Johannesburg Star, nd. ca. 1921. 47 BL Add. MS 73480 B, fo. 11, ‘Tyranny of Science’, Johannesburg Star, nd. ca. 1922. 48 Zeev Sternhell, ‘Fascist Ideology’,Walter Laqueur ed., Fascism: A Reader’s Guide (London: Wildwood House, 1976), p. 334. 49 See Rab Bennet, Roger King and Neill Nugent, ‘Introduction: The Concept of “the Right” ’, Neill Nugent and Roger King eds., The British Right (Farnborough: Saxon House, 1977), pp. 3–10. 50 BL Add. MS 73480 B, fo. 11. 51 BL Add. MS 73480 B, fo. 5, ‘Melodies and the Man’, Johannesburg Star, nd. ca. 1922. 52 BL Add. MS 73480 B, fo. 7, ‘When Laughter is Analysed’, The Johannesburg Star, nd. ca. 1923. 53 Fascist Week, 19–25 January 1934, p. 8. 54 The Blackshirt, 26 June 1937, p. 2. 55 On the origins of the Rand Revolt see Krikler, The Rand Revolt, pp. 21–49; Keith Breckenridge, ‘Fighting for a White South Africa: White Working Class Racism and the 1922 Rand Revolt’, South African Historical Journal,Vol. 57, No. 1 (2007), pp. 228–243. 56 Krikler, The Rand Revolt, pp. 50–77. 57 Breckenridge, ‘Fighting for a White South Africa’, p. 235. Lt. Col George Molyneux was the commander of the Durban Light Infantry during the Rand Revolt, according to Krikler, The Rand Revolt, p. 75. 58 BNML, p. 54. 59 Chesterton reiterated this same account in a letter to Col.Arthur C. Martin, who authored a history of the Durban Light Infantry incorporating details of the Rand Revolt. See Chesterton Collection E. 23, A.K. Chesterton to A.B. Martin [sic], 18 December 1970. 60 Krikler, The Rand Revolt, pp. 256–289. For an account of the attack on Fordsburg, see pp. 269–271.

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61 Action, 3 September 1936, p. 9. 62 Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 333–334. 63 Action, 3 September 1936, p. 9. 64 BNML, p. 49. 65 BNML, Ch. II, pp. 17–18. 66 Action, 3 September 1936, p. 9. On anti-Semitic responses to the Rand Revolt, see Shain, Anti-Semitism in South Africa, pp. 92–113. 67 BNML, p. 58. 68 BNML, p. 62. 69 BL Add. MS 73480 B, fo. 13, ‘Wanted: A New Iliad’, cutting from The Johannesburg Star nd. ca. 1922. 70 BL Add. MS 73480 B, fo. 28, ‘Towards the Dawn’, cutting from The Johannesburg Star, nd. ca. 1921. 71 BL Add. MS 73480 B, fo. 38, ‘Shelley’s Message’, cutting from The Johannesburg Star, nd. ca. 1922. 72 BL Add. MS 73480 B, fo. 2, ‘Art and the Critics’, cutting from The Johannesburg Star, nd. ca. 1922. 73 BL Add. MS 73480 B, fo. 2. 74 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 35. 75 Ian Ker, G.K. Chesterton: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 142–143. 76 BNML, p. 64. 77 BNML, p. 66. 78 For a general overview of the affair and its political context, see Frances Donaldson, The Marconi Scandal (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 79 Bryan Cheyette, ‘ Hilaire Belloc and the “Marconi Scandal” 1913–1914’, Kenneth Lunn and Tony Kushner eds., The Politics of Marginality (London: Frank Cass, 1990), pp. 131–143. 80 For a description of the ‘wandering Jew’ myth and its religious antecedents, see George L. Mosse, Towards the Final Solution (New York: H. Fertig, 1978), pp. 115–116. 81 Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (London: Sheed and Ward, 1944), pp. 227–228. 82 G.K. Chesterton, Poems (New York: John Lane, 1916), p. 123. 83 Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton, p. 228. 84 Ker, G.K. Chesterton, p. 570. 85 The Times, 27 February 1913, p. 7. 86 Cecil Chesterton, A History of the United States (London: Chatto and Windus, 1919), p. 233. 87 On the origins of the ‘cosmopolitan’ stereotype in Britain, see Colin Holmes, AntiSemitism in British Society 1876–1939 (London: Edward Arnold, 1979), pp. 10–35. 88 BNML, p. 67. 89 BNML, pp. 67–68. The journalistic circle surrounding G.K. and Cecil Chesterton included Hillaire Belloc’s son-in-law, R.D. Jebb, an active member of the BUF during the 1930s who later became editor of the Weekly Review. 90 BNML, p. 69. 91 Baker, Ideology of Obsession, pp. 97–120; G.D. White, ‘Shakespearean Fascist: A.K. Chesterton and the Politics of Cultural Despair’, Angel-Luis Pujante and Ton Hoenselaars eds., Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe (Delaware: University of Delaware Press, 2003), pp. 89–97. 92 BNML, p. 83. 93 BNML, p. 80. 94 BNML, p. 86. 95 A.K. Chesterton, Adventures in Dramatic Appreciation (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1932), p. 10. 96 Chesterton Collection A. 27, Doris Chesterton, ‘Torquay Days’ (4pp. manuscript notes), nd. ca. 1979, p. 1.

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97 ‘1914–1918: British Union Was Born in War’, pp. 10–11. 98 BNML, p. 89. 99 Thurlow, foreword to Baker, Ideology of Obsession, p. vii. 100 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 27–28. 101 Chesterton Collection A. 19, Doris Chesterton, ‘Notes re the life of A.K. Chesterton’ (8pp. manuscript notes), nd. ca. 1979, p. 3. 102 A.K. Chesterton, Oswald Mosley: Portrait of a Leader (London: Sanctuary Press, 1937), p. 118. 103 Chesterton Collection A. 46, ‘Interview with Doris L. Chesterton’, 8 February 1980, p. 2. 104 TNA KV2/3328/25, S.B. report re Tremlett, 13 October 1941. 105 Mandle, ‘The Leadership of the British Union of Fascists’, pp. 364–366. 106 Chesterton Collection A. 28, Doris Chesterton, ‘Kenneth meets Rose Macauley’ (4pp. manuscript notes), nd. ca. 1979. 107 Chesterton Collection A. 46, David Baker interview with Doris L. Chesterton, 8 February 1980. 108 Payne, A History of Fascism, p. 73. 109 See Martin Pugh, The Making of Modern British Politics 1867–1945 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 199–221. For more on the background of the 1929 general election, see: David Powell, British Politics 1910–1931 (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 142– 162; Robert Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1967), pp. 51–61. 110 Chesterton Collection A. 46, David Baker, ‘Transcript of an interview with Doris L. Chesterton’, 8 February 1980 (2pp. typescript), p. 2. 111 See Dan Stone, Responses to Nazism in Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 1–17. 112 Chesterton, Adventures in Dramatic Appreciation, pp. 19–20. 113 Chesterton Collection A. 12, p. 3. 114 BNML, p. 83.

2 THE BLACKSHIRT LIFE The British Union of Fascists, 1933–1938

By the time that Chesterton arrived on the BUF scene, self-described fascist movements had been active in Britain for nearly a decade. The British Fascists, a small party founded by former ambulance driver Rotha Linton-Orman, appeared within a year of Mussolini’s March on Rome. The party’s default leader, Brigadier General Robert Blakeney, attempted to mould it into something resembling the dynamic, paramilitary force that had swept the Duce into power and rallied the support of anti-communist conservative elites. Although in hindsight the British Fascists can be credited with establishing some of the ideological groundwork for Mosley’s party – in particular, a militaristic and imperialist form of ultra-nationalism – it struggled to distinguish itself from the foreign movements as an organic and truly ‘British’ fascism. Members of the party regularly became embroiled in the kind of street violence that would characterize later iterations of British fascism. Unlike the continental fascist movements of 1920s, however, the BF were unable to leverage their paramilitarism into political influence; its efforts to become ingratiated with state authorities during the 1926 general strike were largely unsuccessful, despite the abstract support for fascism among members of the Conservative establishment.1 The fractiousness that would become typical of extreme right groups in Britain after 1945 was foreshadowed by the experience of the British Fascists. Divisions within the already-slim ranks of Linton-Orman’s party produced two notable offshoots: the National Fascisti, a pugilistic faction which broke off in 1924, and the Imperial Fascist League (IFL), founded in 1928 by Arnold Leese. A veterinarian by trade, Leese would later disparage his former colleagues for espousing fascism in name only, or ‘conservatism with knobs on’.2 Whereas the BF had taken pains in its early years to mimic the Italian movement, Leese’s organization was more clearly influenced by Nazism, outstripping most of its counterparts on the extreme right in terms of sheer anti-Semitic vitriol. As with Orman’s group, however, the IFL was not solely an imitation of continental fascism. Anti-Semitism had already become a defining

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feature of nationalist and extreme right movements that appeared prior to the Great War; in addition, Leese and his followers could draw from a native tradition of colonial racism to support fascist and eugenicist ideas imported from overseas.3 In political terms, the IFL was a marginal voice in an already marginalized movement. Leese gained a reputation during the 1930s as an unstable eccentric even by the standards of the extreme right. One surveillance report described him as ‘a man who had a great craving for political knowledge without the mental balance to make use of it’ and ‘a fanatic who would be a menace to any organization he joined’.4 Despite this, Leese is notable as one of several British fascists – Chesterton and Mosley besides – whose influence on the extreme right would extend well beyond the interwar period. Although it is now synonymous with the phenomenon of British fascism, Oswald Mosley’s BUF was a relative latecomer among movements that sought to replicate the successes of continental fascism. The timing and significance of the BUF’s emergence reflected Mosley’s long and meandering ‘odyssey’ through interwar politics, which began following his involvement in the Great War.5 Enrolled as a cadet at Sandhurst Academy in August 1914, Mosley had initially been commissioned as part of a cavalry regiment before applying for the Royal Flying Corps. After suffering an ankle injury from a plane crash, he was recalled to his original regiment, the 16th Lancers, and served from October 1915 when he was removed from active duty in March 1916 due to an injury.6 Mosley spent the remainder of the war in administrative roles, an experience that biographer Robert Skidelsky noted as a major influence on his enthusiasm for centralized control of the national economy.7 Like Chesterton, Mosley was impressed by the immense potential of collective action undertaken by disciplined units, as well as the capacity for the shared struggle of war to override divisions of class. In the years between the end of the war and the founding of the BUF, Mosley moved through a rapid series of political alignments: first as member of the Conservative Party in 1918, then as a Labour MP in 1926, and finally as the leader of his own New Party in 1931. When the New Party electoral efforts floundered, in part due to the opposition of Mosley’s former allies in the Labour Party, he grew disillusioned with the ‘Old Gangs’ of the parliamentary system that had stymied his attempts at radical reform. After a final failed attempt to form a cross-party opposition with several other backbenchers, including Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, Mosley travelled to Italy in 1932 and became convinced of fascism’s potential to be implemented in Britain.8 On 3 October 1932, he founded the British Union of Fascists and released his manifesto, The Greater Britain, which served as the party’s statement of policy.9 At the outset of the BUF’s existence, there were a number of structural obstacles to the success of a fascist movement in Britain. Many of Mosley’s political efforts prior to establishing the BUF had been geared towards radical social programs designed as a response to economic downturn and the unemployment problem in particular. By 1933, however, Britain had begun to recover from the worst effects of the ‘Slump’. Unlike their counterparts in Germany, moreover, British fascists could not point to military defeat as the cause of the nation’s economic woes.10

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Another problem confronting Mosley in the 1930s was fascism’s reputation among the British public.As it had in the 1920s, fascism bore the markings of foreign influence, with ideas and symbolism that bore little connection to British culture. Members of the public already had reason to fear the outcome of fascists coming to power or behaving in a manner similar to the continental movements. As the economic journalist Paul Einzig observed in 1933, the philosophical or economic aspects of fascism that The Greater Britain proclaimed were easily overshadowed by its violent and despotic character: ‘To millions of men and women of average intelligence, Fascism means castor oil, violence, political persecution, aggressive nationalism, and rampant reactionary despotism’.11 Finally, the late arrival of Mosley’s party placed it at a tactical disadvantage to its left-wing opponents, which had worked to establish an organized anti-fascist movement since the 1920s.12 While in retrospect it is easy to see the BUF as constrained by circumstances from the beginning, Mosley’s party did possess some momentum in its early stages and attracted an array of capable personnel, along with steady financial backing from domestic sources as well as the Fascist regime in Italy.13 When Chesterton joined the party, therefore, he was convinced that fascism was not only viable but necessary in order to ensure Britain’s survival. This conviction, no doubt bolstered by Mosley’s unerring self-confidence and the camaraderie of the Blackshirt life, compelled Chesterton to overlook the signs of weakness and division in the party.14 The general mood of optimism that prevailed during Chesterton’s early years with the BUF was reflected in his first works as a fascist propagandist. In a series of articles that appeared in The Fascist Week between January and February 1934, Chesterton addressed different sections of the British populace regarding the merits of fascism as a rational alternative to both the ‘jungle law’ of liberal-capitalism and the impending civil war threatened by the ‘Red menace’ of communism.15 These articles were part of a broader strategy adopted by the BUF’s propaganda wing prior to 1934, whereby Mosley hoped to build up a mass movement with a broad social base, emulating the method through which fascism had gained power in Italy and Germany. There was thus a great emphasis in Chesterton’s writing upon the utopian dimensions of Mosley’s program: class conflict was to be rendered obsolete by the mediating role of the corporate state; international relations would be stabilized as Britain set about pursuing its ‘great constructive tasks’.16 In the conclusion of the series, Chesterton offered a paean to Mosley, the man who had stepped forward on behalf of ‘the warrior dead of the empire’ in order to oversee this national revival: When our need was the most urgent, and our position the most hopeless, we were amazed to see emerging from a miscellany of ‘fake’ leaders a leader who was not a fake. He was of our own war companionship, he saw as we saw, and felt as we felt, only with an intense luminosity.17 There is no doubt that during this time, Chesterton possessed a genuine belief that Mosley alone was capable of leading Britain to a fascist future. Yet his work as a propagandist also revealed a more general set of political assumptions that

The Blackshirt life  33

would persist beyond his involvement with the BUF. Chief among these assumptions was that heroism and leadership, like that cultivated by Carlyle’s ‘great men’, was necessary in order to effect political and historical change.18 Rather than being a blind follower of Mosley, therefore, Chesterton was also responsible for deliberately shaping the mythos that surrounded him.This effort would culminate in 1936 when Chesterton authored an account of Mosley’s life, Portrait of a Leader. More hagiography than biography, the book was rife with passages that extolled Mosley’s virtues as the anointed leader of a fascist Britain: ‘his tall athletic frame, with its dynamic force and immense reserves of strength, his unconquerable spirit, with its grandeur of courage and resolve’.19 In a less sycophantic fashion, Chesterton’s book expressed the view that Mosley’s years of struggle prior to embracing fascism revealed a unique ability to withstand the corrupting influence of the political process: ‘Alone of all the leaders of the age Oswald Mosley has scorned to take personal advantage of the system of political chicanery and opportunism’.20 Another lasting product of Chesterton’s involvement with the BUF was his attachment to the economic principles outlined in The Greater Britain. In Mosley’s ideal of the corporate state, the various branches of British industry would be organized into corporate entities, each serving the needs of a balanced economy while controlling supply and demand through directives issued by the state; in keeping with the theories of corporatism espoused in Fascist Italy, this form of economic planning was also to negate class conflict by mediating the relationship between workers and owners. Reflecting the interest in Keynesianism and planned economies he had developed during the Great War, Mosley placed a great deal of emphasis upon the scientific nature of his proposals. He explained the crisis of interwar economies as stemming from an imbalance between the capacity of industrial society to produce goods and the availability of markets to consume them: science, invention, technique have recently increased the power to produce out of the range of all previous experience. In the meantime, our machinery of distribution and of government has remained practically unchanged with the result that the production of industry greatly outstrips effective demand.21 Problems of supply and demand, as well as unemployment and poverty, were to be resolved by careful planning under the guidance of a strong state unhindered by ‘petty’ democratic concerns. The logic of technocratic central planning extended to the whole of Mosley’s vision of a fascist government, which would request input only from those with expertise in specific fields.22 Having warned years earlier against the ‘tyranny’ of scientific modernism, Chesterton now embraced the technocratic aspects of Mosley’s fascism as a necessary corrective to unbridled capitalism. However, while his talents as a polemicist were well suited to attacking the proposals of social democrats and liberals, Chesterton made no original contributions to the economic doctrine of the BUF.23 His interest in corporatism was mainly instrumental, as the system promised to resolve the practical crises of interwar Britain without succumbing to the materialism inherent

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in both laissez-faire capitalism and socialism. The corporate state also promised to recapture aspects of an idealized past, with Chesterton likening Mosley’s proposals to medieval England under the guild system.24 Most compellingly of all, Mosley’s ideas provided Chesterton with a practical plan to revitalize the British Empire. The end goal of the corporatist transformation outlined in The Greater Britain was the establishment of an ‘imperial autarchy’, whereby the colonies and dominions provided Britain with a self-contained economy. According to Mosley, this arrangement would provide insulation from the chaos of the international marketplace while ensuring that Britain maintained its preeminent place in world affairs. Plans for imperial regeneration were never the sole purview of the extreme right in interwar Britain. Mosley’s autarchic plans were predated in 1929 by Lord Beaverbrook’s ‘Empire Crusade’ proposals, which called for free trade within the Empire and heavy barriers against external markets. Fascism nevertheless provided a rationale for Britain to reassert itself over its empire and reject any notion of colonial independence, since the very idea of democratic government was now redundant: At the moment where every advanced nation in Europe is turning from the old parliamentary institutions in order to live and to prosper in a scientific age, our little professional talkers of both nations try to persuade all Indians who can understand their arguments to adopt a proved failure. What a sorry end to the great record of Britain in India to sell them, as the price of our surrender, this broken down old machine, just as we discard it.25 Despite Mosley’s constant emphasis upon the technical sophistication and necessity of fascist corporatism for a changing world, the BUF’s imperial doctrine was also explicitly reliant upon the racist, social Darwinian concepts that undergirded colonialism in the 19th century: We will certainly pursue the steady course of British Colonial practice, which seeks by every means to raise native populations to a higher standard of life; but we will not pursue the illusion that great and productive areas of the world should be kept as a close preserve for races who are unable or unwilling to preserve them . . . the earth can and will be developed by the races fitted for that task, and chief among such races we are not afraid to number our own.26 As with their attitudes to the Empire, Britain’s extreme right derived its racial ideas from a domestic tradition rather than one ‘imported’ from overseas. In many ways, the BUF was not radically removed from mainstream parties of the interwar period in its assumptions about racial supremacy, segregation and ‘civilizing’ colonial rule. What set fascism apart was its conflation of the domestic and imperial spheres – under Mosley’s plans, England and India alike were to be governed by a corporatist system and united under the banner of fascism. As would become clear when the

The Blackshirt life  35

party became openly anti-Semitic after 1934, the racist and social Darwinian elements of BUF doctrine applied in England as readily as they did in the colonies and dominions.27 Since these ideas of race and empire were already so familiar to Chesterton, he did not appear concerned by the alien or ‘un-English’ qualities of fascism that perturbed some quarters of the extreme right. His task as a propagandist nevertheless required that he further the BUF’s case regarding the suitability and inevitability of fascism in a British context.To this end, he reiterated Mosley’s arguments regarding the inherent failures of the liberal system: ‘Governments under democracy kowtow and follow where they should lead. They are at the dual mercy of financial or class interests on one hand, and of an electorate fed by falsehoods from Press and Party on the other’.28 Though Chesterton would later openly deride notions of freedom and individual rights, his early efforts as a propagandist contained the tacit admission that these concepts were bound up with British national identity and thus needed to be integrated somehow into the framework of fascism.29 He insisted, therefore, that the sense of collective freedom and purpose provided by fascism would not resemble the stifling bureaucratic order of communism: ‘Human beings are too implacably regimented to lose their initiative, and with their initiative, all sense of the adventure of life. Britons would find this intolerable’.30 Chesterton’s attempts to draw ‘lovers of democracy’ to fascism rested on the abstract (though not unprecedented) idea that genuine freedom could only be provided under a strong state: ‘the true representation of the people by the people for the general welfare and prosperity of the nation’.31 For all the window dressing applied to this notion of ‘fascist freedom’, however, BUF policy made it clear that the political system it envisioned was a dictatorship. Mosley was to be appointed the leader of a fascist government (with the Monarch serving as head of state), while political parties were to be abolished and local governments replaced with local councils.32 Mosley provided vague assurances that civil liberties like freedom of expression and representation would be preserved in a fascist Britain: ‘Real freedom of speech’, he contended, would be provided through the ability of the populace to provide ‘constructive criticism’ in their own areas of expertise while voting to appoint or dismiss the government.33 Chesterton was more direct in setting out the limits to which a fascist government would tolerate criticism, particularly from the press: No liberty will be held forfeit which advances the cause of national wellbeing and happiness. Liberty that fails to come within this scope will be regarded as license and destroyed. The press will have every freedom except the licence to mislead the public or to create a panic or to offend against national self-respect.34 If BUF propaganda left little uncertainty as to how fascism would exercise authority in Britain, it was more circumspect on the issue of how this authority would be attained. In The Greater Britain, Mosley declared that the BUF sought ‘to achieve

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its aim legally and constitutionally, by methods of law and order’.35 This allowed for the possibility that fascism would gain power without relying on the electoral system, through means that were ‘constitutional’ if not necessarily democratic. The paramilitary organization of the BUF lent credence to the idea that Mosley hoped to exploit societal upheaval like Mussolini and Hitler before him. In February 1933, the party was embroiled in a scandal after a newspaper reported that the Blackshirts were arming themselves for a civil war. Fittingly, given his stated preference for legal methods, Mosley responded to these allegations by filing a libel suit – the first of many brought against critics of the BUF.36 Despite these efforts, however, Mosley was never able to fully insulate his party from accusations that it sought power by violent or subversive means. Chesterton’s contemporary views regarding BUF’s use of violence are hard to discern, mainly due to the lack of personal documents that remain from his time with the party. Although he was unimpressed at first by the Blackshirts he encountered at Black House, part of what drew Chesterton to fascism in the first place was its promise to transfer the virtues of the military into peacetime. He subsequently wrote in favour of the BUF’s attempts to emulate military discipline within its own ranks, and its goal to replicate the discipline and order of the trenches in British society: One of our many discoveries during the war was that in battalions where the discipline was firmest the men were happiest and their morals most sure. There is solid enjoyment in forming part of a community wherein every individual knows his job and does it to the best of his ability; ultimately it is doubtful whether there is any other real social happiness.37 Much as the war had required men to make sacrifices to the greater good, Chesterton argued that the task of political, economic and social reform facing a ‘decadent’ British democracy in peacetime required fascists to make sacrifices and aspire to the ideals of the fascist ‘new man’.38 Achieving this ideal required the foregoing of material comforts and ‘diversions’, as well as the cultivation of physical, mental and spiritual virtues. Both men and women were required to develop their physical health in order to ‘make themselves superbly fit for life’s purposes’. Where mental virtues were concerned, Chesterton implored fascists to reject intellectualism, which he saw as unwilling to face reality, and instead adopt a ‘stark realism’ that rendered the world in terms of black and white. Above all else, he called for commitment to the spiritual principles of fascism: a ‘faith in life’ that embraced the challenges of modernity while rejecting ‘catchphrases and mere wish fulfillment in the flabby democratic fashion’.39 Having come face to face with political conflict in South Africa, and given his ideological disposition, Chesterton was well aware of the confrontational tactics that had been deployed by Mosley’s ‘Defence Force’ since its inception. Yet he would later claim, with the support of his wife, to have been deeply perturbed by the events of the Olympia meeting, which brought the BUF’s use of political violence under harsh scrutiny. Since joining Mosley full time in 1933, in addition to his

The Blackshirt life  37

journalistic efforts, Chesterton had been charged with organizing the party’s affairs in the Midlands. On the night of 10 June 1934, he led a large contingent of Blackshirts into London to hear Mosley speak at an event heralded as the largest indoor political rally in British history. What was intended to be a triumphant display of fascist discipline before the public quickly descended into chaos, as Blackshirt stewards dealt ruthlessly with hecklers attempting to drown out Mosley’s speech.40 Collin Brooks, a conservative newspaper editor who would work alongside Chesterton after the war, described the resulting melee as a ‘Roman Circus’ that only served to highlight the violent excess of the fascists’ attempts to maintain order. Though not entirely unsympathetic to Mosley’s ideas, Brooks’s diary entry from the night of the rally captured some of its notoriety as a turning point in the BUF’s existence: Whatever the press may say . . . the whole thing was a fiasco and has probably done more to rally opinion to the National Government than anything since 1931. As far as the 6000 or 10,000 eye witnesses were concerned the personal appeal of Fascism has been drowned by such a display of un-English methods.41 Chesterton’s private reaction to Olympia showed a similar sense of alarm at the violence he had witnessed. In an interview with David Baker in 1980, Doris Chesterton described her husband arriving home from the rally in the early hours of Monday, 11 June: He returned in the early hours of the morning exhausted, extremely angry and with his right fist bruised. But it was against the fascists he was fuming. It seems that at one point he had witnessed two fascists holding down a communist while another kicked the prostrate figure. ‘So I hit one of them’ he told me. He would not stop talking about the unnecessary violence until he finally fell asleep vowing ‘I will resign tomorrow’.42 By the next day, however, Chesterton had reevaluated what had taken place and made the decision to remain in the BUF, demurring that the two Blackshirts he intercepted had been engaged in a ‘clear breach of fascist discipline’.43 He made no mention of whether this assessment of disciplinary failure also applied to the other publicized incidents of brutality at Olympia, such as the ‘mass assaults’ described by Brooks, the widely reported use of stage lighting to target audience members for assault, or the humiliation of female hecklers ejected by Blackshirt stewards.44 Not surprisingly, his coverage of Olympia in The Blackshirt betrayed no sense of discomfort about the conduct of Mosley’s Defence Force: ‘This body, as always, performed magnificent service. Not a man hesitate to pounce upon his adversary, no matter how barbarous the weapon used against him.Thus was a hearing eventually secured for the leader.’45 The significance of the Olympia meeting has proved one of the more controversial subjects within the history of British fascism. This is partly due to the varied

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records of the night itself, as well as the subsequent controversy which played out across the media. When he was interviewed for Colin Cross’s history of fascism in Britain in the 1960s, Chesterton claimed that the Blackshirts had only acted in selfdefence and in order to ensure that the meeting could proceed uninterrupted.46 Mosley was likewise adamant that the fascists’ actions at Olympia had been proportional to the threat posed by their opponents, and that the meeting had never been intended as a ‘show of force’. These claims were subsequently reproduced by Robert Skidelsky in his biography of Mosley, which drew harsh criticism for its exculpatory treatment of fascist violence at Olympia and elsewhere. The most recent arguments regarding Olympia have concerned its impact upon the BUF’s political fortunes. Most accounts of the BUF have treated mid-1934 as the high-water mark of fascism’s popularity in interwar Britain, with political elites and the public at large turning against Mosley in response to the violent displays at Olympia. In the revisionist account offered by Martin Pugh, however, reactions to fascist violence (particularly among Conservative elites in Parliament and the media) were far more sympathetic to Mosley. Some commentators even reiterated the quasi-liberal arguments put forward by the BUF itself, claiming that the stewards’ heavy-handed tactics had restored ‘freedom of speech’ to Britain.47 Regardless of whether Olympia was a singular catalyst for the failure of interwar fascism in Britain, it is apparent that the meeting’s aftermath heralded a series of fundamental shifts within the organization and character of the BUF. In July 1934, it lost the support and free publicity provided by The Daily Mail, which had driven the membership to a peak of approximately 50,000. BUF stalwarts claimed that Lord Rothermere, the newspaper’s owner, had effectively been blackmailed into withdrawing his endorsement by advertisers and financial interests threatening a boycott of The Daily Mail and its affiliates. In truth, the pressure on Rothermere had come not from big business but from state authorities, who were alarmed by the public disorder at Olympia, as well as Hitler’s bloody purge of the Nazi Party during the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ on 30 June. Along with the Daily Mail’s support went thousands of the ‘Rothermere fascists’ who had flocked to the BUF in the first half of 1934, causing the BUF’s membership to drop precipitously. As D.S. Lewis observed in his history of the BUF, this turn of events forced Mosley to rethink his prior assumption that ‘enthusiasm was sufficient to lead to power’.48 In practical terms, the reconstruction of the BUF between 1934 and 1935 transformed it into a more streamlined and effective political organization. In ideological terms, however, it saw the party undergo a considerable degree of radicalization. In Portrait of a Leader, Chesterton claimed that the break with Rothermere was necessary to maintain the revolutionary thrust of fascism in Britain: He [Rothermere] imagined, it seems, that Mosley was a Right-Wing Tory, instead of a Fascist revolutionary, and that his movement existed to bolster up big business in Britain. Incalculable harm was done by this intervention, and the large influx of recruits which resulted proved useless almost to a man.49

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Although it slightly overstated the BUF’s rejection of ‘respectable’ sources of support and membership after 1934, Chesterton’s assessment described a genuine and deepening rift between fascists and the mainstream right in interwar Britain.50 The upheaval of the post-Olympia period also triggered a shake-up in the party’s inner circle of activists. Rex Tremlett, the figure who had persuaded Chesterton to join the BUF, resigned from the party in 1934. He would later claim to have distanced himself from fascism in response to the ‘debacle’ at Olympia, though the records of the Security Service cast doubt on this in light of Tremlett’s continued association with the extreme right after 1934.51 With Tremlett’s departure, the BUF’s public image and propaganda efforts became increasingly reflective of an internal faction comprising Chesterton, John Beckett,William Joyce and Alexander RavenThomson; in organizational matters, the BUF’s radical wing was supported by Neill Francis-Hawkins. Between July 1934 and August 1935, as the party’s ranks thinned to a mere 500 active members, this faction became embroiled in a series of disputes with conservative members like Robert Forgan and F.M. Box. In retrospect, the divisions in the BUF can be seen as an outgrowth of tensions that arose from the syncretic nature of the extreme right’s ideology. Even the most well-established of Europe’s fascist parties experienced internal conflict in their effort to reconcile ‘left-wing’ ideas of revolutionary change with ‘right-wing’ notions of order and tradition. It bears noting, however, that the rift between radicals and moderates in the BUF was not purely ideological. The changes prompted by Olympia raised practical questions about the party’s tactics and future direction. While the radicals called for a barrage of propaganda to prepare the ground for electoral campaigning and further demonstrations, therefore, the more conservative wing sought to normalize the BUF and establish a conventional base of supporters. On this occasion, the radical voices prevailed: Forgan resigned in May 1935 and was replaced by Box, who embarked upon an unpopular campaign to curtail the party’s spending. Chesterton, whose salary at the time was estimated at £6 per week, joined other senior officers in accusing Box of ‘impeding the movement’.52 Box’s resignation in late 1935 represented another victory for the radicals, with Francis-Hawkins now established as the party’s key organizer. By 1935, Chesterton’s personal contributions to the BUF’s literature were substantial, with one surveillance report suggesting he was responsible for as much as 70 per cent of the pro-Fascist material appearing in the press. This was likely an exaggeration, since Chesterton’s work for Mosley during this period also included numerous speaking engagements, training and organizational duties. In January 1935, as part of Mosley’s ‘re-organization scheme’, he undertook a tour of local branches only to discover that many of them operated as little more than social clubs. Chesterton responded by shutting down several branches and dismissing some 300 members for lack of discipline.53 Such drastic action not only reflected the organizational shifts within the BUF but matched the increasing zealousness of Chesterton’s outlook, which was on display in a series of Blackshirt articles that appeared between August and October 1934. Later collated into a pamphlet entitled

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Creed of a Fascist Revolutionary these essays served as a manifesto of sorts describing the cultural and spiritual crisis that only fascism could resolve: The price to be paid for the revolution entails the sacrifice of many cherished illusions, not least among them the smug notion that progress is inherent in the social scheme of things. We have to face a truth which to many will not be a pleasant truth – that the social tendency is always in the direction of disintegration.54 Chesterton was not the most original or distinguished thinker in the BUF, falling short of Mosley’s technical sophistication and the philosophical prowess of Alexander Raven-Thomson.55 Nevertheless, his long obsession with themes of cultural decadence and national decline, coupled with his fiercely polemical style, made his ‘creed’ one of the purest expressions of the BUF’s ideology. It invoked the metaphor of a national organism succumbing to internal rot: Great Britain – once so proud and virile and majestic – crumbles into dissolution, her foundations eaten away by financial and commercial lust, her superstructure shaken by political ineptitude, cowardice and graft, her morale destroyed by the spiritual discords of the class-war, and her ancient grandeur assailed by all the forces of decay which appear when there is no anti-toxin of courageous and constructive effort to keep the people in a state of exercise and health.56 The themes of national decline, cultural decadence and spiritual rebirth in Chesterton’s work as a BUF propagandist were exemplars of the generic or ‘universal’ fascist ideology which appeared in various manifestations throughout interwar Europe. His writing also put some of the distinctive qualities of British fascism on display, such as its prevailing emphasis upon popular culture as a bellwether for national decline. Chesterton took part in the standard fascist denunciations of decadent modern entertainment: the ‘pennyworth of narcotic’ offered to cinema patrons and the ‘the lilt of American love croons’.57 His experience as a professional critic was utilized to greater effect in describing the fallen state of British literature: James Joyce was ‘the centre of a circle of half-baked fake intellectuals’ and Wyndham Lewis a sufferer of ‘spiritual delirium tremens’.58 D.H. Lawrence and T.S. Eliot were similarly denounced as the ‘she-men of letters’ and ‘spiritual pygmies’.59 As a counterbalance to these examples of modern decadence, Chesterton offered his long-term literary heroes as inspiration for Britain’s impending cultural renaissance. Reviewing a collection of George Bernard Shaw’s works, Chesterton found the acclaimed playwright teetering on the edge of a fascist awakening, despite having been waylaid by ‘Marxian dreams and Soviet nightmares’.60 His eulogy of Rudyard Kipling likewise saw the ‘poet and prophet of empire’ as a predecessor to the Blackshirts: ‘The modern whining about “rights” was a thing alien to the Kipling

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mood and to the Kipling temperament’.61 Surprisingly, it was not Chesterton but another contributor to The Blackshirt who told readers in 1935 that ‘Shakespeare would have been a fascist’.62 There is little doubt, however, that Shakespeare occupied the central position in the pantheon of cultural heroes claimed by Chesterton as icons for Britain’s coming regeneration.63 The fiery rhetoric and utopian idealism on display in Chesterton’s Creed of a Fascist Revolutionary was, in many respects, a more typical example of fascist expression than the technocratic proposals outlined at the BUF’s foundation. Detailed statements of policy were uncommon among fascist movements in interwar Europe, some of whom violently rejected the notion of a political program altogether or sought to define their principles only once power had been secured. What Robert Paxton described as fascism’s ‘special relationship to doctrine’ – its refusal to engage in theoretical debates and its leaders’ willingness to change their doctrine without explanation – was not always apparent in Mosley’s original manifesto.64 ‘The object of this book’, Mosley informed readers of The Greater Britain, ‘is to prove, by analysis of the present situation and by constructive policy, that the necessity for fundamental change exists’.65 By contrast, Chesterton’s call to action in 1935 was unflinching in its hostility towards Britain’s liberal traditions: ‘Fascism tolerates no whining about “rights”.The highest privilege it grants is the renunciation of “rights”. All but the right to serve, to suffer, to sacrifice’.66 Between 1934 and 1935, the radical faction within the BUF had a discernible influence upon the party’s direction. This was reflected most profoundly in Mosley’s public embrace of anti-Semitism, which has since become synonymous with the history of British fascism as a whole.W.F. Mandle’s pioneering study of the antiSemitism in the BUF characterized Mosley’s turn against the Jews between 1934 and 1935 as an act of destructive hubris prompted by the party’s failures: ‘Rather than blame himself . . . he acted in his customary fashion by inflating a minor opponent into a major cause of failure’.67 Taking the opposing view, Martin Pugh has suggested that Mosley’s failure was to underestimate the potential for antiSemitism as a recruiting tool, particularly in the late 1930s.68 In both interpretations, the emphasis is upon anti-Semitism as a form of political agitation employed by Mosley in response to the changing circumstances after Olympia. However, as highlighted most recently by Daniel Tilles, the mid-1934 reconstruction did not mark the genesis of the BUF’s anti-Semitism but rather its reorientation to the centre of the party’s strategy and public image.69 Chesterton was among those responsible for propagating the myth of the BUF’s neutrality on the ‘Jewish question’ prior to 1934: While it is probable that [Mosley] had no deeper an affection for Jews in the mass than any other Englishman, the last thought in his head was that it would prove necessary for him to adopt any attitude towards them, apart from refusing them admittance to the movement – a step made essential by the power of the Jew in an incredibly short time to gain control for himself and his fellow racials of organizations with which he becomes associated.70

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The policy of exclusion to which Chesterton referred was not made explicit in BUF publications prior to the Olympia meeting. Responding to a letter to The Fascist Week in February 1934, editor Rex Tremlett claimed that ‘There is no boycott against Jews by the British Union of Fascists. The responsibility for admission rests with the local branch officials’.71 The edition of The Greater Britain published in April 1934 gave no indication that the BUF was doctrinally antiSemitic, although Mosley’s original draft of the book had included a reference to the outsized influence of Jewish financiers. Even prior to Olympia, when its propaganda was directed against political rather than racial enemies, the BUF was quick to draw links between Jews and the subversive elements seen to be driving communist and anti-fascist groups. In November 1933, Mosley penned an anonymous article in The Blackshirt which warned that international Jewish interests were conspiring to involve Britain in a war with Germany.72 There were several aspects in which this initial salvo against Jewish finance differed from the later anti-Jewish propaganda delivered by the BUF. Mosley dissembled on ‘whether or not Germany was right in her attitude towards the Jews’, a careful attempt to stave off damaging comparisons with Nazism. In a contrast with his later stance, which emphasized the BUF’s need to defend itself against Jewish opponents, Mosley also dismissed the importance of attacks made on the BUF itself by Jewish media or business interests: ‘We are not concerned with the treatment of the British Union of Fascists, for we have learned to laugh at the hatreds over which we triumph’. Finally, Mosley offered an unconvincing assurance that the fascists’ criticism of the Jews was a matter of politics rather than prejudice: ‘We do not fight Jews on racial or religious ground. We oppose them because they have become an organized interest within the State pursuing a policy which threatens British lives and homes’.73 Between 1932 and mid-1934, Mosley made some effort to downplay anti-Semitism within his party’s campaigns, partly in an effort to mollify members of the party who disapproved of racial attacks. Writing in 1948, Chesterton recalled that BUF speakers were forbidden from espousing their views on ‘the Jewish question’ under penalty of being expelled from the movement. Strangely, in the same passage, he contradicted his earlier statement regarding the BUF’s membership policies, claiming that ‘some Jews belonged to the movement, and others were attracted by its political, social and economic concepts’. Whatever the accuracy of Chesterton’s memory on this matter, it is doubtful that Mosley’s stance during this period arose from a principled aversion to anti-Semitism, particularly given the number of avowed anti-Semites (like William Joyce) who joined and remained within the party during this period.74 Some of those who came to Mosley via other political groups carried with them a tradition of racial and conspiratorial anti-Semitism that predated fascism altogether. The British Brothers League, a nativist group which attracted some 45,000 members after its founding in 1902, adopted a broadly nationalistic stance against ‘alien’ threats to British identity which flared up in the early 20th century. Recent migrants received the brunt of the Brothers’ group’s racial animus, which was directed primarily at a wave of Jewish refugees who had

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fled to Britain from Eastern Europe after 1881.75 Anti-Semitic conspiracy theories also had a foothold in British culture and politics prior to the advent of British fascism.The Britons, a small but fanatical anti-Semitic organization founded by Henry Hamilton Beamish in 1919, was responsible for the distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forged document purporting to reveal the workings of an international Jewish cabal.76 Anti-Semitism was never to have as profound an impact upon British politics as was the case in other parts of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. Nevertheless, anti-Semitic ideas and sentiments were readily available to Britain’s extreme right as it emerged after 1918. This was not solely the influence of fringe figures like Beamish or the street-level backlash against Jewish immigrants, since a tradition of quasi-respectable anti-Semitism, exemplified by prominent cultural figures like G.K. Chesterton, also provided space for campaigns against ‘international finance’ that blended socio-political critiques with conspiracy theories and the racial vilification of migrants.The idea of a rational anti-Semitism, prompted by analysis rather than prejudice, was central to the mythology that Chesterton helped construct around the BUF’s escalating attacks on Jews after 1934. Mosley’s attention was soon drawn to the fact that Jewish money was being poured into anti-Fascist activities. . . . This puzzled him, until he caused an investigation to be made into Jewish financial and commercial activities in this country. Then he discovered the reason. He found that there is no great financial, industrial, or commercial trust or combine which was not dominated by the Jew whether acting in person or by proxy. The whole capitalist racket, the whole of the national Press, the whole of the ‘British’ cinema, and the whole bunch of purely parasitical occupations were found to be Jew-ridden. Every vitiating and demoralizing factor in our national life was Jew-influenced where it was not Jew-controlled.77 Chesterton’s rapid descent into anti-Semitic obsession after 1934 was encouraged by his own flawed analysis of the political and economic circumstances that confronted fascism in Britain. Jewish influence provided the ‘missing link’ between the otherwise disparate forces acting to undermine Britain: the predatory finance that corrupted her politics, the ‘decadent’ liberals that eroded the national culture and the subversive movements that attacked fascists in the streets and exacerbated class conflict. Because of its global dimensions, the conspiracy by international finance also provided an explanation for events taking place overseas. Jewish plots to destabilize and even disestablish the British Empire were to become a central theme in Chesterton’s political output after 1945. Like many other aspects of his post-war ideology, however, the roots of this obsession could be traced to his time with Mosley. As far back as December 1934, he ‘spoke of the hold the Jews have in South Africa which was being strengthened by Herzog and Smuts’.78 Three months later, Chesterton again accused Smuts, the general under whom he had fought in East Africa and in the Rand Revolt, of representing the interests of ‘Yiddish finance’.79

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In Chesterton’s reckoning, South Africa’s ‘hag-ridden’ state provided a warning that the Empire at large would soon be under attack from international finance. David Baker has argued convincingly against the notion that Chesterton’s prejudice against Jews stemmed neither from a psychological need for a ‘scapegoat’, nor from a cynical desire to promote his ideas. It is nevertheless apparent that antiSemitism fulfilled an important role in Chesterton’s ideology that would otherwise have been lacking. Fascism required enemies, and the specter of an internationally connected ‘Jewish menace’ provided a more versatile and tangible enemy than the ‘Old Gangs’ or the abstract forces of civilizational decline; racial enemies provided a physical presence to be sought out in the process of cleansing or purifying the national body.80 Anti-Semitism served as a natural counterpoint to Chesterton’s utopian idealism: the stereotypical Jewish ‘anti-man’ acted as a foil to the hypermasculine ‘new man’ lauded by BUF propaganda.81 In the same fashion, Chesterton’s lauding of Britain’s literary and theatrical traditions was paired with attacks on decadent Jewish culture: Are the films trash? Then the Jew makes a fortune out of them because it is his natural gift to purvey trash. . . . Have the public manners become as deplorable as the public taste? Then the Jew walks the world as their perfect exponent. Financially, socially, politically, culturally, the Jew has brought all things down to the level on which he feels most at home.82 British fascism came to share the Nazi obsession with Jews’ cultural cosmopolitanism. In October 1937, while thousands flocked to the exhibit of ‘degenerate art’ in Munich, the front page of Blackshirt bore an article by Chesterton depicting an internal dialogue by the sculptor Jacob Epstein. [Epstein] There’s something in it, my lad.This gentle spirit, Christ we’ll clothe him in outlandish garbs of flesh, so that he becomes extravagantly animal. [Epstein’s ‘Genius’] Yes, by Jove. As we jewboys are animal only much more so. He must be the caricature of a most palpable jew. They never like that, you know. And he must have grotesque hands turned outward in the fashion of the marketplace. In Portrait of a Leader, he made assurances that the party’s attitude towards the Jews was not racially motivated: Mosley ‘refuses to be drawn into adopting any racial line of attack on [the Jews], holding that an Empire composed of many different races, castes colours and creeds preludes any possibility of racial persecution, even if persecution were held to be otherwise desirable’.83 In his analysis of Chesterton’s anti-Semitism, David Baker drew a cautious distinction between the ‘cultural’ and ‘biological’ forms of anti-Semitism that prevailed

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in Europe prior to the Holocaust. The latter was represented at its most extreme by the Hitlerian drive for the biological elimination of Jewish ‘bloodlines’ and the resulting campaign to wipe out the Jews in Europe. In Baker’s judgement, even Chesterton’s most vicious anti-Semitic innuendo fell short of this tradition, and instead represented an outgrowth of the cultural prejudice of his forebears Cecil and Gilbert.84 Chesterton made his own attempts after 1945 to distinguish his views on the ‘Jewish question’ from the anti-Semitism promoted in Nazi Germany. He disavowed the work of Houston Stewart-Chamberlain, a forerunner to the ‘blood and soil’ racial theories of Alfred Rosenberg, declaring that ‘all I have gathered about Houston Chamberlain from attempting to read his books is that he was mad’.85 Baker ultimately concluded that Chesterton’s ‘ethnocentric’ antiSemitism was distinct from his racism against non-white migrants and colonial peoples, which contained a more explicit biological component; he noted, however, that both prejudices seemed to be informed more by misguided ‘common sense’ than an adherence to philosophical or pseudo-scientific theories. Baker’s analysis is useful in distinguishing Chesterton from other members of Britain’s extreme right like Arnold Leese, who were readily forthcoming in their support for Nazi anti-Semitism. It is less satisfactory as an explanation for how the concept of race factored into Chesterton’s anti-Semitism after 1945, and how antiSemitism in turn shaped his wider conception of racial politics during that period. Moreover, as Baker himself acknowledged, it is impossible to view Chesterton’s most vituperative works of anti-Semitic propaganda for the BUF as untainted by assumptions about biological notions of race.86 ‘Apotheosis of the Jew’, an essay that appeared in the second issue of the BUF’s quarterly journal, depicted Jews as a subversive, alien influence incapable of transcending their physiological origins. Had he stayed to swelter in the place of his origin there would have been no Jewish problem. . . . Unfortunately, his migration to more temperate zones, and the consequent approximation of his skin to the colour of white, has led to his finding himself both at home and not at home.87 Chesterton argued that the physical appearance of Jewish migrants reflected the psychological and ‘spiritual’ process of their infiltration into English society. Arriving in the country ‘poverty stricken and bedraggled’, the Jews had risen in wealth and social standing through nefarious means (‘often they invite closer inspection than the police are able to give them’) and subsequently adopted the appearance of the native populace: ‘Now is the Jew arrived at the stage of his greatest menace to civilisation. . . . Education in the social graces has made of him to all outward appearances except facially a typical English gentleman’.88 This state of near-perfect ‘metamorphosis’ allowed Jews to move freely throughout the political and social spheres while retaining their ‘race consciousness’. Some of the racial invective used by Chesterton during this period appears to have been drawn from his own warped perceptions of encountering Jewish migrants in England: ‘To go to a swimming-pool anywhere near London or

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the large cities is as efficacious as baptism in the Jordan; one becomes positively anointed with Semitic grease’.89 In support of Baker’s view, Chesterton’s physical description of Jews was clearly informed by stereotypes that permeated English literature: an amalgamation of the sinister money-lender figure from The Merchant of Venice and the ‘shambling’ or ‘cringing’ figure from G.K. Chesterton’s poetry.90 His outrage towards the supposed ‘arrogance’ of Jewish public figures also seemed to derive from a sense of social conservatism and classical English propriety; Jews were associated with ‘loud clothes, loud cars and loud behaviour’ and the use of self-promotion through the media. Ultimately, however, Chesterton gave no indication that changes in behaviour or social customs would be sufficient to quell his antagonism towards the Jews as a group. Where they adopted English customs, he accused Jews of adopting a guise for their ‘parasitical’ nature; where they made no attempt to hide their heritage, he ridiculed their poor appearance, manner of speaking and ‘shuffling gait’.91 Unlike those anti-Semites who identified religious or cultural differences as the cause of friction, Chesterton attributed the Jews’ inability to integrate to a ‘collective neurosis’ and an ‘ever-present sense of insecurity born of the knowledge that his race and the way of life of his race are inferior things’.92 He suggested that some of these innate attributes had allowed the Jewish migrant to succeed in hostile circumstances: ‘sound business instincts which are the heritage he derives from the Oriental bazaar’ or ‘his talent – and even his genius – as an artist’, both of which yielded considerable wealth.93 These advantages came with a cost, however, which Chesterton identified as the garish and ultimately self-destructive displays of arrogance by the Jews at their ‘apotheosis’: Because his neurosis produces in him such high tension . . . he throws caution to the wind as he comes forth to hold his own and to keep the world a fit place for the habitation of parasites. Thus does he eventually show up his entire racket. Thus does he turn anti-Semitism from a mild disdain to a passionate and wholesome rage. Thus does he destroy himself.94 In the final passages of the essay, Chesterton spoke directly to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. Rather than see such resentment as an irrational or prejudicial response, Chesterton characterized anti-Semitism as a constant, natural occurrence in any society where Jews had become intermingled with the wider population. This assumption was not radical in and of itself, since many prior considerations of anti-Semitism in Britain had considered ‘friction’ between Jews and gentiles to be an objective consequence of immigration. Rather than see this friction in neutral terms, however, Chesterton placed the blame for anti-Semitism and its consequences entirely on ‘the Jew’ himself, who ‘had turned the spark into a roaring fire that fortunately for the survival of the superior races will never be extinguished’. More threateningly, Chesterton argued that the growing anger against Jews (the ‘passionate and wholesome rage’) marked a resurgence of the same ‘virile nationalism’ that had erected barriers against Jewish power in the past. He further warned

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that an alliance was forming, under the guidance of the Blackshirts, between the two major branches of anti-Semitism in Britain: the ‘men of research’ (intellectual or ‘rational’ anti-Semites like Chesterton) and the average citizens of London’s East End ‘and many another district where the physical facts of the Jew scarcely escape attention’.95 In his final analysis, Baker emphasized the need to view A.K. Chesterton’s antiSemitism in the context of the 1930s, when the categorical prejudice against the Jewish people had yet to reach its full, genocidal implications in the Holocaust.The same view is offered by Ian Ker in his assessment of G.K. Chesterton’s relationship with ‘the Jewish question’ after the First World War: That there was to be a ‘final solution’ proposed in Nazi Germany to the Jewish ‘problem’ was still some years ahead, and [G.K.] Chesterton cannot be judged in the light of the Holocaust. He was certainly aware that general impressions are general impressions and nothing more.96 The key difference, in the case of A.K. Chesterton, is that his anti-Semitism was not merely construed as a personal opinion, a literary construct or a general observation. As part of a political program, the younger Chesterton’s views on the ‘Jewish question’ had immediate and dangerous ramifications. For all his attempts to couch the BUF’s anti-Semitism in ambiguity and euphemism, Mosley did not shy away from stating his party’s solution to the ‘alien problem’: ‘We shall not keep Jews here to bully them. Those who have been guilty of anti-British conduct will be deported’.97 Chesterton was even less reserved in calling for a direct response to the Jewish problem: In all sorrow, I must advance the opinion that a race capable of so damnably violating the feelings of their British hosts is a rabble race, and that the sooner we get rid of the largest possible number of them and break their financial stranglehold the better will it be for the happiness, the prosperity and the future greatness of the British people.98 Addressing a meeting in Shoreditch in November 1935, Chesterton gave a more detailed explanation of how the BUF planned to enact its racial policy: ‘When the Fascists get into power, all Jews will be sent to Palestine, and then, [he suggested] the mandate should be handed over to the Arabs’.99 Viewed charitably, this stance could be interpreted as an attempt to reconcile the policies of British fascism with the Zionist movement. On several other occasions, however, Chesterton expressed hostility towards the Jewish settlement of British-mandated Palestine. In August 1937, following the meeting of the World Zionist Congress in Zurich, Chesterton accused the American-Jewish leader Samuel Wise of conspiring against the British Empire: ‘The British Army has acted in Palestine as the bodyguard of these jackal interests. Now that the British government shows a belated concern for Moslem opinion the jackals bear their fangs’.100

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The proposal that a large proportion of Jews were to be summarily deported to an uncertain future was disturbing in and of itself. But what was to be done about the many Jews who, by Chesterton’s admission, lived ‘quietly and decently’? According to Mosley, the scrutiny incurred by patriotic Jews was an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of their fellows’ misdeeds: ‘they can no more complain of suffering from the errors of Jewry as a whole, than members of any other nation can complain of suffering for the mistakes of the majority and the blunders of its government’.101 Chesterton echoed this view in Blackshirt, acknowledging the existence of ‘intelligent, decent Jews’ willing to admit the Jewish role in feeding anti-Semitism but concluding that: ‘So long as the Jewish majority is pleased to link itself with either the subversive movements of the political “Left” or with the damnable malpractices of the capitalist “Right” the Jewish minority must suffer from whatever odium their colleagues bring upon them as a race’.102 Even for those Jews likely to be spared from deportation, the prospect of life under a BUF government was foreboding. They would be allowed to remain as ‘foreigners’ but denied the full rights of citizenship and not permitted to become Members of Parliament or government officials.103 Other non-British races were also to be classed as ‘foreigners’, with even those naturalized under existing laws to be deported ‘unless they have proved themselves valuable citizens of Great Britain’. Despite Mosley’s repeated assurances that his policies on race would never emulate those in Nazi Germany, therefore, it was difficult to ignore the similar strains of racist and anti-Semitic thought that ran within the BUF. Mosley’s policies on birth control and sterilization were influenced from the eugenicist movement that became linked with racial policies in both the United States and Nazi Germany. None were to be forcefully sterilized, but the ‘unfit’ were to be ‘offered alternatives of segregation sufficient to prevent the production of unfit children, or voluntary sterilization’. While it must be granted that such concepts had yet to gain their later notoriety in the wake of Hitler’s racial cleansing programs, their acceptance by Mosley was a reminder that scientific racism did play a role in the ideology of the BUF.104 Since the BUF and its counterparts failed to gain any semblance of state power in Britain, the final consequences of fascist anti-Semitism were never in danger of being realized. Mosley’s lack of political success would hardly have been reassuring, however, for Jewish communities and migrants in Britain noting the similarity between BUF policy and the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany; nor would they have derived comfort from the BUF’s early claims that it represented a rational, high-minded anti-Semitism, a pretense which rapidly fell away after 1935. As part of the effort to bolster its ranks in the wake of Rothermere’s withdrawal, Mosley’s party embarked upon a vigourous campaign aimed at recruiting followers in London’s East End, an area home to a substantial population of Jewish migrants – many of whom had arrived in Britain while fleeing from pogroms in East Europe after 1881.105 Chesterton joined Joyce and local fascist representatives in attempting to harness resentment against Jewish migrants and communities, all the while touting the BUF’s new orientation as a party for the patriotic working class. The Blackshirts’ attempts to stake out a presence in East London were marked by a new level

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of violence, with emboldened BUF members assaulting communists and Jews on the street and attempting to break up rival meetings.106 With the BUF losing much of its support from Mussolini’s regime, Mosley now looked to Nazi Germany for support and inspiration. This not only emboldened anti-Semites like Chesterton and Joyce but encouraged the party to pursue confrontational tactics in its drive for membership and electoral support. Communist attempts to break up fascist meetings, which sparked the majority of violent incidents in the East End, fed into BUF propaganda which sought to portray fascism as restoring order to areas overrun by ‘Red-Jew gangs’.107 The culmination of violence in the East End came in October 1936 when a BUF march down Cable Street was repulsed by thousands of anti-fascist demonstrators.The character and consequences of the ‘Battle for Cable Street’ have sparked a debate similar to that surrounding Olympia; recently, both Martin Pugh and Daniel Tilles have suggested that anti-fascist violence, much of it directed at the police rather than the Blackshirts themselves, served to bolster the BUF’s popularity and facilitate further anti-Semitic provocations in the East End.108 It is clear, at the very least, that the scale of anti-fascist backlash in 1936 failed to convince BUF radicals to tone down their anti-Semitism. Addressing the Jewish responses to Cable Street for Blackshirt, Chesterton sneered: Is it any wonder that this delightful race, so loathed throughout the world, should have endeared itself to the English men and women of East London? Is it any wonder that so gracious and modest a people should have warmed the hearts of the Blackshirts to such an extent that we wish them nothing less than a long sea-trip at the earliest possible moment for the sake of their health – and for the sake of the health of the British nation? Other representatives of the BUF in the East End, such as Mick Clarke, dispensed with veiled threats and publicly declared that a ‘pogrom’ against British Jews was forthcoming; an outburst of violence in Mile End the week after Clarke’s declaration suggested that this was no idle threat.109 The prospect of further violence accelerated the passing of the Public Order Act of 1936, legislation which forbade the wearing of political uniforms and gave police the authority to redirect demonstrations. This too failed to dampen fascist enthusiasm in the East End, however, and in February 1937 Chesterton again took to the front page of The Blackshirt to drum up support for the six ‘national socialist’ candidates contesting the area in the upcoming London County Council elections.110 Unbeknownst to readers of this appeal, by the time of the election, Chesterton was far removed from the campaign in East London. In December 1936, he had suffered a severe nervous breakdown, descending back into the erratic pattern of alcoholism that had begun with his arrival at Black House. Francis Beckett describes his father’s recollections of Chesterton during this period: In his first three years at BUF headquarters he was frequently too drunk to work, and John [Beckett] remembered several times, when Chesterton had

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been missing for a few days, touring his known haunts, finding him drunk and filthy in some dive, and returning him to his wife to be cleaned up.111 The severity of Chesterton’s illness during the winter of 1937, which at one stage saw him ‘locked up in Bethlehem Royal’, prompted Mosley to send him to Germany for treatment at the cost of 17 pounds per week.112 Once he had begun to recover, Chesterton used his time in the Third Reich to prepare a series of articles exploring the ‘Aspects of the German Revolution’. Published at a time when many members of the BUF were becoming increasingly enamoured with Nazism, this material might have provided some rare insights into Chesterton’s personal perspective on Hitler’s regime. Even by the standards of his other work for the BUF, however, the reports from Germany were rote propaganda. It is unlikely, in any case, that a carefully curated tour through Germany would have altered Chesterton’s glibly optimistic view of National Socialism, nor his long-standing conviction that the forces working to discredit fascism in Britain were waging a propaganda campaign against its European allies.113 Chesterton was correct in assuming that the fortunes of the BUF were increasingly tied to British perceptions of fascism in Europe. Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia on 3 October 1935, which was the first major act of aggression by a European power since the Great War, heralded a shift in attitudes against the regime in Italy; this was followed shortly after by Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in March 1936, and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, two events which raised the serious prospect of a conflict involving Britain. The BUF met the increasing belligerence of Mussolini and Hitler after 1936 with a mixture of denial, obfuscation and overt support. Mosley’s official stance on European affairs was isolationist, stressing that Britain should mind its own business and avoid being drawn into military or diplomatic disputes on the continent. BUF policy dictated that the best assurance for European peace was for each nation to develop its own nationalist system, thus establishing something akin to the ‘universal fascist brotherhood’ proposed by some German and Italian fascists in the 1930s.114 Aside from the abstract notions of ‘fascist internationalism’, there were strong financial and organizational incentives for the BUF to ingratiate itself with Rome and Berlin.115 A mixture of idealism and conspiratorial cynicism warped Chesterton’s perceptions of Nazism and Italian Fascism. Where Chesterton was concerned, the military ethos that underpinned his creed did not represent a love of war, but instead stood for the sacred principles discovered by men fighting on both sides of the Great War.116 Despite his deep aversion to the prospect of another conflict, therefore, Chesterton was driven to attack pacifists and other advocates of disarmament as eroding the national spirit: ‘As it takes real men to fight a war, so does it take real men to make and keep the peace. It is that thought which so terrifies the pacifists’.117 Fatefully, Chesterton also fell under the illusion that this ethos of peaceful militarism applied in Nazi Germany: ‘If it be granted that a love of the warrior virtues need not (and in the present instance does not) embrace a love of war, then we are at least some distance on the road to understanding the spirit of the new Germany’.118

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Even as this notion became increasingly implausible after 1936, Chesterton’s imperialism provided its own justification for the aggression of fascists in Europe. His response to the brutal Italian campaign in Africa was a mixture of crude racism and colonialist paternalism, with the deposed Abyssinian Emperor, Haile Salassie, dismissed as a ‘crowned poltroon’ whose ‘savage citizens’ had welcomed the intervention of the Italian army. In an early example of how Chesterton’s colonial racism intersected with anti-Semitism, he further disparaged Salassie as a puppet of Jewish finance: ‘Conquering Lion of Judah, descended upon the primitive platform at Djibouti’.119 Chesterton’s apologetics on behalf of the Nazi regime were not as explicitly racist, though he encouraged Blackshirt readers to ‘visualize the urgencies of a national life encompassed by turbulent, envious, hysterical or even semi-barbarous peoples’.120 It was the invasion of Czechoslovakia, another ‘civilized’ nation, that would eventually prompt Chesterton to renounce his support for Hitler in 1939. Prior to that time, however, he voiced no objection to Hitler and Mussolini’s attempts to acquire territory. Up to a point, he recognized that the same drive for space and resources that led Germany and Italy to ‘assert their national claim to live’ was also the rationale for Britain’s overseas empire.121 By the time that Chesterton returned from Germany in the summer of 1937, the BUF had undergone another reorganization, this time in response to the failed election campaigns in East London. Despite their high expectations, fascist candidates secured on average less than 20 per cent of the vote. Within a week of the election and with the party now in dire financial straits, Mosley dismissed several of his full-time staff including Beckett and Joyce, who left to pursue their own National Socialist League.122 Despite losing two of his closest allies in the movement, Chesterton emerged from the purge unscathed and in good stead. On 17 April, he received a letter from Mosley praising his contributions to Blackshirt and promising ‘a great burden of work for you waiting in the future’.123 Back at BUF headquarters in June 1937, he was appointed ‘Director of Policy Propaganda and Special Adviser to the Leader’ and was reported by the Security Service to be ‘in great favour with Mosley’.124 Given the technocratic approach to political organization favoured by ‘the Leader’, it is unlikely that his support for Chesterton during this period was purely altruistic. Chesterton was now among the most capable and experienced propagandists still on staff; as Mosley had alluded in his letter, a large portion of the party’s journalistic output now depended on the investment made in his recovery. Despite his new position, which was expanded to include editorial responsibilities for Blackshirt in August 1937, the reports of Chesterton’s influence over Mosley were exaggerated. With Beckett’s and Joyce’s departures, the BUF’s organizational wing became increasingly influential. Under Francis-Hawkins’s direction, the party gradually shifted its priorities away from anti-Semitic agitation in the East End and back towards a broader program of recruitment and electoral campaigning. By October 1937, Chesterton was at odds with other BUF officers, whom he regarded as incapable of confronting Mosley about the party’s failures. A further blow to Chesterton’s position followed in January 1938, when Francis-Hawkins

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announced a new campaign to print and distribute 10 million copies of Mosley’s ‘Ten Points’ policy leaflet throughout Britain. To free up funds for this venture, Blackshirt was reduced from a weekly schedule to a monthly distribution aimed solely at party members.125 Chesterton remained with the BUF for a further two months as an editor and propagandist, before finally tendering his resignation on 18 March 1938.126 A week after Chesterton’s departure his final editorial appeared in Action; full of effusive praise for Mosley, it gave no indication of the deep disenchantment Chesterton now felt with the leadership of the BUF: ‘What strong voice is there raised on behalf of sanity and life? In all truth I know of but one – the voice of Mosley’.127

Notes 1 Details of the BF’s foundation and early activities are drawn from Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! pp. 92–109. 2 For some comments on the accuracy of Leese’s assessment of early British fascism, see David Baker, ‘The Extreme Right in the 1920s: Fascism in a Cold Climate, or Conservatism with Knobs on?’ Cronin ed., The Failure of British Fascism, pp. 12–28, cf. 21. 3 Kenneth Lunn, ‘Political Anti-Semitism Before 1914: Fascism’s Heritage?’ Lunn and Thurlow eds., British Fascism, pp. 20–41; Paul Stocker, ‘Importing Fascism: Reappraising the British Fascisti, 1923–1926’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2016), pp. 326–348. 4 TNA KV2/1365, Imperial Fascist League, 22 August 1933. 5 See David Howell, Mosley and British Politics 1918–1932: Oswald’s Odyssey (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 6 Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump, pp. 62–63. A concise discussion of Mosley’s war service is also provided by Dorril, Blackshirt, pp. 20–35, who notes some of the contrasts between his actual experience of the war and its depiction in BUF propaganda. 7 Skidelsky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 62–63; Dorril, Blackshirt, pp. 34–35. 8 For a general overview of how Mosley progressed from the New Party to fascism, see Matthew Worley, ‘Finding Fascism: The Politics of Sir Oswald Mosley, 1929–1932’, Nicola Kristin Karcher and Anders G. Kjostvedt eds., Movements and Ideas of the Extreme Right in Europe (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 79–103. 9 Chesterton, Portrait of a Leader, p. 120. For secondary accounts of the BUF’s founding, see Dorril, Blackshirt, pp. 217–223; Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! pp. 128–134. 10 The effects of the Slump persisted in Britain till the end of the decade, with over 2 million unemployed in 1935 despite the number declining from 1933 onwards. See John Stevenson and Chris Cook, The Slump (Harlow: Pearson, 2010), pp. 10–11. High rates of unemployment did not necessarily translate into widespread support for fascism, as noted by Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945, p. 494. 11 Paul Einzig, The Economic Foundations of Fascism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1933), p. 2. 12 On the origins and development of Britain’s anti-fascist movement through the interwar period, see Nigel Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 37–76. For additional perspectives on the left-wing opposition to the BUF, see Keith Hodgson, Fighting Fascism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), pp. 125–155. 13 For a brief overview of how the BUF was funded, see D.S. Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 80–83; Dorril, Blackshirt, p. 236, puts the figure of Mussolini’s yearly contributions in 1933 at £60,000. 14 On the internal culture of the BUF, see Michael A. Spurr, ‘ “Living the Blackshirt Life”: Culture, Community and the British Union of Fascists, 1932–1940’, Contemporary European History,Vol. 12, No. 3 (2003), pp. 305–322.

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15 Action, 3 September 1936, p. 9. 16 Fascist Week, 12 January 1934, p. 8; Fascist Week, 9 February 1934, p. 8. 17 The Blackshirt, 26 October 1934, p. 3. 18 Chesterton Collection A. 45, Letter from Doris Chesterton to David L. Baker, 18 March 1980. 19 Chesterton, Portrait of a Leader, p. 165. 20 The Blackshirt, 28 February 1936, p. 3. 21 Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain (London: BUF Publications, 1934), p. 61. 22 Chesterton, Portrait of a Leader, pp. 148–149. 23 A.K. Chesterton, ‘Democracy Produces a Five-Year Plan’, Fascist Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 3 (1936), pp. 361–376. 24 Action, 13 August 1936, p. 6. 25 Mosley, The Greater Britain, pp. 143–144. 26 Mosley, The Greater Britain, pp. 146–147. 27 David Revaldsen, ‘ “Science Must be the Basis”. Sir Oswald Mosley’s Political Parties and Their Policies on Health, Science and Scientific Racism 1931–1974’, Contemporary British History,Vol. 30, No. 3 (2016), pp. 368–388. 28 Fascist Week, January 12–18 1934, p. 8. 29 Skidelsky noted that a number of British fascists sought to depict Olympia as an event that had ‘restored “free speech” in Britain’. See Oswald Mosley, p. 365. 30 Fascist Week, January 12–18 1934, p. 8. 31 TNA KV2/1345/1b, S.B. report mentioning that Chesterton spoke at a B.U. Meeting, 28 February 1935. 32 Chesterton, Portrait of a Leader, p. 150. 33 Oswald Mosley, Fascism: 100 Questions Asked and Answered (London: BUF Publications, 1936), pp. 8–9. 34 Chesterton, Portrait of a Leader, p. 148. 35 Mosley, The Greater Britain, pp. 21–22. 36 Mosley, My Life, pp. 351–357. 37 A.K. Chesterton, Creed of a Fascist Revolutionary (London: BUF Publication, 1936), pp. 14–15. 38 The Blackshirt, 19 October 1934, p. 2. 39 Action, 9 July 1936, p. 9. 40 For general accounts of the Olympia meeting, see: Robert Benewick, The Fascist Movement in Britain (London: Allen Lane, 1972), pp. 169–193; Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! pp. 156–176. 41 N.J. Crowson ed., Fleet Street, Press Barons and Politics: The Journals of Collin Brooks, 1932–1940 (Cambridge: University of Cambridge for the Royal Historical Society, 1998), p. 62. 42 Chesterton Collection A. 46, ‘Interview with Doris Chesterton’, p. 1. 43 Chesterton Collection A. 46, ‘Interview with Doris Chesterton’, p. 1. 44 Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur, pp. 79–80. 45 The Blackshirt, 15 June 1934, p. 2. For background on the formation and training of the BUF ‘Defence Forces’, see Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur, pp. 62–64; Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! pp. 134–135. 46 Chesterton Collection A. 45, Letter from Colin Cross to David Baker, 27 January 1982; Skideslky, Oswald Mosley, pp. 365–378. 47 See Martin Pugh, ‘The British Union of Fascists and the Olympia Debate’, Historical Journal,Vol. 41, No. 2 (1998), pp. 529–542. 48 Lewis, Illusions of Grandeur, pp. 68–69. 49 Chesterton, Portrait of a Leader, p. 128. 50 See Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! pp. 166–169. 51 TNA KV2/3328/25. 52 TNA KV2/1345/1K, Chronological list of activities of Chesterton, 26 January 1940. 53 Cross, The Fascists in Britain, pp. 137–138.

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54 Chesterton, Creed of a Fascist Revolutionary, pp. 6–9. 55 See Matthew McMurray, ‘Alexander Raven Thomson, Philosopher of the British Union of Fascists’, European Legacy,Vol. 17, No. 1 (2012), pp. 33–59. 56 Chesterton, Creed of a Fascist Revolutionary, pp. 6–7. 57 The Blackshirt, 5 October 1934, p. 3. 58 Chesterton’s attack on Wyndham Lewis was curious given that author’s expressed sympathy for Italian Fascism in the early 1920s, as well as his collaboration with Ezra Pound – the most prominent literary figure to have actively supported the BUF. See Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979). For a recent consideration of Pound’s involvement with fascism in Italy and Britain, see Matthew Feldman, Ezra Pound’s Fascist Propaganda, 1935–45 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 59 The Fascist Week, 9 March 1934, p. 4. 60 The Fascist Week, 23 February 1934, p. 4. 61 The Blackshirt, 24 January 1938, p. 3. 62 The Blackshirt, 18 April 1935, p. 4. 63 The Blackshirt, 10 January 1936, p. 4. 64 Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, pp. 18–19. 65 Mosley, The Greater Britain, p. 17. 66 Chesterton, Creed of a Fascist Revolutionary, p. 19. 67 Mandle, Anti-Semitism and the British Union of Fascists, p. 34. 68 Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! pp. 230–231. 69 Daniel Tilles, British Fascist Anti-Semitism and Jewish Responses, 1932–1940 (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), pp. 50–79. 70 Chesterton, Portrait of a Leader, p. 123. 71 The Fascist Week, 2 February 1934, p. 8. 72 The Blackshirt, 4 November 1933, p. 1. Tilles notes that this article was prompted by a Daily Express piece commenting on Jewish responses to Nazi Germany, but that the ‘BUF’s analysis took the case much further’ than its mainstream counterpart by invoking an international Jewish conspiracy. See British Fascist Anti-Semitism, p. 55. 73 The Blackshirt, 4–10 November 1933, p. 1. 74 Tilles, British Fascist Anti-Semitism, pp. 53–54. 75 Gisela Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in Britain 1918–1939 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1978), pp. 8–9. 76 See the chapter ‘What is behind it all?’ for a more detailed discussion of the Protocols conspiracy and its impact on Chesterton’s anti-Semitism. 77 Portrait of a Leader, p. 125. 78 TNA KV2/1345/1k. 79 The Blackshirt, 22 February 1935, p. 1935. 80 Michael Mann identifies the drive for ‘internal cleansing’ as a defining feature of fascist ideology. See Fascists, p. 16. 81 Phillip Coupland, ‘The Blackshirted Utopians’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 33, No. 2 (1998), pp. 255–272, cf. 264. 82 Chesterton, ‘Apotheosis of the Jew’, p. 51. 83 Chesterton, Portrait of a Leader, p. 123. 84 Baker, Ideology of Obsession, pp. 141–146. 85 Chesterton and Leftwich, The Tragedy of Anti-Semitism, p. 67. 86 Baker, Ideology of Obsession, p. 144. 87 Chesterton, ‘Apotheosis of the Jew’, p. 46. 88 Chesterton, ‘Apotheosis of the Jew’, p. 48. 89 Chesterton, ‘Apotheosis of the Jew’, p. 51. 90 On the relationship between political anti-Semitism and cultural stereotypes of Jews, see: Bryan Cheyette, ‘Jewish stereotyping and English literature 1875–1920:Towards a political analysis’, Tony Kushner and Kenneth Lunn eds., Traditions of Intolerance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 12–32.

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91 Chesterton, ‘Apotheosis of the Jew’, p. 47. 92 Chesterton, ‘Apotheosis of the Jew’, p. 46. 93 Chesterton, ‘Apotheosis of the Jew’, p. 51. 94 Chesterton, ‘Apotheosis of the Jew’, p. 53. 95 Chesterton, ‘Apotheosis of the Jew’, pp. 53–54. 96 Ker, G.K. Chesterton, p. 617. 97 Mosley, 100 Questions, p. 47. 98 Action, 7 November 1936, p. 7. 99 TNA KV2/1345/1f, S.B. report re B.U. meeting, 3 November 1935. 100 The Blackshirt, 14 August 1937, p. 5. 101 Mosley, 100 Questions, p. 47. 102 The Blackshirt, 29 August 1936, p. 5. 103 Mosley, 100 Questions, p. 46. 104 On the influence of eugenics in BUF policy, see Redvaldsen,‘ “Science Must be the Basis” ’, pp. 373–375. 105 For a full account of the BUF’s presence in the East End, see Thomas Linehan, East London for Mosley (London: Frank Cass, 1997). 106 Cullen, ‘Political Violence and the BUF’, pp. 262–263. 107 The Blackshirt, 17 October, 1936, p, 3. 108 Tilles, British Fascist Anti-Semitism, pp. 150–152; Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! pp. 227–228. 109 The Blackshirt, 31 October 1936, p. 2. 110 The Blackshirt, 27 February 1937, p. 1. 111 Beckett, Fascist in the Family, pp. 204–217. 112 TNA KV2/1348/294a, ‘Extract from int. letter from Beckett to Chesterton’, 25 September 1945. 113 The Blackshirt, 10 April 1937, p. 2. 114 Mosley, The Greater Britain, pp. 152–153. 115 See Stephen Cullen, ‘The British Union of Fascists: The International Dimension’, Historian,Vol. 80 (2003), pp. 32–37. 116 The Blackshirt, 2 August 1935, p. 1. 117 The Blackshirt, 16 May 1936, p. 1. 118 The Blackshirt, 10 April 1937, p. 2. 119 Action, 7 May 1936, p. 11. 120 The Blackshirt, 10 April 1937, p. 2. 121 The Blackshirt, 21 February 1936, p. 4. 122 For an overview of the National Socialist League, see Holmes, Searching for Lord HawHaw, pp. 112–130. 123 Chesterton Collection E. 2, Letter from Oswald Mosley to A.K. Chesterton, 17 April 1937. 124 TNA KV2/1345/1K. 125 The Blackshirt, 23 January 1938, p. 1. 126 KV2/1345/1h, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Sanctuary Press Ltd., 18 March 1938. 127 Action, 26 March 1938, p. 2.

3 MY COUNTRY RIGHT AND WRONG Fascism after Mosley, 1938–1939

At the end of 1938, the BUF had managed to recoup some of the momentum it had lost after the Olympia affair, with official estimates placing its active membership at approximately 16,500.1 By this time, however, there were also an increasing number of factors martialing against the success of fascism in Britain. Chief among them was the increasing likelihood of a conflict with Germany after 1938, which brought one of the key contradictions of Mosley’s movement into sharp focus: despite claiming to be the true heir to Britain’s patriotic tradition, the BUF was literally and figuratively indebted to the regimes across the channel.2 In the long term, suspicions of disloyalty and subversion arising from these foreign associations would lead to the dissolution of Britain’s interwar fascist movement. In the short term, however, the crises in Europe provided opportunities for the extreme right to exploit public sentiment opposed to another war.3 There was some speculation, both within the extreme right and among its observers, as to why and under what circumstances Chesterton left the BUF. A rumour that he had resigned or been ejected due to ‘another alcoholic lapse’ was encouraged by Mosley in his discussions with party loyalists.4 The Security Service reported correctly in April 1938, however, that Chesterton had maintained his sobriety since returning from overseas and had in fact ‘resigned over what he termed the “misleading of leadership” ’.5 A more plausible rumour held that Chesterton resigned specifically in protest of Mosley’s attempts to steer the BUF away from anti-Semitism – an explanation that has been accepted in more than one historical account of interwar fascism.6 Chesterton’s gravitation towards other, more radically anti-Semitic organizations on the extreme right after 1938 lends credence to the notion that he had been stifled by Mosley and Francis-Hawkins’s attempt to cultivate a more moderate image.Yet the BUF of 1938 was hardly an unwelcoming party for anti-Semites, particularly those who subscribed to the view that Jewish interests were behind the drive for war.7 Had he wished to do so, Chesterton was

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given ample opportunity to criticize the BUF’s softened approach to anti-Semitism in a pamphlet, Why I Left Mosley, published and distributed by the National Socialist League in 1938. Rather than concern himself with matters of ideology or doctrine, however, Chesterton directed his criticisms entirely towards Mosley’s failures as a leader and the dysfunctional culture of the BUF’s upper ranks: I left because I became convinced that the BUF was playing about with a great idea and producing in its own organization a parody of Fascist thought and principle. I might have continued trying to galvanize the unhappy corpse into a semblance of life had I not come to the conclusion that it was not so much any particular coterie that stood in the way of revolutionary advance as blindspots in Mosley’s own mind.8 Expanding upon this critique, Chesterton suggested that his disillusionment with Mosley began in earnest following the reorganization of the party in March 1937. The most damning indictment of the BUF is its reckless irresponsibility towards the services of men who could have seen it through to victory – in organization, men like Forgan, Geuroult, Moore, Vincent; in propaganda, Joyce, Beckett, McNabb [sic], Probyn and many others who rendered loyal and distinguished service.9 Not coincidentally, Chesterton’s chief criticisms of ‘the Leader’ echoed those expressed by Beckett and Joyce, alleging Mosley had grown increasingly detached from reality and had surrounded himself with ‘comfortable men, shielding him from every impact of reality’.10 Chesterton gave no singular instance of when this tendency towards self-delusion had become apparent; later in life, however, he would entertain his wife and friends with anecdotes of Mosley’s foibles while campaigning in the 1930s: At a meeting in North Yorkshire, a hefty chap (K. thought he was a farm worker) rose to ask a question. He raised an accusing finger.‘Sir Osley Mosley, if Fascism comes to power, what’ll thou be lad? Dictator or summat?’ There was a brief uncomfortable silence. Then Mosley pulled himself together the bland reply, ‘I shall be whatever my country desires of me’.11 Had he been in a more introspective mood in 1938, Chesterton might have noted the deeper questions raised by his attacks on the BUF. Was the cult of personality, arbitrary decision-making and the suppression of dissent that he criticized in the BUF not an implicit feature of fascist leadership? Moreover, did the BUF’s lack of progress not reflect a broader antipathy towards authoritarianism or anti-Semitism among the British public? Rather than grapple with these discomforting prospects, Chesterton maintained in his own self-serving illusion, that the failures of the BUF

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were solely the product of poor leadership and did not indicate the dim prospects for fascism or anti-Semitism in Britain as a whole. The emergence in Britain of a multitude of small fascist, nationalist and antiSemitic organizations between 1938 and 1940 was in many ways a prelude to the numerous small and ideologically diverse parties grouped under the post-1945 extreme right.12 In the period leading up to internment, anti-Semitism and opposition to the war proved to be the unifying force that brought some of the small, squabbling factions of Britain’s extreme right together. Initially, it appeared that Chesterton was likely to join Joyce and Beckett’s National Socialist League, which made its public debut in the month following his resignation from the BUF.13 Although he addressed two meetings of the organization on Joyce’s invitation, however, Chesterton refrained from throwing in his lot with ‘the unpredictable little man’. He later recalled two separate incidents which hinted at Joyce’s growing infatuation with Nazi Germany: He brought the first of these meetings to an end by calling for the National Anthem to be sung. That done, he shouted the Nazi cry of triumph SIEG HEIL. . . . At the second meeting I expressed my concern at the growing danger of war. Joyce arose vehemently to dispute my contention. ‘There will be no war,’ he thundered. ‘I trust Adolf Hitler to see to that.’14 Chesterton claimed that he became further alienated from Joyce following the Sudetenland crisis of September 1938 and the British government’s subsequent pursuit of rearmament. ‘Something had happened to Joyce’s clarity of vision. He had become incapable of seeing that the country’s grotesque unpreparedness for war revealed during the Munich crisis was more than sufficient reason for the Government’s haste to rearm’.15 Prior to March 1939, however, Joyce and Chesterton’s views on the international situation were not so easily distinguished. On 1 October 1938, the day after the Munich agreement, they each appeared in an anti-war newspaper published by the British Council Against European Commitments.16 Both blamed the Jews – ‘resentful of Hitler’s refusal to allow them to run Germany’ – for leading the drive to war.17 The escalating persecution of Jews in Europe after 1938, accentuated by the outbreak of pogroms in Germany and Austria, prompted strong criticism from many parts of British society. With a few exceptions, however, the Jewish populations threatened by Nazi policy failed to elicit sympathy from members of the extreme right. Some went to absurd lengths to rationalize the violence transpiring in Europe within the framework of a Jewish conspiracy: one theory held that the killing of German official Ernst Von Rath (which sparked the Kristallnacht pogrom in November 1938) was an act of ritual murder, carried out at the behest of a secret Jewish enclave in London.18 For Chesterton, a more mundane conspiracy by a Jewish-controlled media sufficed to explain away stories of violence and persecution emanating from Germany. As before, his most frequent targets were Jewish figures in the public eye: he accused the Sunday Referee correspondent Geneviève Tabouis

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of printing lies about Hitler’s regime that had ‘kept Europe in a panic state’, as well as Marks and Spencer chairman Israel Moses Sieff, whom he accused of turning the Daily Mirror into a left-wing tabloid.19 Despite his ongoing attachment to fascist and anti-Semitic ideas, Chesterton’s opposition to the war after 1938 did not stem solely from pro-Nazi or pro-German sympathies. He felt a deep aversion to the prospect of another war and was haunted by memories of the Western Front: ‘For years after the first war it had been my recurring nightmare to walk over a carpet of dead bodies stretching to infinity. I was greatly concerned lest another generation should be called upon to furnish other such grisly carpets’.20 After 1945, Chesterton was driven to defend both Mosley and Joyce by ascribing to them the same idealistic motives for opposing the war. Of the latter he wrote: Joyce was not a pushing bounder, in search of personal political conquests. The man was an idolater, but he did not idolize himself. Instead, at first he worshipped Mosley, declaring him to be a man of infinitely greater capacity than either Hitler or Mussolini. When he became disillusioned about Mosley, he transferred the whole of his hero-worship to Adolf Hitler. Hence his plunge into the abyss.21 While this was a slight mischaracterization of the self-aggrandizing Joyce, it accurately summarized Chesterton’s own dilemma after 1938. Still basically committed to an ethos of heroic leadership, he now searched hopelessly for another charismatic figure capable of staving off Britain’s descent into war. He was quick to discover, however, that leaders of Mosley’s ilk were not in ready supply. One of the more pathetic incidents of Chesterton’s political career took place in December 1938 at an event announcing the launch of Lord Lymington’s New Pioneer, an anti-Semitic journal that appointed Beckett as its assistant managing editor. As reported in The Jewish Chronicle, Chesterton’s speech declared the discomfited Lymington – ‘a shortish man in the early forties, with a mildly pugnacious expression’ – to be ‘the man that England needed as a “national saviour” ’.22 A more promising candidate to supplant Mosley was Captain Archibald Ramsay, a Conservative MP whose anti-Semitic and anti-communist obsessions had been sparked by the Spanish Civil War.23 More than individual charisma or political acumen, Ramsay possessed a broad array of contacts, ranging from radicals like Arnold Leese to sympathetic conservative politicians, businessmen, aristocrats and eccentric fellow-travellers of Britain’s extreme right. In the months leading up to Britain’s declaration of war, Ramsay became the driving force behind a series of public meetings held by two overlapping anti-Semitic associations, the Nordic League and the Militant Christian Patriots. Chesterton’s appearances as a featured speaker at Ramsay’s meetings marked the nadir of his anti-Semitic vitriol and garnered him further notoriety as a ‘Jew baiter’. Documenting a meeting of the Militant Christian Patriots in June 1939, an article from The Jewish Chronicle wrote that ‘The wildest speech was made by A.K. Chesterton, who gave his delighted

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audience – mainly middle class – full value for their money by speaking (in Oxford tones) of “greasy little Jewish pornographers” ’.24 On at least one occasion, a meeting of the Nordic League held on 11 May 1939, Chesterton’s rhetoric strayed into violent incitement as he ‘suggested that using lamp-posts was the “the only way to deal with the Jew” ’.25 Shortly after delivering this speech, Chesterton became involved with the Right Club, a secretive organization whose membership was recorded by Ramsay in a leather-bound journal known as the ‘Red Book’.26 Chesterton appeared in Ramsay’s journal having paid the club’s membership fee and was listed as both a writer and speaker alongside two other ex-BUF members, Richard Findlay and Jock Houston.27 Besides promoting anti-Semitism and opposing the war, Ramsay hoped that his new venture would provide much-needed unity and coordination to the numerous ‘patriotic’ organizations that had sprung up alongside the BUF; the membership was thus highly varied, representing a cross-section of the various activists and fellow-travellers drawn to the extreme right during the previous decade. Chesterton’s involvement in the Right Club was not in itself significant, since it represented one of several anti-Semitic organizations that he patronized during the final, nomadic phase of his interwar career. As was the case with his contributions to Lymington’s New Pioneer, however, Chesterton’s association with Ramsay became more of a liability once the war broke out in September 1939. Chesterton’s final act of peacetime activism came in June 1939, when he took steps to form his own group known as British Vigil. There is little information available to determine what type of political organization this was to be, though the Security Service collated various snippets regarding its ideological orientation. One report suggested that it would simply be another anti-Semitic organization opposed to ‘admixture in the social and cultural history of the British people’. More significantly, it was suggested that Chesterton’s new venture would seek to ‘counter the propaganda for a Federal Union of Democratic countries which is now being conducted in certain quarters’.28 Since the Federal Union represented an early campaign to draw Britain into cooperation with Europe, this seemed to foreshadow many of Chesterton’s preoccupations with European integration after 1945. Like most of the microscopic extreme right organizations that branched off from the BUF, however, British Vigil was destined to poverty and obscurity. In July 1939, the Daily Worker provided Chesterton’s home address in Surrey as the group’s ‘headquarters’ and claimed that it had secured a former BUF member, John Clarke-Goldthorpe, to act as a secretary.29 Nothing more was reported of British Vigil, apart from a brief confirmation that it had been dissolved by Chesterton at the start of the war. The choice that confronted Chesterton in September 1939, between national duty and the ideological mission of interwar fascism, was not uncommon for members of the extreme right in Britain. Just as many of Chesterton’s BUF colleagues had shared his idealism and military background, so did many of those drawn into

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fascist, nationalist and anti-Semitic politics before 1939 share his earnest patriotism. As Richard Griffiths observed, The outbreak of the war was to produce tensions for all these people. For many, however, these tensions were simple to resolve. Now that we were at war, Hitler had become our enemy; beside that fact any other belief faded into existence. So it was that the majority of people who, before the war, had called for the suppression of Jews, now found themselves fighting valiantly, often with distinction, for the extinction of the Nazi evil. As his wife observed, Chesterton came to regard Nazism as an enemy ‘more in sorrow than in anger’.30 Yet there is no doubting his commitment to the fundamental principle of ‘My Country Right or Wrong’, nor his hostility towards the various peace movements which coalesced on the extreme right during the ‘phoney war’. As he had made clear after parting ways with Mosley, Chesterton regarded any association with pacifism or subversion as contrary to the principles that had drawn him to fascism in the first place.31 In hindsight, there is no question of Chesterton’s loyalty, though it is still uncertain why he was able to avoid the consequences that befell so many of his colleagues on the extreme right during the war. In his memoirs, Chesterton suggested that his involvement with Lord Lymington’s peace movement was what sparked the interest of the Security Service: The German radio stations, without asking my permission, would broadcast the articles in which I hit out at the war propagandists in my own country and America; but naturally suppressed the much harder hitting articles in which I condemned the invasion of Czechoslovakia. The ‘hard hitting’ piece to which Chesterton referred was an article published by The Weekly Review in March 1939 which denounced Hitler’s violation of the Munich agreement and criticized the response from Mosley’s peace movement: ‘the usual Fascist quarter, which has a gift for defending the things which may fairly be called indefensible’. Although this stance set Chesterton apart from the more ardent Nazi apologists on the extreme right, it did not signify a break with fascism in any meaningful sense. Chesterton continued to adhere to the view, set forth by Mosley in 1932, that peace in Europe could be secured by each nation pursuing its own variant of universal fascism. ‘The Czechs might well have produced their own Franco had the German Fuehrer not elected to fill the role himself ’.32 Although it prompted him to volunteer for the Officer’s Reserve, the invasion of Czechoslovakia caused only a momentary lapse in Chesterton’s political activity. If his involvement with the Nordic League is any indication, Hitler’s ‘amok run’ may even have served to intensify Chesterton’s public expressions of anti-Semitism, thus rendering him a more prominent figure in the eyes of the Security Service. Another

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liability was Chesterton’s ties to William Joyce, who, since September 1939, had begun his career as a propagandist for Nazi Germany.33 Despite never pursuing any kind of close relationship with either man, Chesterton was referred to by an informant in March 1940 as a ‘a personal friend of Sir O. Mosley, also Joyce, reputed commentator from the German Radio Station, Hamburg’.34 Chesterton’s name also appeared repeatedly in the list of activists associated with Ramsay’s Right Club, which became embroiled in subversive anti-war campaigns after its ostensible dissolution in September 1939. The Red Book itself was seized by authorities during the ‘Tyler Kent affair’ of 20 May 1940, which in turn sparked the arrests of Mosley and Ramsay the following week.35 When the internment process began, Chesterton had received his commission and was serving as Assistant Transport Officer with the Royal Army Service Corps in Liverpool.36 This was no guarantee of safety, however, since active military personnel were still subject to internment under Security Regulation 18b. Much to his chagrin, Chesterton’s distinguished record in the First World War was also insufficient to prove his loyalty. Decades later, he would bitterly recount how his return to the army in 1940 took place under a cloud of suspicion: Orders were evidently given for me to be treated with reserve. Secret documents which had come to me in the normal course of my duties as a training officer were diverted. When pip-squeak subalterns, who had never heard a shot fired in anger, were discussing troop movements or suchlike matters my appearance would lead to nudges and the drying up of the conversation. I had the feeling of being in the Army but not of it – an appalling sensation and an impossible situation.37 By his own account, these experiences drove Chesterton to confront his commanding officer and offered to resign if his name could not be cleared. Since the investigations of political subversion were conducted by the Home Office rather than military authorities, however, he was forced to wait ‘six deadly weeks’ before being cleared of suspicion on 18 June 1940.38 By the time that this clearance was provided, the 18b raids had already served their intended purpose of breaking up the BUF and providing a stern warning to other advocates of a negotiated peace. A decision to apply for service overseas, as an officer in the East Africa campaign in 1941, ensured that Chesterton was free from further surveillance until 1943, when official fears of fifth column activity had declined substantially. There are several factors that may explain why a high-profile activist like Chesterton was spared from the initial wave of arrests, which snared all but two of Mosley’s high-ranking associates. Baker provides two plausible explanations: that Chesterton received assistance from a former commanding officer, Colonel Walsh, and that his loyalty was proved beyond doubt by a letter rebuking an offer to work as a German propagandist.39 Another piece of intercepted correspondence, a gossiping letter sent from Chesterton to an ex-BUF colleague in December 1939,

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may also have helped convince authorities of his personal dissociation from both Mosley and Joyce: What are your views about Master William, now that we’re on that subject? I fear that words will not express my own surprise, disappointment and anger.When I hear him expressing his sympathy with the Southern Irish, the Moscow ‘Reds’ and the Indian separatists – all of them once the objects of his fanatical hatred – I begin to hope that he will live long enough to face a firing-squad.40 There is a strong possibility that Chesterton was not saved by his own actions but instead spared by a combination of luck and circumstance. Several studies of wartime internment have concluded that the process was often arbitrary and inconsistent, with the Home Office drawing upon outdated records regarding the BUF and other activist groups on the extreme right.41 Chesterton seems to have benefitted from these inaccuracies in more ways than one. During the course of their inquiries into Chesterton, MI5 correspondents repeatedly claimed that he had been ejected from the BUF due to alcoholism, a rumour that may have resurfaced due to Mosley and other detainees’ misleading testimony.42 A letter from Vernon Kell’s office dated 29 May 1940 claimed that ‘Chesterton’s main trouble in the past seems to have been caused by drink. It appears that he is now behaving himself normally, and his C.O. seems to think he has given up his former views’. In the view of the Security Service, therefore, Chesterton’s notoriety as a fascist was inextricable from his reputation as a drunkard. Following its investigation, therefore, the Special Branch suggested that Chesterton’s sobriety indicated his abstinence from further political activity: I beg to report, having made inquiries and interviewed a senior officer who is in daily touch with 2nd Lieut. Chesterton. He informed me that he is all that could be desired in an Army officer. He has given up all kinds of alcoholic drink and his views on the Fascist party have changed entirely.43 Despite the faults in the investigation process, the decision to clear Chesterton of suspicion was a sound one. His break with Mosley was absolute and his decision to suspend all political activities until peacetime stemmed from a genuine commitment to the war effort. The Security Service erred, however, in treating this suspension as evidence of a deeper ideological transformation. Chesterton, like many of those interred for their involvement with the BUF, saw no conflict between his fascist beliefs and his patriotism. By rejoining the armed forces, he was returning to the environment where many of the nationalistic and militaristic ideals proclaimed by British fascism had originated. It was thus premature to conclude, as one police informant did in June 1940, that Chesterton ‘was finished with fascism forever’.44

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Notes 1 G.C. Webber, ‘Patterns of Membership and Support for the British Union of Fascists’, Journal of Contemporary History,Vol. 19, No. 4 (1984), pp. 575–606, cf. 577, Table 1. 2 See Cullen, ‘The British Union of Fascists’, pp. 32–37. 3 See Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! pp. 261–286. 4 TNA KV2/1507/25a, S.B. report mentioning Beckett, 23 June 1938. 5 TNA KV2/1345/1k. 6 See for example: J.D. Brewer, ‘The British Union of Fascists: Sir Oswald Mosley and Birmingham’ (unpublished MSSc. Thesis, Birmingham University, 1975), pp. 172–189; Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! pp. 230–231. For Baker’s criticisms on this matter, see Ideology of Obsession, pp. 136–137. 7 Tilles, British Fascist Anti-Semitism, pp. 74–79. 8 A.K. Chesterton, Why I Left Mosley (London: National Socialist League, 1938), p. 1. 9 Chesterton, Why I Left Mosley, p. 17. 10 Chesterton, Why I Left Mosley, p. 19. 11 Chesterton Collection A. 26, Doris Chesterton, ‘Mosley in Yorkshire’ (2pp. manuscript notes), nd. ca. 1979. 12 Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, p. 170. 13 Holmes, Searching for Lord Haw-Haw, pp. 113–120. 14 USSC 238/7/9, A.K. Chesterton, ‘The Strange Case of William Joyce: Article Two’ (10pp. unpublished typescript), pp. 1–2. 15 USSC 238/7/9, p. 2. 16 Richard Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), pp. 53–54. 17 USSC 238/7/4, War Crisis, 1 October 1938, pp. 3–4. 18 TNA KV2/667/10a, Report on speech made by Capt. Ramsay, 8 March 1939. 19 TNA KV2/1345/1I, Extract from S.B. Report re a meeting held at Caxton Hall, 23 May 1939. 20 BNML, p. 94. 21 USSC 238/7/8, A.K. Chesterton, ‘The Strange Case of William Joyce: Article One’ (10pp. unpublished typescript), p. 9. 22 The Jewish Chronicle, 2 December 1938, p. 40. 23 Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted, pp. 77–89. 24 The Jewish Chronicle, 2 June 1939, pp. 20–21. 25 Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted, pp. 136–137. 26 Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted, pp. 300–314; Robin Saikia ed., The Red Book (London: Foxley Books, 2010), pp. 4–5, 80–81. For a full index of the Right Club members listed in the book, see pp. 97–129. 27 Saikia, The Red Book, pp. 60–62. 28 TNA KV2/1345/1k. 29 Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted, p. 49. 30 Chesterton Collection A. 13, p. 5. 31 Chesterton, Why I Left Mosley, pp. 3–4. 32 The Weekly Review, 23 March 1939, pp. 9–10. 33 Holmes, Searching for Lord Haw-Haw, pp. 176–177. 34 TNA KV2/1345/8a. 35 Tyler Kent was an American spy arrested for passing documents to Germany with the help of Anna Wolkoff, a member of Ramsay’s Right Club. For full details of the incident and its impact on internment, see Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 159–189; Jennifer Grant, ‘The role of MI5 in the Internment of British Fascists during the Second World War’, Intelligence and National Security,Vol. 24, No. 4 (2009), pp. 499–528. 36 TNA KV2/1345/8a. 37 BNML, p. 99. 38 BNML, p. 99. 39 Baker, Ideology of Obsession, pp. 192–193.

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4 0 TNA KV2/1345/1j, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Archie Findlay, 14 December 1939. 41 Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! pp. 305–307; A.W. Brian Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), pp. 180, 205–207. 42 TNA KV2/1345/1k, see reference from 28 March 1938. 43 TNA KV2/1345/10a, Special Branch report, 8 June 1940. 44 TNA KV2/1345/10a.

4 DRAWING ROOM FASCISM The After-Victory Group, 1943–1946

By avoiding internment, Chesterton was spared from the most direct and personally damaging repercussions that faced British fascists, peace advocates and Nazi sympathizers during the Second World War. Few of his friends and colleagues were as lucky, even those who shared his disillusionment with ‘the Leader’. In April 1940, Chesterton wrote to Archibald Findlay, Mosley’s former Director of Public Relations, favourably comparing his new position as an officer with his time in the BUF:‘The B.U. has no monopoly of intrigue and racketeering. But an Army officer at least can rely upon a certain minimum of considerate treatment, which is in refreshing contrast to the lot of a Blackshirt officer’.1 The following month, Findlay was arrested and sent to Brixton Prison alongside most of the other fascists who had exited Mosley’s company in 1937. Beckett, who drifted away from Joyce in late 1938 but remained active in the peace movement, was arrested in May 1940. The same fate befell Macnab, who had assisted Joyce during and after his move to Germany.2 Chesterton did not publicly express his views on internment until returning from overseas in 1943. It would later become clear, however, that he shared many of the fascist internees’ outrage at having been ‘hounded at the insistence of men who had clamoured for war and at the same time taken care that we should lack every means to wage it’.3 To some extent, Chesterton also held to the view he had expressed as a BUF propagandist, that liberal-democratic Britain was ill prepared to fight a ‘totalitarian war’.4 Many years later, he would recall a sense of uncertainty that arose while preparing for overseas service in 1941: ‘The English way of life may be much more pleasant than the German, but in the grim modern struggles for survival the comfortable axiom “sufficient unto the day” is certainly no insurance for victory’.5 Unlike Mosley, Joyce and the handful of die-hard Nazi sympathizers, however, he derived no pleasure from the prospect of a decadent Britain being brought to her knees by the German war machine. His decision to apply for service

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overseas in 1941 was partly informed by a desire to serve on the front lines of the Empire he had fought for in 1915, rather than languish in the mundane duties of the RASC. The last time I wore uniform and came under fire was in the streets of Johannesburg during the great armed revolt of 1922. Perhaps, therefore, with the world again in flames, it seemed natural that I should return to that fierce land wherein so often from my earliest years I had heard the thunder of armies on the march. . . . Having in the pride of my youth been trumpeted to battle by Rupert Brooke, it went ill with my disposition to march to the pipings of Beverley Nicholls, or Godfrey Winn, or the many apparent eunuchs of the B.B.C. In other words, I aspired to do my own share of the war in a male world.6 In his incomplete memoir of the East Africa campaign, All Aboard for Addis, Chesterton also confessed that the continuing fallout from his involvement with Mosley and the anti-war movement was another incentive to seek a deployment outside of Britain. I do not shirk the possibility that I may also have been influenced by a desire to leave England for a time in order to see her from a distance, readjust many of my ideas, and rid myself of a good deal of the irritation caused by a study of the conduct of her affairs during many years past. Bound up with all this, I must confess, was doubtless an inclination to leave behind me what had threatened to become a private and personal hoodoo. The opportunity for Chesterton to leave England arose in September 1940, when he responded to a request for officers with experience in a tropical climate to assist in the reconquest of British Somalialand. Having previously been deemed ineligible for infantry service by the War Office due to his advanced age, Chesterton was now accepted as a veteran of the first East Africa campaign. In January 1941, after several false starts, he set sail for South Africa aboard the Winchester Castle, a converted mail ship which arrived at Cape Town in mid-February.7 His unit was transferred to a smaller vessel en route to Mombasa before boarding a troop train bound for Nairobi.8 Upon arriving in Egypt, Chesterton was assigned work as a storekeeper, a role considered suitable for someone who had already conducted his share of front-line fighting in the previous war. As in his previous posting, Chesterton was dissatisfied by the sedentary nature of this position and immediately requested a transfer up the line to Thika, the city that served as the British forces’ advanced headquarters.9 Although he acknowledged the environmental and physical challenges facing his fellow soldiers, Chesterton concluded that ‘the hardships of the Somaliland and Abyssinian campaigns were not one tenth as severe as the German East African campaign had been a quarter of a century earlier’.10 In more than one respect, his

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conduct during the war reflected a desire to recapture some of the romanticism and heroic idealism he associated with the Great War. As a BUF propagandist, Chesterton had inveighed repeatedly against the decadent and effeminate values of British liberalism. Now back in uniform, he leapt at the opportunity to do a ‘man’s job’ and fulfil the ambitions of a true soldier: ‘The others were happy, as I suppose they had a right to be, if their ambition was to serve as store men. Besides they became Majors and Captains and prospered exceedingly in the land’.11 Having returned to war in order to reclaim the ‘warrior virtues’ of his youth – and perhaps seeking some form of redemption or renewal from political failure – Chesterton also was disturbed by the lapses in discipline and comradeship among other officers that seemed to undermine his military ideals: ‘the man who is willing to accept all the privileges of commissioned rank (and they are many and real) while being unwilling to shoulder its obligations constitutes a menace to any army and ought not to be tolerated therein’.12 Alongside these reflections on the need for military discipline, the war also reacquainted Chesterton with the semi-egalitarian ‘trench socialist’ ideals that had spurred his interest in fascism. Some difference in the lot of officers and men is doubtless inevitable: to herd them together hugger-mugger would merely be to cause acute embarrassment to both. But it always seems to me that the dissimilarity of their living conditions is out of all true proportion, indeed it harks back to the mediaeval world of privilege. An officer is superior only in his military function; why, then, should he often be better fed than his own men?13 In light of Chesterton’s political ventures after 1945, the most significant feature of his Second World War was its imperial aspect. Though it took place in the context of a war against the fascist powers, the war in East Africa took place in a distinctly colonial setting and, like Chesterton’s previous war, called for a defence of the Empire. The recollections of the campaign in All Aboard for Addis echoed aspects of 19th-century colonial ventures into the ‘dark continent’: long journeys through harsh and inhospitable landscapes (‘safaris sixteen thousand miles in length’), interactions with friendly but culturally exotic native tribespeople, and even time spent trekking with the ‘Camel Corps’, a specialized military unit established in the First World War to defend colonial territory.14 In a less abstract sense, the war reinforced Chesterton’s sense of identification with the people of Britain’s overseas empire and the colonial system as a whole. He was even forthcoming with praise for the many ‘native’ soldiers and support personnel who aided in driving the Italian army out of Somaliland and Abyssinia, penning an account of their bravery that was broadcast by the BBC in November 1941.15 Chesterton’s second campaign through Africa came to an end when his health collapsed as a result of malaria and gastric illness, forcing him to return to England in early 1943.16 These problems were compounded by another, final relapse into alcoholism which was triggered when a fellow officer spiked Chesterton’s drink. By the time that he recovered and returned to civilian life, Britain’s fortunes in

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the war had improved markedly due to its alliance with the United States and the Soviet Union. The political environment to which Chesterton returned was thus no longer gripped by a ‘fifth column scare’.17 Most 18b internees had long since been released, with the exception of high-profile figures like Mosley, Beckett and Ramsay. As Chesterton was soon to discover, however, official suspicion and public hostility towards ex-BUF members was still widespread. In March 1943, he applied for a position as a sub-editor for the BBC but was rejected when a background check revealed his associations with fascism.18 Unable to secure work in London, he was forced to travel north in May 1943 to join the staff of the Sheffield Telegraph as a sub-editor.19 A month after assuming this role, Chesterton began corresponding with Alfred Norris, an active serviceman and ex-BUF member, expressing his views on the political situation. Although his enthusiasm for the cause remained intact, Chesterton took a dim view of the scattered crop of extreme right organizations that had persisted through the war. These included the English National Association (ENA), a successor to the pre-war British People’s Party which Chesterton had briefly patronized in 1939.20 The financial backing for both of these ventures was provided by Hastings William Sackville Russel, the 12th Duke of Bedford and formerly the Marquess of Tavistock. Bedford was an eccentric yet influential presence in the extreme right both before and after 1945, whose Christian pacifist beliefs drove him to support various fascist and anti-Semitic campaigns. Like the other aristocratic fellow-travellers of the interwar movement, Russel was spared from internment despite being deeply implicated in campaigns for a negotiated peace in 1940.21 Under surveillance during the remainder of the war, he continued to support various anti-Semitic, propeace ventures while promoting economic and political reforms inspired by C.H. Douglas’s social credit theories. In his letters to Norris, Chesterton was particularly scathing of the economic ideas being promoted through the ENA by Ben Greene, an ex-Labour candidate and pacifist who had been interned due to his ties with fascism.22 Despite this commitment to winning the war, and the moribund state of British fascism, Chesterton remained firmly committed to the radical positions he had advocated as a member of the BUF: I just don’t get the idea as to what men like you and I – who combine within our political philosophy the motifs of nationalism and socialism – have to do with all the High Tory and Economic Liberal stuff that is being pushed out these days. I have a great dislike of crankery and a greater dislike of political futility and I think it best to plough a lone furrow until something emerges which has at least a dog’s chance of doing some good. In any case we have got to win the war first, before we can get on with the winning of the rest.23 Chesterton’s political aspirations were stymied by the nature of his employment in Sheffield, where a demanding schedule left him little time for other pursuits. In August 1943, he resigned to take up a role as assistant editor at the Southport

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Guardian. Though the paper did not itself provide an output for political writing, the position allowed Chesterton to resume his contributions to various right-wing journals. The tenor of this freelance work gave another revealing insight into his continuing sympathies with fascism. On 19 August 1943, less than a month after Mussolini’s resignation, Chesterton appeared in The Patriot attacking critics of the new Italian government under Marshall Badoglio. We are fighting for the survival of our nation, and for the hope of handing down some chance of peace to those who follow us, but there are others – and they are not to be found anywhere near the fighting line – who are quite indifferent to these vital matters, for their one object is to bring the entire world back into the web of international control. It would naturally suit these interests better to deal with a political tout than with a King and Marshal of Italy.24 Articles of this kind were received with interest by the Security Service, who had prudently resumed their surveillance of Chesterton following his return from overseas. It quickly became apparent that the political transformation ascribed to him by previous reports had not taken place, though Chesterton’s letters to Norris reassured authorities of his loyalty. ‘In spite of the fact that Chesterton is still obviously a Fascist’, stated one report from July 1943, ‘I do not think he would be likely to help the Germans in the event of an invasion’.25 While Chesterton was not considered a high-risk target, he remained valuable to the Security Service as a conduit to other individuals suspected of undermining the war effort. On 12 August 1943 he attended a small gathering of right-wing activists at a pub in Fleet Street. Chesterton’s old friend and colleague, Rex Tremlett, was among those present to ‘discuss the growth of anti-Semitism and the frequency with which this sentiment is met with in the Armed Forces’.26 As an early exile of the BUF,Tremlett had been at little risk of internment but remained known to the authorities as a fascist sympathizer throughout the war.27 Two other attendees, Major Harry Edmonds and Edward Godfrey, were involved with other fascist and anti-Semitic grouplets operating around London. Edmonds was the founder of the Constitutional Research Association, a secretive anti-Semitic organization launched in August 1941, while Godfrey was involved with the English National Association.28 Only one former internee was present at the meeting: John ClarkeGoldthorpe of the National Socialist League and Chesterton’s British Vigil.29 As one of many gatherings by fascists and ex-BUF members conducted during the later years of the war, this meeting was not significant in the wider history of the extreme right. For Chesterton, however, it represented the first serious step back into political activism since September 1939. Small, semi-clandestine meetings of this kind also offer some useful insights into the conditions of the extreme right in the period between internment and the end of the war. The situation bore similarities to that which Chesterton had

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encountered after leaving the BUF in 1938: a series of small, overlapping factions which, in the absence of clear leadership, were bound together by ideological shibboleths like anti-Semitism or money reform. There were a number of important differences, however, compared to the period before the war. Most obvious was the increased need for discretion and secrecy, which meant that the extreme right was now forced to hold small private gatherings rather than public rallies. A subtler indication of the extreme right’s efforts to remain under the radar were the innocuous or respectable sounding titles adopted by its various organizations – for example, Edmonds’s Constitutional Research Association, or Chesterton’s proposal for a ‘British Officers’ Freedom League’ in April 1943.30 This tactic, which had developed among anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi groups back in the 1930s, now became standard practice for those aiming to avoid public and governmental scrutiny.31 For obvious reasons, the most pressing issue for those hoping to rekindle the spirit of British fascism in 1943 was the war. Consistent with the views he had expressed to Alfred Norris after returning from overseas, Chesterton was convinced that any major political campaign would need to be delayed until after an allied victory. In addition to his pragmatic reasoning, Chesterton was opposed to calls for a negotiated peace on ideological grounds, as he explained to his former BUF colleague J.F.C. Fuller on 2 July 1943: For my own part, the bitterest pill of all was the defection of Adolf Hitler. I know, of course, the growing power of the war party over here, but they could scarcely have prospered without Hitler’s enthusiastic aid. He was the only man in the world who could have commanded peace.32 Chesterton’s imperial focus provided another compelling reason to support an Allied total victory, since the fate of British colonies in South East Asia was now tethered to the outcome of war in the Pacific. In the same letter to Fuller, he described an encounter with a peace activist in London: ‘[he] seemed quite upset when I enquired into the precise processes whereby the Japs were to be negotiated out of Burma’.33 This stance quickly became a source of friction between Chesterton and other activists committed to extricating Britain from the war, whom he described to Fuller as a ‘queer army of cranks . . . espousing a travesty of the cause that was once ours’.34 Chesterton’s correspondence with Norris broke off after September 1943, after he called for right-wing peace activists to collaborate with Fenner Brockway’s Independent Labour Party.35 In the same month, a Security Service informant quoted Chesterton’s blunt dismissal of the fascist and pacifist movements hoping to negotiate with Germany: ‘Anybody who is pro-German is a spiritual traitor, and I won’t touch them with a barge pole after the war is over’.36 Another looming source of conflict between Chesterton and other fascist activists was the prospect of Mosley’s return. In June 1943, he had penned an open letter to Winston Churchill protesting against Mosley’s and Beckett’s continued imprisonment. Though much of the letter was given over to attacking the Home

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Secretary Herbert Morrison, it also contained a defence of Mosley’s decision to continue his peace campaigns after the declaration of war: it is one of his [Mosley’s] weaknesses that he habitually exaggerates his own influence and imagines himself to be swaying the thoughts of millions where only a few thousand are listening to him . . . he firmly believed he could carry the people with him along the only road that appeared to offer them the chance of survival. As events have turned, he was mistaken both as to his own capacity and as to his country’s incapacity, but they were the mistakes of an honest man.37 As had been the case with Joyce, Chesterton failed to appreciate the extent to which his past (and in Beckett’s case future) associates had dabbled in subversion. His diagnosis of the former BUF leader’s weaknesses was essentially accurate, however, recognizing a profound egotism that continued to warp Mosley’s perceptions of the political landscape. Chesterton’s own weakness – a stubborn and often selfcomforting idealism – did not prevent him from realizing that Mosley’s reputation had been irrevocably damaged by recent events and that a genuinely new movement would be necessary in the war’s aftermath. This view put Chesterton at odds with the various ‘die-hards’ who hoped for a full-blown revival of the BUF and envisioned a temporary movement that would merely prepare the ground for the triumphant return of ‘the Leader’. In 1943, several figures had already come to the attention of the authorities for planning along these lines. Another ex-BUF journalist, George Green, held a private meeting on 29 August to discuss forming a committee that would ‘reorganize the whole of the British Union elements’ and oversee the movement ‘until such time as Sir Oswald Mosley could resume the leadership’.38 Green’s lofty aspirations for a revived BUF belied both the material and political difficulties facing British fascists in 1943. Besides the ever-present problems of funding and internal unity, any organization or individual suspected of ties with fascism was liable to incur the wrath of the British public. This was starkly demonstrated in November 1943, when Mosley and his wife were released from prison under house arrest. Chesterton later disparaged the public outcry against Mosley’s release as an episode of mass hysteria that distracted from more pressing matters related to the war: The ordinary member of the mob, who long ago handed his brains into the keeping of demagogues, may be forgiven for thinking there was something profoundly sinister in bringing out of a jail a sick and broken man to place him under house arrest, under circumstances in which he was made powerless even to issue a single word in his own defence.39 Contrary to Chesterton’s view, it was precisely those ‘vast issues of the war’ that made Mosley such a figure of hatred, particularly among those who had fought or otherwise suffered as a result of the conflict with Nazi Germany. Despite his

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well-publicized rift with Mosley, Chesterton was still under scrutiny by the authorities and a diligent anti-fascist press. On 20 August, an article in the Daily Worker drew attention to Chesterton’s freelance contributions to Truth and The Weekly Review as evidence of an emerging fascist clique in Fleet Street.40 The Daily Worker’s depiction of Chesterton as a ‘late crony and confederate of “Haw Haw” William Joyce’ was particularly threatening, since the ‘traitor broadcaster’ was still a reviled presence on British airwaves. Chesterton responded to this charge by launching a libel case against the Daily Worker and The Jewish Chronicle, which reprinted the claim that he had worked with Joyce ‘in running the notorious National Socialist League’.41 This was the first of many legal battles waged by Chesterton against any publication that threatened to tarnish his reputation, and an example of a strategy deployed elsewhere by extreme right activists, who utilized the peculiar nature of English libel law to defend themselves against accusations of disloyalty or violent intent. Pursuing such action came with its own risks, however, particularly for those called as witnesses. In September 1943, Chesterton wrote to former NSL member John Clarke-Goldthorpe, who was then enrolled as a medical student, asking him to testify in his libel case. Goldthorpe’s response highlighted the precarious circumstances for those tied to fascism before the war: ‘To do as you request would be to take a 90% chance of smashing something I have built up; and would ruin, perhaps irretrievably, my own future and that of my wife and children. I would require a mighty cause indeed for me to risk that’.42 Chesterton would eventually receive printed apologies from the Daily Worker and The Jewish Chronicle.43 Despite its error in describing Chesterton’s relationship with Joyce, however, the original report was entirely justified in its description of the two ‘suspicious publications’ in question. The editorial staff of The Weekly Review, which printed 13 of Chesterton’s articles in 1943 alone, included Rex Tremlett and R.D. Jebb, a former branch inspector for the BUF who had inherited the position of his late father-in-law Hilaire Belloc.44 Although its professed political and economic leanings were distributist rather than fascist, The Weekly Review had shown sympathies with the extreme right prior to the war. Besides Belloc’s own considerations of the ‘Jewish question’, the journal had featured advertisements for Lord Lymington’s New Pioneer, mounted a defence of the Franco regime in Spain and attributed the outbreak of the war to ‘international finance’.45 Truth, the other paper implicated by the Daily Worker, had a similarly chequered history. In the lead-up to the war, under the direction of Conservative propagandist Joseph Ball, it had launched an anti-Semitic smear campaign against Leslie Hore Belisha, a Jewish Labour MP and outspoken critic of appeasement.46 The editor and chairman of Truth between 1940 and 1953 was Collin Brooks, a journalist and former personal secretary to Lord Rothermere the owner of the Daily Mail.47 Though he never joined the BUF, Brooks’s extensive diaries show that he developed more than a passing interest in British fascism. Upon learning of the Daily Mail’s outpouring of support for Mosley in January 1934, he had remarked that he was ‘too much of a democrat to be a Fascist, though too much of a disciplinarian to be a democrat in any but the vague Walt Whitman sense’.48 Although

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he expressed dismay at the ‘Un-English’ displays of brutality at Olympia, Brooks met with Mosley on several occasions between 1935 and 1939. The last of these meetings, a private dinner held by Rothermere in June 1939, left him contemplating the prospect of a fascist coup: ‘In that event’, he told his daughter, ‘Tom Mosley will either make me governor of the Central Bank, or hang me for not displaying his colours in the early days of the struggle’.49 Aside from detailing his personal and professional dalliances with fascism, Brooks’s diaries also betray the extent of his anti-Semitism. After attending a BUF meeting in the East End in 1936, he lamented the Daily Mail’s unwillingness to report ‘that it was the anti-Jewish references that drew the cheers . . . because they thought their Jewish advertisers would be offended. This is the freedom of the Press. Here in little is the justification of Fascism’. Unlike some of the other upper-class anti-Semites in his social milieu, Brooks was decidedly unimpressed by Archibald Ramsay: ‘I took tea with him once and found him the conventional anti-Jew fanatic . . . a rather crazy man was my summing up of him.’50 Even so, Brooks’s continuing fixation on the ‘Jewish question’ after the outbreak of war was made readily apparent in his editorials for Truth, one of which was quoted by The Jewish Chronicle in July 1942: It is of course possible that the British may suddenly realize that the root cause of anti-Semitism is Semites. Mr. Israel Cohen’s suggested method of dealing with Britons who may not relish the numbers or influence of the race to which they have given tolerant shelter is suppression. That is brutal. Expulsion would be more kind. The question of who is to expel whom might be left to the majority voice of the race which happens to be native to this land.51 Brooks’s invective was remarkably similar to that deployed by Chesterton during the East End campaigns, and following the initial exchange of letters, the two men found themselves in both political and professional collaboration. By October 1943, their correspondence had moved to the subject of fascism and the possibilities of a new movement that would bring about ‘national regeneration’ after the war. Although he had privately expressed admiration for the BUF’s leader in the past, Brooks shared Chesterton’s belief that Mosley was not suited to oversee such a project: My own emotion towards ‘O.M.’ whose hospitality I occaisionally [sic] enjoyed, was always coloured by the political instability of his early career. The swing from Toryism to Labour, from Labour to the New Party, from the New Party to an English Plagiarism of Fascism never seemed to me to imply a right psychology for a great National regenerator. I always consider that he probably blocked the way for the genuine article.52 Brooks’s depiction of British fascism as an ‘English plagiarism’ of Mussolini’s doctrine recalled his ambivalent attitude towards the BUF in the 1930s. Particularly

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when compared to Chesterton, he gave the appearance of having being a conservative sympathizer with the extreme right in the 1930s, rather than a grassroots radical. At the time they began corresponding in the early 1940s, however, there was a pronounced ideological convergence between Chesterton, the disaffected fascist revolutionary, and Brooks, the self-professed ‘right-wing Tory’. In a diary entry from 1938, Brooks had expressed hope that if Britain survived another war with Germany, ‘she may at long last adopt a sane standard of life and be herself properly led. The reign of the road house and the cocktail bar and the cheap American cinema may be ended. We may return to real values, and the Faith that was once in us’.53 Along with his preoccupation with cultural degeneracy, national decline and Jewish conspiracies, therefore, Brooks shared Chesterton’s ongoing commitment to the leadership principle: a belief in the necessity of a heroic figure (other than Mosley) who would oversee Britain’s cultural and spiritual regeneration in the aftermath of the war. Chesterton’s correspondence with Brooks continued throughout the early part of 1944, while he oversaw the production of Leopard Valley, a play based on his experiences in Africa that was staged in Southport in February 1944. Though the show was a modest success, Chesterton continued to struggle in balancing his political ventures with the need for financial and personal stability. In June 1944, he was offered a position at the Birmingham Post but was once again denied when his prior affiliation with the BUF came to light. Unable to rejoin his wife in London, Chesterton was also engaged in an ongoing affair with a G.P.O. telephonist from Liverpool.54 This likely influenced his decision to leave Southport for Merseyside in early July to take up a position as sub-editor for the Evening Express.55 As his search for steady employment in London continued, Chesterton maintained a prolific sideline as a contributor to The Weekly Review. Though he was given considerable leeway by sympathetic editors like Tremlett and Brooks, writing for more mainstream publications compelled Chesterton to refine the fascist and anti-Semitic fare of the previous decade into a more palatable format. Back in August 1943, the Special Branch had reported that Chesterton had begun reviewing several of his pamphlets for the BUF ‘with the idea of re-issuing them when the war is over’. As he explained to a fellow Weekly Review contributor in March 1944, however, it was possible to put forward subtler forms of political agitation while the war was still in progress: The great secret of writing for such a journal, I find, is always to remember that they only come a part of the way with people like you and me. . . . This means that one has to keep within fairly narrow limits, besides toning down everything one writes, but it is worth it.56 Chesterton’s first independent effort as a propagandist since 1939, Britain’s Alternative, was adapted from a three-part series that ran in The Weekly Review throughout May 1944. The thesis of the pamphlet was a refined version of the conspiratorial corporatism that had underpinned so many of Chesterton’s articles before the war.

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In economic terms, therefore, it amounted to little more than a redressing of Mosley’s Greater Britain, albeit stripped of its overt references to dictatorship and Jewish finance: Limits would be set to private enterprise – the limits of the imperial i­ nterest – but within those well-defined boundaries there would be every freedom for the individual to use his own initiative. . . . Poverty amidst plenty would vanish. The class-war would be liquidated by steady work and progressive rewards, and its prophets and fomenters, together with a host of petty planners and bureaucrats, absorbed into productive industry. Britain would live again.57 The lack of originality and elasticity in Chesterton’s economic mindset was woefully apparent. He dismissed the public response to the Beveridge Report as an ‘astonishing mob welcome’, and the report’s recommendations as ‘the courtship and impending union of finance-capitalism and socialism in the bonds of unholy matrimony’.58 As had been the case before the war, however, Chesterton showed more sophistication in addressing the international developments relating to the war and its impact on British interests. In particular, the growing importance of the United States reaffirmed Chesterton’s long-standing concerns that an epochal shift was taking place in international politics at the expense of Britain’s status as a world power. In July 1943, he criticized government plans for Anglo-American cooperation in colonial affairs, arguing that Britain’s foreign territories in Africa and South East Asia were to be effectively handed over to the United States: it does not require explicit statements such as this to enable one to read the writing on the wall.The Empire is to be handed over on the installment plan, and the promise that we shall retain administrative control will be no more than the shadow to compensate us for the loss of the substance.59 Aside from the alarming prospect of America usurping Britain’s strategic possessions, Chesterton was also concerned about the more subtle economic ramifications of US expansion: ‘The administrative details will be ours, but the effective masterdom will be vested in the hands of the greatest money-lending power, and the colonies will very soon learn to recognize and obey their master’s voice’.60 As it had before the war, Chesterton’s fear of political domination by Jewish finance fed his concerns about international trade. Amidst calls for Britain to revive its export trade, which had suffered as a result of the war effort, Chesterton argued that the Empire should instead pursue self-sufficiency to avoid the ‘deluge’ of competition threatened by the growing industrial might of the United States and China.61 Aside from preserving the Empire, the strongest incentive for cooperation between the extreme right and conservatives was fear of a left-wing uprising, a prospect that remained threatening during the war despite the alliance between Britain and the Soviet Union. Responding to the by-election victories of two socialist candidates

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in January 1944, Chesterton warned that a genuine ‘bolshevist’ element was rekindling itself in Britain. ‘Let us boldly square up to the truth, which is that revolution is in the air’, he declared to Weekly Review readers in 1944, further warning that British conservatives were ill equipped to meet this new challenge from the radical left. Since the chief motive of Conservatives is still its dedication to big-scale capitalism and the financial rampage, it is manifestly incapable of putting forward what the age demands – an honest alternative to the existing system. There must be new men, new machinery and, above all, a new social concept which will embody and bring up-to-date the old social truths. In other words, the counter-revolution must be itself revolutionary.62 In both its rhetoric and implications, this passage bore a striking similarity to fascist propaganda from the 1930s, invoking the same notions of national revolution and transcendent social reorganization that had been used by the BUF. Despite this, Chesterton’s proposals for an ‘honourable solution along distributist-corporativemoney reform lines’ bore only a vague resemblance to his outright calls for revolution and dictatorship in the previous decade. Chesterton also acknowledged that Britain’s survival in the post-war era would depend on its ability to counter the ‘stampede to the Left’ that would inevitably lead to the loss of its empire. Despite his ongoing affinity for the radical, third-way ideals of national socialism, therefore, Chesterton’s activism after 1943 was increasingly directed towards a conservative audience liable to support the anti-communist, pro-Empire aspects of his agenda. Chesterton’s employment woes were finally ended on 31 July 1944, when Brooks offered him the position of Editorial Assistant for Truth.63 Much to the gratification of his wife, the position allowed Chesterton to return to London and pursue a ‘9 to 5’ existence that had been absent throughout much of his married life.64 In addition to a steady income, the posting also placed minimal restrictions on his freelance work, thus serving as an ideal foundation for a return to serious political activism. By mid-September 1944, Chesterton had transferred to London and commenced work for Truth. Almost immediately upon returning to the capital, he began meeting with Brooks and a group of other activists to form a committee known as the After-Victory Group; this organization would in turn provide the basis for a short-lived political party known as the National Front.65 As it never moved significantly beyond the planning stage, historical accounts of Britain’s fascist and extreme right movements have largely dismissed this venture as insignificant and easily compromised by informants.66 The latter appellation is well justified, since despite Chesterton and Brooks’s attempts to keep a low profile, the group’s activities were well documented by the Security Service and an undercover informant from the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Despite its abortive nature, however, the significance of the After-Victory Group in Chesterton’s career is still notable, as it represented his first real attempt to found a mass political movement following the collapse of the BUF. The manner in which this movement arose and

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disintegrated also indicated several important themes that would recur throughout Chesterton’s career after 1945: the internal tension between radicals and moderates, the ongoing efforts to collaborate with (or infiltrate) the mainstream right, and the material necessities for maintaining an effective organization. The initial impetus for the After-Victory Group came from Brooks, who claimed to have been contacted by unnamed figures within British industry promising financial support if he could build a viable movement.67 It was for this reason that the planning of the National Front attracted immediate interest from the Security Service, who correctly anticipated the importance of stable financial backing to the extreme right after the war.68 Chesterton discussed his initial plans for the group at a private meeting on 21 September between himself, Brooks, Ben Greene (of the English National Association) and Barney Seale, a sculptor whose studio provided the venue.69 Although all of the attendees were committed to establishing some form of nationalistic, anti-Semitic movement within Britain, it was not yet clear what methods this movement would pursue, and whether it would constitute a formal party along the lines of the BUF. In keeping with his earlier views while working for Mosley, Chesterton placed an inordinate amount of faith in the public’s receptiveness to anti-Semitic messaging and the potential for well-timed propaganda to arouse supporters. His proposed campaign in this instance was the mass distribution of leaflets and chalked slogans to be commenced on the day that Britain’s victory over Hitler was declared. As an example of such a slogan, Chesterton offered the following ‘NOW GERMANY IS DEFEATED, HANG CHURCHILL AND DEAL WITH THE JEWS’. Later, having perhaps realized how poorly such sentiments would be received by a public celebrating the Allied victory, Chesterton offered a different (yet equally repugnant) slogan: ‘NOW FOR THE JEWS’.70 Besides Chesterton’s ongoing enthusiasm for ‘chalking and whitewashing campaigns’, more concrete ideas arose from Greene’s suggestion that Archibald Ramsay (who was still yet to be released from internment) could be brought into the fold as a potential leader for the movement after the war. Precise questions of leadership remained open at this stage, although the ideological importance placed on a leader-figure gave some indication of group’s fascist or authoritarian leanings, as did the consensus among the meeting attendees that the country was waiting for a figure like Ramsay to harness an underlying strain of anti-Semitic, nationalistic fervour that would be unleashed after the war.71 The first official meeting of the National Front was held on 24 November 1944, bolstering the group’s potential membership with an array of former BUF members and sympathetic figures. Notable new arrivals included Rex Tremlett, General J.F.C. Fuller and Lord Portsmouth (formerly Viscount Lymington of the New Pioneer), as well as George Green and Ian Waverly Girvan, both of whom were involved in forming another organization known as the Independent Nationalists. ‘Light entertainment’ at the meeting was provided by the music-hall comedian (and later political activist) Gillie Potter, who was employed at the time as a radio propagandist for the BBC. As the circle of extreme right activists and fellow-travellers involved with the After-Victory Group

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expanded, the challenge of unifying different strains within the movement became more pressing. Some of the new additions to the movement suggested that Chesterton viewed the immediate task of forming a unified front as more important than ideological consensus. Having expressed a strong aversion to dealing with peace activists the previous year, he was now resolved to work alongside the likes of Green and Girvan, both of whom were resolutely ‘pro-German’ in their attitude to the war.72 The movement’s security was also a matter of growing concern for Brooks and Chesterton, who were wary of drawing attention from the Home Office.73 Unbeknownst to both men, the ongoing surveillance of ex-BUF members, coupled with the alertness of anti-fascists, made their organization’s exposure a foregone conclusion. In addition to preserving the group’s privacy, Brooks hoped to avoid the failures in leadership that, in his view, were responsible for the BUF’s collapse. Rather than rush to appoint a leader from their own ranks, several members of the National Front anticipated that the question of leadership would resolve itself naturally after the war. A letter from Rex Tremlett to Chesterton in December 1943 expressed hope that a new leader would arise from the ranks of ex-servicemen: I feel with you that not only is a large popular movement after the war most necessary but that it will inevitably rise, led we will hope, by some as yet unknown ex-serviceman with the spark that O.M. [Mosley] once had before it was debased by the squalid minds of his mouthpieces.74 This idea held currency among several members of the National Front including Brooks, who speculated that the group’s leader would likely be drawn from the armed forces.75 Chesterton similarly envisioned a candidate emerging from ‘the 8th Army or the 14th . . . someone like a General of the Commandos’. Brooks stressed that the movement would need to avoid a leader in the vein of Mosley, Hitler or Mussolini, as such a figurehead ‘would never go down in this country’.76 In April 1945, he went so far as to speculate that Field Marshall Montgomery could be useful to the National Front ‘if he were sympathetic’.77 Many of the British fascists who endured or avoided internment vested their hopes for a new movement in soldiers coming back from overseas. Harry Edmonds, the head of the Constitutional Research Association, informed Chesterton that returning servicemen would be driven into patriotic national socialist movements when they became disillusioned by government policy after the war.78 Jeffery Hamm, a dyed-in-the-wool Mosley acolyte, was particularly proactive in this regard; in October 1944, he infiltrated and commandeered the British Ex-­Serviceman’s League, transforming it from a pension-rights group into a pro-Mosley front.79 Chesterton was meanwhile planning to print masses of anti-Semitic leaflets, to be ‘handed to ex-servicemen outside demobilization depots, the moment they become civilians’.80 All of these ventures were doomed to failure, since the political sentiment of post-war Britain was deeply hostile to fascism and political antiSemitism. Nevertheless, there was a certain logic to Chesterton’s assumption that an

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Allied victory would be fertile ground for national revolution; wartime trauma and the subsequent disillusionment with civilian life had been the catalysts for his own radicalization after 1918. It therefore stood to reason, at least within Chesterton’s idealistic interpretation of patriotism and military values, that a sizeable portion of the new ‘Front Generation’ would be driven towards radical nationalism. As Chesterton argued in The Weekly Review in September 1944, the growing likelihood of Britain’s victory presented the nation with a second chance to avoid the ‘decay of national pride’ that followed its triumph in the First World War.81 Convinced that the timing of the National Front’s emergence would be crucial to its success, Chesterton began discussing the party’s foundational policies at a meeting on 4 December 1944. This resulted in a ten-point statement of policy that a Security Service informant described as ‘looking like a watered down British Union statement of policy’ that carefully avoided references to corporatism or dictatorship.82 Chesterton was able to persuade Green and the other advocates for a negotiated peace that the issue was politically untenable. Reflecting this decision, the National Front’s planning committee later dubbed itself the ‘After-Victory Group’.83 Chesterton also modified the policy document from 4 December into a simplified seven points, to minimize the risks of further disagreement among the planning committee. Even after these changes had been made, however, the policy document still bore an unmistakable resemblance to BUF doctrine – including proposals to secure Britain’s economic independence through the Empire, to ‘uphold distinctive British traditions’ and to ‘promote the national interest above all sectional interests, thus destroying class-warfare’. Despite echoes of fascist thought and policy, the seven points also contained what appeared to be a direct repudiation of an overbearing state, calling specifically to reduce ‘to a minimum all forms of bureaucratic interference and to restore the dignity of the individual and the rule of law’.84 Taken at face value, the inclusion of such a clause seemed to suggest a party geared more towards conservatism than revolutionary fascism or national socialism. On closer examination, however, even bromides about individual liberty and bureaucracy were recognizable as a holdover from BUF doctrine as laid out in Mosley’s Greater Britain: We are treated as a nation of children; every item of social legislation is designed, not to enable the normal person to live a normal life, but to prevent the decadent from hurting himself. At every point the private liberty of the individual is invaded by busybody politicians who have grossly mismanaged their real business – which is the public life of an organized nation.85 As demonstrated by the After-Victory Group’s rapid dissolution after 1945, the seven points drafted by Chesterton were the product of an uneasy compromise rather than a true ideological synthesis between fascism and conservative anti-communism. It retained aspects of fascist organization and policy that had proved alienating to potential supporters of the BUF, particularly anti-Semitism. Even though it sought to anticipate the conditions of the ‘post-fascist’ era, therefore, Chesterton

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and Brooks’s new movement was primed to encounter the same problems of political space and hostile opposition that had dogged the BUF. Moreover, without a charismatic leader equivalent to Mosley, the National Front was poorly equipped to weather the ideological divisions that were liable to emerge between its conservative and radical elements. After resigning from the BUF in 1938, Chesterton had blamed the inertia of British fascism on the ‘circus’ surrounding Mosley.Yet the BUF’s longevity owed much to Mosley, if not in his abilities as a leader, then in his mere presence as an authority figure that could override the competing ideas and contentious personalities that were invariably drawn into the orbit of the extreme right.86 Mosley’s release from prison in 1943 raised another problem for Chesterton, who feared that a majority of National Front supporters, particularly those he hoped to draw from London’s East End, would abandon the movement and rejoin ‘the Leader’ as soon as he reentered politics.87 Besides the ideological divisions, a general mood of suspicion and competition prevailed throughout smaller factions overlapping with the National Front, including Edmonds’s Constitutional Research Association and Green’s Independent Nationalists.88 In theory, Brooks argued that the National Front did not require its members to refrain from joining or forming other organizations. In practice and as far as Chesterton was concerned, however, these offshoots served to undermine the party’s goal of producing a unified front that would be capable of drawing a wider membership and resisting its political enemies.89 Even looking past the ideological and organizational fractures facing the National Front, its proponents faced a deeper-seated question of how it would actually achieve or exercise political influence. In a column for The Weekly Review, Chesterton claimed to have accepted the failure of British fascists to restrain their doctrine’s anti-democratic nature: Many of us in Britain who were attracted to the movement had many qualms on this score, and in so far as we were able to influence its policy we endeavoured to establish safeguards to ensure that suitable checks were forthcoming. . . . At the time most of us, I fancy, persuaded ourselves that these guarantees had been secured but in retrospect it is more than likely we were mistaken. On that account I for one weep no tears to find the Fascist one-party system discredited.90 This was an early example of the revisionism that appeared throughout the literature of Britain’s extreme right after 1945. As Chesterton’s reaction to the Olympia rally suggested, he was disturbed by some aspects of the BUF’s campaigns during the 1930s. He was never a voice of democratic restraint among British fascists, however, having asserted plainly in 1935 that ‘Fascism tolerates no whining about “rights” ’.91 Pleading with readers of The Weekly Review that British fascists had also made an effort ‘to expand and purify and even restore the traditional constitution’, Chesterton conceded that the Italian and German dictatorships had now ‘established what some of us before had questioned – the truth that absolute power corrupts’.92 While

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it is apparent that he regretted much of his association with the BUF, Chesterton’s claim to have renounced authoritarianism in all forms was questionable. Apart from his continuing disdain for many aspects of the liberal system, Chesterton was an unabashed admirer of authoritarian regimes in Spain and Portugal; hard-line support for Britain’s imperial status was another sign that Chesterton was still far from embracing democracy. Genuine or not, Chesterton’s reflections on the failures of fascism touched on a question confronting the post-war extreme right in Britain and elsewhere: could a movement advancing the ‘national interest’ replicate the ideals of fascism without replicating its methods of achieving and exercising power? Both the corporate and the occupational franchise are Fascist concepts but in condemning Fascist method, with its ballyhoo and its repressions, it is not necessary to condemn all Fascist policy as well . . . such advocacy does not become suspect because some of us were once humourless enough to preach these things in a coloured shirt.93 Based on his plans for a new movement after the war, it was doubtful whether Chesterton had truly put aside ‘fascist method’ altogether since 1940. Many of his proposed tactics for the National Front carried an implicit connection to subversion, social upheaval and violence. Anticipating the onset of anti-Semitic feeling in the wake of Britain’s victory, he expressed on one occasion a willingness to ‘countenance rioting of a violent nature’ and on another stated his readiness to ‘face up to barricades’ in pursuing the movement’s goals.94 Knowing Chesterton’s penchant for overblown militaristic metaphors, some of these statements could be dismissed as idle talk among members of an insular and sedentary movement. This appears to have been the view of one Security Service informant who, after attending a meeting of the National Front on 15 April, gave the following assessment: ‘its present trend is towards becoming a drawing room party of anti-Communists. The gentleman revolutionaries will give more trouble to the Waldorf with their lunches than to the departments responsible for security or the Communist Movement’. As the end of the war in Europe drew closer, Chesterton made repeated predictions that some form of violent revolution would follow the armistice. In March 1945, he informed Harry Edmonds that ‘Jewish pressure groups’ would attempt to rile up public opinion against the National Front and ‘that it will have to come to a clash of arms’. Reflecting a peculiar strain of anti-Semitic paranoia that had developed on the extreme right since internment, Chesterton also warned against the likelihood of a false-flag operation targeted at British fascists: ‘an attempt would be made for one or two Jews to be found murdered and then for a swift round up to be made of everybody who had ever written or spoken a word against the Jews in public and these people shoved into prison for an indefinite time’.95 Chesterton’s conversations with Edmonds cast doubt upon David Baker’s suggestion that he was a ‘dissenting voice’ amidst more radical attendees of the National Front meetings, based upon his refusal to join Arnold Leese in the formation of an armed revolutionary cell in October 1945.96 As aptly noted by the Security Service,

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however, the National Front as a whole was ‘a perfect example of drawing-room Fascism’, whose revolutionary rhetoric and violent anti-Semitism was tethered to a fairly benign and ineffective strategy.97 Aside from chalking and leafleting campaigns, Chesterton’s plans for the National Front revolved around the recruitment (via word of mouth) of a small cadre of activists that would form the party’s governing council. This body would in turn be responsible for the recruitment of additional members, the development of a ‘research department’, an independent publishing house and ‘a big intelligence service’.98 To provide the necessary funding, and to stave off unwanted attention from the Home Office, Chesterton and Brooks also planned to draw in a sympathetic yet respectable public figure to act as the National Front’s public face, a strategy that Rex Tremlett described as analogous to that of the Ku Klux Klan.99 By April 1945, it appeared that some of these plans were coming to fruition. Chesterton was in contact with an employee of the Conservative Central Office, whom he hoped to employ as a paid full-time organizer. Brooks had meanwhile drawn the support of Captain Granville Soames, the chief of the Air Training Corps in Sussex, who offered to act as the movement’s figurehead and promised an immediate donation of £400.100 Buoyed by this infusion of cash, Chesterton and Brooks’s plans for the National Front became increasingly ambitious. At a meeting on 13 April 1945, it was agreed that the organization should establish a permanent headquarters in London, complete with a paid secretary, and that the ‘Council’ was to be expanded to 100 members following the end of the war, with representatives from each of the English counties.101 By the following month, however, these plans had collapsed into disarray following a series of events that illustrated the fragile alliance between the extreme right and its conservative patrons. Brooks had narrowly avoided a catastrophe at the meeting on 13 April 1945 when Soames, seemingly oblivious to his surroundings, had proposed inviting the vehemently anti-fascist MP Lord Vansittart to join the National Front.102 Despite Chesterton and Brooks’s best efforts to preserve their ‘stooge’, Soames soon grew wise to the National Front’s orientation, resigning and withdrawing his financial support the following Monday. This left the party with insufficient funds to cover its expenses, including the wages of its only paid employee, who had since been persuaded by Soames to resign from his position with the Conservative Party.103 On 21 May 1945, with VE day having passed without incident, Brooks professed the view that the National Front had been ‘completely wrecked’ and should be put to rest.104 Having failed to execute his long-anticipated propaganda campaign, Chesterton was also pessimistic about the party’s long-term prospects after Soames’s ‘betrayal’.105 At a meeting on 29 June it was announced that three of the original council members – Brooks, Tremlett and J.F.C. Fuller – would no longer be actively involved. The most hopeful prospects for the National Front now lay in a merger with the other extreme right groups still in operation: Green’s Independent Nationalists, Hamm’s League of Ex-Servicemen, or the British People’s Party, recently brought back into operation by Beckett and the Duke of Bedford. As the

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discussions for a merger proceeded, however, Chesterton became increasingly concerned about security, fearing that National Front meetings had been compromised by one or more ‘spies’ from a rival organization. These fears were well justified, but the clumsy attempts to root out and uncover the leaker resulted in further discord and two members resigning in protest.106 By November 1945, a surveillance report summarized the grim state of affairs within the remaining membership: ‘the optimism and enthusiasm which characterized the movement in its early stages have given place to a sense of frustration. . . . Even the few faithful adherents recognize that the movement has accomplished and is likely to accomplish nothing’.107 The dissolution of the National Front began in March the following year, when it was identified as one of several incipient fascist groups in a House of Lords speech given by none other than Lord Vansittart.108 Having confirmed his fears that the movement had been infiltrated and exposed, Chesterton called for a threemonth hiatus before abandoning the party in August 1946.109 Despite meeting with Hamm and Beckett on numerous occasions, Chesterton had failed to negotiate any form of alliance. His vision for a genuine ‘National Front’ uniting the factions of the extreme right would thus remain unfulfilled until two decades later. In the meantime, Chesterton returned to the nomadic political existence he had maintained during the last months of the interwar movement. Freed from the climate of suspicion and competition that had prevailed in the National Front, Chesterton’s relationship with Beckett improved to the point where his articles appeared regularly in Bedford’s newsletter, The People’s Post. The BPP itself had fared poorly since entering the public eye, attracting fierce and well-organized opposition from anti-fascist groups, as well as scathing criticism from the press. Hamm’s League of Ex-Servicemen encountered even more vigourous opposition, due to its efforts to reestablish a new ‘stronghold’ for British fascism in North-East London. Although these violent confrontations with anti-fascists brought a disproportionate amount of publicity to the extreme right’s reemergence, Hamm and his followers failed to replicate even the modest successes of the BUF in the East End.110 After his resignation from the National Front, Chesterton maintained a careful distance from the street-level confrontations between BUF revivalists and their anti-fascist opponents. In May 1946 he politely declined an offer to speak at a public meeting of the League of Ex-Servicemen in Leeds, though he assured Hamm that ‘this is not to cast doubt on your admirable League’.111 Having already suffered from disillusionment with the BUF, Chesterton’s experiences with the AfterVictory Group made him deeply wary of public activism. As a further disincentive, since August 1946, he had become acutely aware that his activities and correspondence were being monitored by the Special Branch. In December 1946, a warrant for Chesterton’s ongoing surveillance was renewed by the Home Office on the grounds that he represented ‘one of the most effective propagandists of nationalsocialism’.112 While it is clear that he remained within the orbit of the extreme right after 1945, both socially and ideologically, Chesterton’s decision not to pursue a more active course after leaving the National Front raised questions about his ongoing relationship with fascism.

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Although he would continue to defend and reflect upon his involvement with the BUF for the remainder of his life, some of Chesterton’s most revealing comments on the interwar period were delivered pseudonymously in No Shelter for Morrison, a short book published by Dorothy Crisp in 1945. As its title suggested, the volume served mainly as an attack on Chesterton’s wartime bête noire Herbert Morrison (represented as a ‘Mr Hackney’) but branched into a wider criticism of internment and British politics in the lead-up to the war. Many of Chesterton’s critiques of the Labour Party, delivered by way of an author surrogate named ‘the Chairman’, were recognizable from his work in the BUF. Britain’s socialists, he alleged, had fomented class warfare and industrial action, while the capitalist power wielded by international finance went unchecked. Labour politicians had weakened Britain’s national defence while calling for an escalation of conflict with Italy, Germany and Japan – all the while pursuing a doomed project of global pacifism through the League of Nations. Alongside these old grievances, Chesterton made a renewed attack on Morrison’s role in overseeing the internment of ex-servicemen under 18b.113 The book’s penultimate chapter concluded with an exchange of dialogue between two characters (‘Tom’ and ‘Dick’) arguing over why fascism had attracted supporters in the first place: DICK:  I detest

and abominate Fascism with all the strength of my soul. But in a country where democracy has broken down, and where the people as a whole do not want communism, I see that a problem exists and that there is at least a prima facie case for subordinating sectional interests to the national interest. Thank Heaven there is no such problem in Britain. TOM: What if there were? DICK:  In that case I should indeed fight at the barricades. TOM:  On whose side? DICK: On the Communist side of course. Though after a spell of Communism I should doubtless again find myself at the barricades, this time on behalf of the other side.114 In David Baker’s Ideology of Obsession, this passage served as an epitaph of sorts to Chesterton’s involvement with fascism after 1940 – a ‘comfortable fiction’ that allowed him to retain the prospect of fascist revival as a ‘last ditch defence against British collapse in the face of a militant international finance-capitalism’.115 ‘For the rest of his life’, Baker thus concluded, ‘Chesterton was able to persuade himself that the point had not been reached where such radical action was necessary’.116 In a superficial sense, this was correct, as Chesterton showed no further inclination towards the style of mass-party fascism that he had pursued under Mosley.Yet there is little indication that Chesterton’s understanding of the crisis precipitating fascism in the 1930s had changed significantly by 1945. Cultural decadence, class conflict and the twin perils of international finance and international Bolshevism were still dominant themes in his ideology. Another snippet of dialogue between ‘Tom and Dick’ suggested that Chesterton’s critique of liberalism also remained firmly

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in place: ‘democracy will only work so long as there are no dissident elements sufficiently strong and lawless to prevent it from working’.117 His proposed solution to the economic and social problems caused by ‘lawless’ capitalism was still essentially corporatist, entailing a system of private enterprise under ‘corporate control by employer, employee and consumer, with the court of law as referees’.118 The After-Victory movement was, in many respects, an exercise in nostalgic fascism, a failed attempt to rekindle the spirit and function of the interwar movement under a different guise.119 Despite his ongoing entanglement with the ideas and personalities of British fascism after 1940, however, not all of the changes in Chesterton’s political orientation after this point can be dismissed as cynical or selfdelusional attempts to reconstitute the fascism of the 1930s. As it became clear that post-war Britain would not yield the kind of spontaneous, revolutionary ferment that Chesterton and his colleagues anticipated, he was forced to reconsider the militant, uncompromising approach to political organization that had characterized his involvement with interwar fascism. While still a radical in the ideological sense, Chesterton’s fruitful relationship with Brooks showed his increasing willingness to work within the territory between the extreme right and conservatism. Finally, the substantive shifts in global politics after 1945 – decolonization, nuclear proliferation and the Cold War – all contributed to the increasing elaboration of Chesterton’s work as a conspiracy theorist.

Notes 1 TNA KV2/1345/5a, Letter to Major P.C. Boon, 8 May 1940. 2 Holmes, Searching for Lord Haw-Haw, pp. 298–303. 3 ‘All Aboard for Addis’, p. 5. This sentiment was widely shared among ex-servicemen detained under 18b: Guy Aldred and John Wynn, It Might Have Happened to You (London: Black House Publishing, 2012), pp. 26–31. 4 Action, 3 April 1937, p. 7. 5 ‘All Aboard for Addis’, p. 19. 6 ‘All Aboard for Addis’, pp. 4–6. 7 TNA BT/389/32, Merchant Shipping Movement Card: Winchester Castle, 14 March 1941. 8 Chesterton’s wartime memoirs do not give any precise date for his arrival but identify the ship which transported his unit from Cape Town to Kenya as the Khedive Ismail. (‘All Aboard for Addis’, p. 21). Shipping records indicate only that this vessel travelled between Bombay and Suez throughout February/March 1941, during which time Chesterton may have disembarked in Mombasa. See TNA BT/389/17, Merchant Shipping Movement Card: Khedive Ismail, 15 March 1941. 9 ‘All Aboard for Addis’, pp. 43–45. 10 BNML, p. 101. 11 ‘All Aboard for Addis’, pp. 44–45. 12 ‘All Aboard for Addis’, p. 20. 13 ‘All Aboard for Addis’, p. 22. 14 ‘All Aboard for Addis’, p. 8. 15 Chesterton Collection B.2., A.K. Chesterton, ‘Calling South Africa: The Abyssinian Campaign with African Troops’ (2pp. typescript broadcast), 7 November 1941. 16 TNA KV2/1345/42a, Report re Chesterton’s return to the B.U. scene, 3 September 1943.

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17 The majority of 18b internees had been released by February 1941. See Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 188–189. 18 TNA KV2/1345/20a, Applicant for Employment in the BBC, Chesterton, Arthur ­Kenneth, 19 March 1943. 19 TNA KV2/1345/40b, Copy of Police Report from Sheffield re A.K. Chesterton, 24 August 1943. 20 Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted, pp. 55–56. 21 Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! pp. 306–307. 22 TNA KV2/1345/26a, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Alfred Norris, 26 June 1943. Greene was a former schoolmate of Chesterton and Rex Tremlett at the Berkhamstead School. He was also a cousin of the novelist Graham Greene and his brother Hugh Greene, the director general of the BBC from 1960 to 1969. 23 TNA KV2/1345/26a. 24 The Patriot, 19 August 1943, p. 299. 25 TNA KV2/1345/28a, Report from Major C.W. Hordern, 8 July 1943. 26 TNA KV2/1345/37b, Special Branch report on Fleet Street meeting, 19 August 1943. 27 TNA KV2/3328/25. 28 Graham Macklin, Very Deeply Dyed in Black (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), pp. 126–127. 29 TNA KV2/1345/58a, Letter from P.M. Burke to Major F.W. Towns, 14 October 1943. 30 TNA KV2/1345/37b. 31 For some other examples of ‘cover organizations’ used by the extreme right in the 1930s, see Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted, pp. 63–64. 32 TNA KV2/1345/31a, Letter from Chesterton to J.F.C. Fuller, 2 July 1943. 33 TNA KV2/1345/31a. 34 TNA KV2/1345/31a. 35 TNA KV2/1345/49b, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Alfred Norris, 19 September 1943. 36 TNA KV2/1345/43a, Report re Chesterton’s present opinions, 4 September 1943. 37 Chesterton Collection B. 16, A.K. Chesterton, ‘Draft open letter to Prime Minister Winston Churchill, requesting the release of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, from internment’, ca. 1943. Chesterton intended for this letter to be published in The Patriot but it was rejected due to its potentially libellous statements about Morrison. 38 TNA KV2/1345/44a, Special Branch report re fascist meeting, 4 September 1943. 39 The Weekly Review, 27 January 1944, p. 206. 40 TNA KV2/1345/50a, Extract from Daily Worker, 23 August 1943. 41 The Jewish Chronicle, 27 August 1943, p. 11. 42 TNA KV2/1345/50a, Letter from John Clarke-Goldthorpe to A.K. Chesterton, 25 September 1943. 43 TNA KV2/1348/272a, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to the Independent Nationalists, 15 March 1945. 44 The Eye-Witness came under Hilaire Belloc’s editorship in 1914 as The New-Witness, which lasted until 1923. In 1925, the paper was relaunched as G.K’s Weekly before finally adopting The Weekly Review moniker in 1936 following G.K. Chesterton’s death in June 1936. 45 During the 1940s, The Weekly Review drew attention from the Security Service for its fascist sympathies. See: TNA KV4/331/1a, T.M. Shelford, ‘The Future of Fascism in Great Britain’, 4 November 1943, p. 15. 46 R.B. Crockett, ‘Ball, Chamberlain, and Truth’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 131–142; Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! p. 267. 47 Crowson ed., Fleet Street, Press Barons and Politics, p. 250. 48 Crowson ed., Fleet Street, Press Barons and Politics, p. 56. Although Brooks’s meaning in this instance was not entirely clear, he was likely referring to Whitman’s 1871 work Democratic Vistas, which was itself a critique of an anti-democratic essay by Thomas Carlyle. See Scott Henkel, ‘Grassroots Politics: Whitman, Carlyle and the Imagination of Democratic Vistas’, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review,Vol. 27, No. 3 (2010), pp. 101–126.

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49 Crowson ed., Fleet Street, Press Barons and Politics, pp. 199–200, 249–253. 50 Crowson ed., Fleet Street, Press Barons and Politics, p. 269. 51 The Jewish Chronicle, 3 July 1942, p. 15. 52 TNA KV2/1345/55a, Letter from Collin Brooks to A.K. Chesterton, 6 October 1943. 53 Crowson ed., Fleet Street, Press Barons and Politics, p. 217. 54 TNA KV2/1345/59a; TNA KV2/1346/134b. 55 TNA KV2/1347/197b, Letter from Southport Police Headquarters to Major F.W. Towns, 11 July 1944. 56 TNA KV2/1346/150c, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to W.A. Cathles, 6 March 1944. 57 The Weekly Review, 25 May 1944, p. 90. 58 The Weekly Review, 11 May 1944, p. 65. 59 TNA KV2/1345/69c, Extract from The Weekly Review entitled ‘No Empire in Pawn’, 29 July 1943, p. 1. 60 TNA KV2/1345/69c, p. 2. For more on Britain’s involvement in the Second World War and decolonization, see: David Killingray and Richard Rathbone, The Second World War in Africa (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986), pp. 1–20; Robert Johnson, British Imperialism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 171–183. 61 The Weekly Review, 2 September 1943, p. 266. 62 The Weekly Review, 2 March 1944, p. 267. 63 TNA KV2/1347/207a, Letter from Collin Brooks to A.K. Chesterton, 31 July 1944. 64 Chesterton Collection A. 13, p. 5. 65 Thurlow refers to a singular ‘National Front for Victory’, when in fact the After-Victory Group was only a planning organization whose membership formed the basis for the National Front. See Fascism in Britain, pp. 209–210. 66 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 209–210. 67 TNA KV2/1348/252a, Source report mentioning Chesterton, 21 January 1945. 68 TNA KV2/1348/296ab, Note on the history of the National Front, 1 November 1945. 69 TNA KV2/1347/227a, Report re meeting of Chesterton, Greene, Seale, Brooks, 26 September 1944. 70 TNA KV2/1347/227a. 71 TNA KV2/1347/232, Extract from F3 1178 source report mentioning Chesterton, 9 October 1944. 72 TNA KV2/1235/97c, Extract from F.3/1575 report re British People’s Party, 8 June 1945. 73 TNA KV2/1347/240b, Report from F.3/1260 of the first meeting of the National Front, 25 November 1944. 74 TNA KV2/1346/83a, Copy of int. letter from Rex to Chesterton, 1 December 1943. 75 TNA KV2/1348/248a, Report mentioning Chesterton, 6 January 1945. 76 TNA KV2/1348/261x, report re Edmonds and Chesterton, 8 March 1945. 77 TNA KV2/1348/266a, Copy of report mentioning Chesterton, 26 April 1945. 78 TNA KV2/1348/261x. 79 Macklin, Dyed in Black, pp. 38–39. 80 TNA KV2/1348/280B, Source report mentioning Chesterton, 26 July 1945. 81 The Weekly Review, 14 September 1944, pp. 283–284. 82 TNA KV2/1348/243a, F.3./1270 Source report re meeting of initial session of the National Front, 4 December 1944. 83 TNA KV2/1348/269c, Source report F.3/1430 re meeting of National Front, 13 March 1945. 84 TNA KV2/1348/269c. 85 Mosley, The Greater Britain, p. 50. 86 On the importance of strong leadership in determining the relative success of interwar fascist movements, see Payne, A History of Fascism, pp. 491–492. 87 TNA KV2/1348/261x. 88 TNA KV2/1348/266a. 89 TNA KV2/1348/250a, Letter from Hosken to Chesterton, 19 January 1945. 90 The Weekly Review, 28 December 1944, p. 162.

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91 Chesterton, Creed of a Fascist Revolutionary, p. 10. 92 The Weekly Review, 28 December 1944, p. 162. 93 The Weekly Review, 28 December 1944, p. 162. 94 TNA KV2/1347/227a, Report re meeting of Chesterton, Greene, Seale, Brooks, 26 September 1944. 95 TNA KV2/1348/261x. 96 Baker, Ideology of Obsession, p. 189. For Chesterton’s reply to Leese, which he announced at a National Front meeting in October 1945, see: USSC 238/12/4,‘The National Front: Its Formation and Progress’ (11pp. unpublished typescript), 25 October 1945, p. 10. 97 TNA KV2/1348/244b, F.3. Source report re National Front meeting mentioning Chesterton, 15 December 1944. 98 TNA KV2/1348/261x, p. 2. 99 TNA KV2/1348/252a, Source report mentioning Chesterton, 21 January 1945. 100 TNA KV2/1348/267a, Report mentioning Chesterton, 13 April 1945. 101 TNA KV2/1348/267a. 102 TNA KV2/1348/264c, Report re meeting of National Front, 15 April 1945. 103 TNA KV2/1348/274a, Report re National Front Council activities, 21 May 1945. 104 TNA KV2/1348/274a. 105 TNA KV2/1348/272a. 106 TNA KV2/1348/296ab. 107 TNA KV2/1348/296ab. 108 Lord Vansittart Speech to the House of Lords, 12 March 1946, Parliamentary Debates, Lords, 5th ser. vol. 140, cols. 40–41. 109 TNA KV2/1348/307c, Report re., National Front, 26 March 1946. 110 Macklin, Dyed in Black, pp. 38–45. 111 TNA KV2/1349/318b, Chesterton to Hamm, 2 May 1946. 112 TNA KV2/1349/369z, 18 December 1946. 113 A.K. Chesterton (as Caius Marcius Coriolanus), No Shelter for Morrison (London: ­Dorothy Crisp, 1944), p. 55. 114 Chesterton, No Shelter for Morrison, pp. 65–66. 115 Baker, Ideology of Obsession, p. 199. 116 Baker, Ideology of Obsession, p. 199. 117 Chesterton, No Shelter for Morrison, p. 65. 118 The Weekly Review, 22 March 1945, pp. 310–311. 119 On ‘nostalgic fascism’ as an orientation of post-war fascist movements, see Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, pp. 163–164.

5 SOUND THE ALARM Candour and the League of Empire Loyalists, 1953–1967

As Chesterton and other members of the After-Victory Group had predicted, Sir Oswald Mosley’s return to politics after 1945 had a profound and disruptive impact on Britain’s extreme right. Bound by the conditions of his release, Mosley had spent the remainder of the war recovering from phlebitis and farming cattle on an estate in Wiltshire. After the declaration of peace, Mosley was able to move with relative freedom throughout the United Kingdom, reconnecting with his followers via a newsletter and a series of book clubs.1 On 16 July 1946, the Special Branch reported that: A.K. Chesterton recently had a long talk with Sir Oswald Mosley at the l­atter’s London flat. Although he is full of praise for the British Union policy, which is ‘worthy of serious consideration’, he is critical of Mosley himself and of Mosley Publications. He declares he will not offer his services to Sir Oswald.2 In December 1946, Mosley gave his formal blessing to Jeffery Hamm, thus providing him with the support of the East End loyalists which Chesterton had failed to lure to the National Front.3 Finally, in November the following year, Mosley gathered his followers at a hall in Farringdon to announce his plans for a new political venture. The Union Movement, which made its public debut on 8 February 1948, was described by Mosley as the unification of ‘fifty-one separate organizations or groups’, all of whom ‘desired a union of the British people to transcend party differences as a vital preliminary to the union of Europe’.4 The debut of the Union Movement brought a renewed wave of public outcry and anti-fascist reprisals, as Mosley made little effort to disguise his new venture as anything other than a reconstituted BUF. This was apparent not only from the territorial concerns of Hamm and Mosley, which centred once again on East London,

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but from the new movement’s political platform. At a press conference held on the night of 28 November 1947, Mosley had informed the assembled reporters that, in the event of taking power, he would suppress the Communist Party and deport all of Britain’s Jewish population apart from those who had resided in the country for ‘three or four generations’.5 Mosley’s 1947 book The Alternative, which outlined the Union Movement platform in detail, reiterated many of the fascistic principles that had appeared in The Greater Britain 15 years prior: the need for a centralized authoritarian government, the development of a ‘new man’ capable of confronting the problems of the nuclear age, and the establishment of a new global order based around the racial supremacy of Anglo-Europeans.6 Not unlike Chesterton’s plans for the National Front, Mosley’s domestic campaigns with the Union Movement were a misguided attempt to resurrect interwar fascism and recapture the heady enthusiasm of the 1930s. Despite the nostalgic orientation of his local followers, however, Mosley’s ‘new European idea’ represented a genuine evolution in the ideology of Britain’s extreme right – one that rejected the imperial nationalist conception of a ‘Greater Britain’ and substituted a kind of pan-European identity. To Chesterton, this was not only an abandonment of Britain’s imperial sovereignty but a bizarre perversion of the principles that had underpinned the BUF: How thoroughly in keeping with the hapless Mosley’s temperament it is that he should seek to return to political life without the least hope of ever being able to escape the odium, whether deserved or undeserved, of his Fascist past, and yet having divested his political stock-in-trade of the one part of the Fascist argument that was demonstrably true!7 The divergence between Mosley and Chesterton’s ideological perspectives, which became increasingly pronounced in the decades after 1945, was partly a reflection of their personalities. Chesterton’s blunt idealism left him incapable of accepting Britain’s imperial decline after 1945; as Baker recognized, an elaborate and malevolent conspiracy was more palatable to Chesterton than recognizing the complex array of impersonal factors that led to decolonization. Mosley, on the other hand, had already demonstrated a willing capacity to modify his views according to changing circumstances – even if this change proved alienating to some of his supporters.8 Chesterton and Mosley’s divergence after 1945 also reflected their vastly different experiences of the Second World War. Mosley had spent the months leading up to internment in anticipation of a German victory and imagining the role he would play in Hitler’s new order.9 When this failed to come to pass, he reconstituted these Eurofascist fantasies into a more cogent and sophisticated plan for ‘Europe a Nation’, in which he was to play a leading role. Chesterton had avoided internment and thus remained distant from the atmosphere of martyrdom and quasi-religious revivalism that prevailed among some of Mosley’s followers.10 As described in the previous chapter, however, Chesterton’s service overseas between 1941 and 1943 represented a different kind of redemptive experience. The campaigns through

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Abyssinia and Somaliland affirmed his belief that the Empire was the one institution capable of staving off Britain’s terminal decline at the hands of international finance. Chesterton’s encounters with the ‘excellent people of Durban and Cape Town’ while en route to East Africa in 1941 also assured him that the ‘imperial mindset’ would carry forward into the new era.11 Though Chesterton’s politics had long been grounded in a concept of impending national and imperial crisis, the end of the Second World War gave a more definite shape to the forces threatening to dismantle Britain’s overseas empire. By the time peace had been declared with Germany, Britain was overshadowed militarily by the United States and faced looming financial problems, which were exacerbated by the costs of maintaining an overseas empire.12 The onset of the Cold War provided another strategic threat in the form of the Soviet Union, although for Chesterton and others seeking to preserve Britain’s international position, this was not altogether negative. Fear of the Soviet menace and communist expansion outside Europe temporarily dampened the United States’ antiimperialist drive, while giving the British extreme right another platform for popular support.13 A third threat to the Empire, which proved uniquely alarming for nationalists like Chesterton, was the expansion of post-war internationalism in the form of the United Nations or through proposals for an integrated Europe. The prospect of the United Nations acting as a successor to the League of Nations was in itself a concern for Chesterton, who had long regarded all such bodies as tools of international finance. Even in a non-conspiratorial sense, however, the United Nations posed a threat to British sovereignty, due to its political goal of replacing imperial hegemony with a more egalitarian community of nations. The same was true for proposals for British integration with Europe, which would eventually become the central focus of Chesterton’s campaigns to preserve British sovereignty. The ‘crisis of empire’ between 1945 and 1948 fulfilled many of Chesterton’s worst fears about imperial decline. Over a period of three years, Britain ceded independence to a huge swath of its overseas territories; February 1947 marked the beginning of Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine and shortly thereafter the independence of India and Pakistan in August 1947. The following year saw two additional departures from the Empire, with Burma declaring independence in January 1948 and Ceylon in February 1948.14 The speed with which decolonization proceeded following the war served to justify Chesterton’s conviction that politicians were incapable of holding the Empire together. Pointing to the 1941 Atlantic Charter as the beginning of the United States’ bid for dominance, he castigated Winston Churchill for having reneged on his promise not to oversee the Empire’s dissolution: what are we to say of your subsequent attitude once Roosevelt had made clear to you that the British Empire was to be overthrown. . . . Did you not say at Fulton that you would not stop the tide of American conquest if you could? Did you not bid the Mississippi roll on?15

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Despite his repeated denunciations of Churchill prior to 1945, Chesterton came to regard Britain’s wartime leader as a stooge rather than a villain, and a talented leader who showed ‘something of the swell of destiny, something of authentic greatness’.16 Ultimately, however, Churchill and his fellow conservatives held a fundamentally different view of the international situation than that possessed by much of Britain’s extreme right. Whereas Chesterton and his conspiratorial ilk viewed Moscow and Wall Street as two manifestations of the same enemy, Britain’s conservatives saw the post-1945 world as an ideological and geopolitical contest between two superpowers, the United States and the USSR. They thus viewed Britain’s special relationship with the United States as a matter of strategic and economic necessity.17 To Chesterton, the turn to America by many conservatives was a craven betrayal of British interests, and indisputable evidence of conspiratorial forces at work.Viewing finance as the key mechanism of the conspirators’ power, he pointed to Britain’s war debt to the United States as a sign this new phase of Anglo-American relations was a barely concealed bid for power by international finance. He elaborated on this theory by tracing the conspiracy to the aftermath of the First World War: First fruits of the great victory, for the Wall Street financiers, was the extension of their power to Britain and the Dominions, forcing us to surrender our command of the seas, to break our alliance with Japan, and, in a very short time, to return to the gold-standard.18 The subsequent changes in the global order that Chesterton attributed to the ‘Money Power’ equated America’s growth with Britain’s decline, placing him further at odds with those in the Conservative Party who hoped a transatlantic alliance might preserve the country’s status as a world power: If Conservatives are so bewildered and intimidated that their only hope lies in the good-will of the Americans to conserve their own country for them, and are prepared to pay the price of surrendering their Empire to achieve this favour, it is small wonder that in the realm of domestic affairs they have no policy to offer the people whom they are betraying in the larger arena of world politics.19 The ratification of the Bretton-Woods agreement (which Chesterton viewed as a key obstacle to an insulated ‘Empire economy’) tied international currency transfers to the US dollar, a measure based on that currency’s relative strength and stability at the time.This role had previously fallen to the British pound but a slump in British economic performance, coupled with the debts incurred through two world wars, meant that the Empire could simply no longer retain its status as the key arbiter of global trade.20 The Soviet Union’s emergence as a major power provided the only counterbalance to the seemingly unstoppable rise of international finance, which, by Chesterton’s own estimate, would otherwise have demolished the Empire only years

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after the Second World War. The emergence of a global communist superpower added an additional layer of complexity to the way in which Chesterton perceived communism. During the interwar period, communism appeared primarily as an internal threat of revolution that could be supported through Soviet assistance. In the early stages of the BUF, Mosley had attempted unsuccessfully to position his movement as an extra-governmental line of defence against this threat. In the end, fascism was regarded in Britain as an essentially foreign ideology, just as liable to bring about violence and dictatorship as communism. At the war’s conclusion, however, Chesterton and other members of the extreme right recognized that the fear of the Soviet Union as a military threat would take centre stage following the defeat of Germany and Japan, providing a new opportunity for nationalists to position themselves as a bulwark against encroaching left-wing tyranny.21 While fears of communism and the overarching sense of crisis associated with the Soviet ‘menace’ were unlikely to foment a revival of fascism, they provided an opportunity for the extreme right to reinvent itself as a bulwark against Cold War subversion. Chesterton’s understanding of the global order after 1945 was realistic enough to acknowledge the danger posed to British interests by the USSR. In particular, he recognized the potential for a communist superpower to foment and exploit revolutionary movements throughout Britain’s colonies.22 During the 1930s accounts of the ‘Red Terror’ overseas had been a staple of BUF propaganda, a theme which carried into Chesterton’s post-war journalism. In 1946, he penned an article addressing ‘The Problem with the Left’ that criticized ongoing sympathies with the Russian experiment among British socialists: ‘When the red star dawned in the East you were jubilant: even to this day you cannot bear to tell your followers the truth, which is that the Red Star ushered in the blackest modern tyranny ever to engulf the working man’.23 Practically speaking, Chesterton recognized that a red scare was likely to drive money and support towards the extreme right. Back in August 1945, he had suggested to Jeffery Hamm that fears of communism were effective in drawing ‘the support of the wealthy old ladies of Bournemouth’.24 Shortly prior to resigning from the National Front, he also suggested that the group temporarily append ‘Against Communism’ to its name. Under the influence of the conspiratorial worldview he had adopted during the 1930s, however, Chesterton was convinced that the real threat to British interests was the ‘master revolutionaries’ acting through American finance, rather than their puppets in the Soviet bureaucracy. In some cases, he even acknowledged Russia’s hostility to Western capitalism as an inadvertent hindrance to the spread of the ‘Money Power’. With the proposal of the Marshall Plan in 1947, Chesterton noted with approval that Stalin was likely to reject an influx of American money into Europe, declaring that ‘Russia alone stands athwart the path of American Imperialism’.25 This esoteric view of global affairs provided the fuel for Chesterton’s career as an anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, which began in earnest following the publication of Menace of the Money Power. Appearing in August 1946, the pamphlet was a variation on the same conspiratorial themes that had preoccupied Chesterton since

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the early 1930s, but placed a newfound emphasis on Bretton-Woods as the ‘coup de grace’ to British sovereignty.26 To avoid jeopardizing his position at Truth, Chesterton published his more contentious works under two theatrical pseudonyms: Philip Faulconbridge, the bastard son in King John, and Caius Marcius Coriolanus, from the eponymous Shakespearean tragedy. As ‘Coriolanus’, he provided the foreword to Failure at Nuremberg, denouncing the prosecution of German war criminals as the ‘judicial murdering of defeated men who devotedly served their country’.27 As Faulconbridge, Chesterton contributed regularly to London Tidings, a newsletter founded by the globe-trotting conspiracy theorist Douglas Reed, and published a heavy-handed work of political satire entitled Commissars Over Britain in December 1948.28 With his considerable energies as a writer occupied, and with his role as an organizer overshadowed by Mosley’s return, Chesterton might well have withdrawn from public activism altogether had his position with Truth remained steady. In March 1952, however, Brooks resigned his position as chairman and sold his stake in the paper to Staples Press. As a result, Truth underwent an overhaul under the supervision of its new owner, Ronald Staples, who sought to rehabilitate the paper from the radical and anti-Semitic reputation it had garnered in the preceding decades. This naturally brought him into conflict with Chesterton who was dismissed from his position in February 1953 after a series of disputes with Staples and the other editorial staff. In the following month, Chesterton distributed a pamphlet expressing outrage over the paper’s change in policy and appealed to readers for assistance in founding an independent outlet for nationalist news and criticism: The old TRUTH was not anti-Semitic when on occasion it criticized certain Jews, any more than it was anti-French when it criticized Frenchmen, or anti-German when it criticized Germans, or anti-Scottish when it criticized extreme Scottish Nationalism. It was pro-British, un-wearingly defending the cause of British interests.29 Following his departure, Chesterton took up a temporary post in London as the ‘Information and Public Relations Officer’ for the United Central Africa ­Association – an organization representing Southern Rhodesians who wished to amalgamate with the British protectorate of Northern Rhodesia.30 As Chesterton took the position shortly prior to the Central African Federation being formed in August 1953, he was soon forced to seek employment yet again. In January 1953, he sent a letter to Lord Beaverbrook explaining his circumstances at Truth, indicating that his departure from the periodical was imminent and expressing frustration at the ‘Mosley aberration’ that dogged his search for employment.31 Following Beaverbrook’s return from overseas in April 1953, Chesterton was able to secure an interview with the Express magnate, who appointed him to ‘to engage in such work as he [Beaverbrook] may designate for you’ on a salary of £100 per month.32 Chesterton later described his role as that of a ‘literary advisor and personal assistant’, for which he had qualified due to his earlier experience as an author and critic. Along

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with his advisory duties, Chesterton also served as a ghost writer for Beaverbrook’s Don’t Trust to Luck, a book of business advice, and contributed feature articles for The Sunday Express and the Evening Standard.33 During the course of his work with Beaverbrook, Chesterton was commissioned to write a piece for The Sunday Express investigating William Joyce, whose trial and execution had recently been documented in Rebecca West’s The Meaning of Treason.34 In order to supplement his own memories of the late ‘Lord Haw Haw’, Chesterton travelled to Germany to interview Joyce’s widow and to Spain, where he drew on the recollections of his old colleague John Macnab. Hoping to parlay this research into a book, Chesterton compiled an extensive set of notes and produced several draft articles examining Joyce’s character and detailing his involvement with the fascist movement in Britain.35 To his immense frustration, however, Chesterton was forced by his editors to condense some 20,000 words into a twopage feature that appeared in The Sunday Express in July 1953. Despite these severe restrictions imposed by Beaverbrook, Chesterton’s article still managed to evoke a cautious sympathy towards Joyce, arguing that he and his wife had effectively been stranded in Germany against their will after a contact failed to secure them German citizenship. It concluded by imploring readers to consider Joyce’s character in the face of execution: ‘Professing to be British of the British, Joyce left us at the first great crisis and joined our enemies.We owe him no honour. But we not dishonour ourselves by acknowledging that he died as a brave man’.36 With memories of the war still fresh, the sympathetic posture of Chesterton’s article aroused controversy. He was accused by the public and members of the Express staff of trying to whitewash Joyce’s reputation, while at the same time drawing the ire of a young Mosleyite, Lawrence Flockhart, who alleged that Chesterton’s article was an attempt to curry favour with his employers at Joyce’s expense.37 In the long term, some of the dubious claims in Chesterton’s article found their way into biographies and historical studies of Joyce. Colin Holmes’s Searching for Lord Haw-Haw, the most authoritative work on Joyce to date, rightly dismisses Chesterton’s piece as a ‘hack enterprise’ and notes that many accounts have been ‘insufficiently alert to his bias and special pleading’.38 While there is no doubt that Chesterton sought to soften Joyce’s reputation, it is unlikely that he did so out of any desire to rehabilitate his actions as ‘Lord Haw Haw’. Chesterton was more forthright than many of his colleagues in condemning Joyce’s decision to work for the Germans, offhandedly telling a member of the National Front in September 1945 that ‘the man was unquestionably a traitor and should be hanged’.39 The main motive for Chesterton’s special pleading for Joyce was not to rehabilitate the man himself, therefore, but the reputation of British fascism as a whole, and the motives of those drawn into Mosley’s orbit. In the first of his unpublished articles regarding Joyce, Chesterton offered a defence of British fascism similar to the one he had presented to readers of The Weekly Review in 1945: ‘[the] Mosley Fascists had been driven foremost by patriotism’, he implored, ‘and had no thought other than to serve Britain’.40 In the same article, Chesterton suggested that the events of interwar period could now be considered ‘with historical objectivity because,

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controversial though the cause was at the time, it is now dead beyond the possibility of resurrection’. Only by properly understanding the patriotic roots of British fascism, Chesterton argued, could one come to grips with ‘how grossly out of character [Joyce’s] defection appeared’.41 As he had in the immediate aftermath of the war, Chesterton misjudged the public’s receptiveness to this kind of apologia on behalf of fascism. In December 1953, his arrangement with the Express was terminated following repeated disputes with editorial staff, which Chesterton believed to have been exacerbated by ‘political prejudice’. Appealing to Beaverbrook to intervene on his behalf, Chesterton lamented his inability to shed the notoriety he had acquired during his time with Mosley: Many years ago when I found that I was going the pace I gave up drinking, and since then have never been troubled by alcohol. Several years ago, when I found that I was smoking too much, I gave up tobacco and since then have never been troubled by nicotine. Fifteen years ago, when I found I was having too much of Oswald Mosley I gave up the habit, but instead of being rid of it the accursed spectre haunts me wherever I go.42 Having opposed the BUF in the 1930s, Beaverbrook was sympathetic to many of the causes that Chesterton espoused after 1945: a staunch Empire loyalist, he also opposed the Anglo-American Loan Agreement and plans for Britain’s integration into Europe. Beaverbrook also appeared to harbour a degree of respect for Chesterton’s literary acumen; in August 1945, he had received a copy of No Shelter for Morrison and claimed to have ‘studied it with a great deal of interest’.43 Despite these promising signs, however, Chesterton’s professional relationship with ‘the Beaver’ was brief, contentious and lopsided. ‘My association with Beaverbrook was destined to last less than a year’, he later recalled. ‘He did not really have it in his nature to relish being told that he was WRANG. I did not really have it in my own nature to be a hack. We parted without malice’.44 Chesterton’s strained relationship with Beaverbrook was another good illustration of the gulf that had emerged between conservatism and the extreme right since the Second World War. To conservatives, even an Empire loyalist like Beaverbrook, the loss of national prestige associated with the rise of the United States was balanced by other political realities after 1945; chiefly, the need to ensure Britain’s economic and national security against the backdrop of the Cold War while meeting the domestic challenge of populist social-democracy. These considerations were of little importance to Chesterton, whose conspiratorial worldview deemed the United States’ financial hegemony a greater danger than that posed by Soviet aggression. Consumed by an intense patriotism, Chesterton also viewed Britain’s national prestige as an end unto itself, rather than something to be managed alongside the more banal aspects of economic and social policy. This unwillingness to meet half-way with conservatives made it unlikely that he would garner support for an independent movement. In a stroke of tremendous fortune, however, an independently wealthy figure responded out of the blue to the

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appeal that Chesterton had circulated after leaving Truth. Robert Key Jeffery was an eccentric English millionaire residing in Chile whose fortune had been amassed through copper mining before the First World War.45 While the precise nature of Jeffery’s political views remain unclear his response to Chesterton’s ‘pro-British’ appeal was a generous and unconditional donation to support the founding of an independent journal. In October 1953, Jeffery became the patron and ‘financial founder’ of Candour, a weekly ‘news and views-letter’ that would continue publication, in one form or another, until after Chesterton’s death in 1973. The leading article of the first issue detailed Chesterton’s mission in drawing attention to the forces acting against the British Empire: The British Empire is disintegrating. Whoever denies that fact is a fool or a knave. . . . In place of the British Empire, there arises the Empire of the United States.We have no quarrel on that account with the American people, who are entitled to what their dollars can buy. Our quarrel is with our own abject leadership, of whatever party, which has supinely allowed the Dollar Empire to grow fat at our expense, crowding us off the stage of history.46 As its title suggested, Candour drew stylistic inspiration from Truth, positioning itself as a mixture of political editorials and investigative journalism offered as an alternative to mainstream reporting of world affairs. Jeffery’s patronage made no demands on the content of the journal, outside the broad direction that it advance British interests. Chesterton was thus left with complete editorial independence, allowing him to continue the crusade against Jewish international finance that he and Collin Brooks had waged in the preceding decade.47 In February 1954, in the final issue of The People’s Post, John Beckett informed readers that their ongoing subscriptions would be transferred over to Candour.48 Despite suggesting in the article that he would contribute to the new journal ‘when needed’, however, Beckett would have no further association with Chesterton before passing away in December 1964.49 In the first year of Candour’s publication, Chesterton faced the challenge of adapting his radically conspiratorial tenor to a largely conservative, anti-communist audience. Seeking to quell the concerns among some readers that the journal’s perspective was flatly anti-American, Chesterton assured them that his concern lay with the forces conspiring within the United States government rather than the people themselves, ‘but that a nation and its government cannot always be tidily separated’.50 Chesterton’s insistence on the interchangeable function of US capitalism and Russian communism put him outside the realm of traditional conservative thought, but Candour served as a consistent outlet for anti-communist literature, opening it up to an audience beyond the die-hard adherents to the ‘Money Power’ conspiracy. Several of the journal’s early issues gave coverage to Joseph McCarthy’s investigation into alleged communist espionage throughout the United States, promising to bring the US senator’s ‘case’ to a British audience.51 The journal also lent its attention to racial politics both in Britain and abroad. Intersecting with Chesterton’s concern over the Empire in Africa was the issue of apartheid in South

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Africa, which he firmly defended as a necessary measure to prevent social disorder. In an early example of how Candour’s racist, anti-Semitic and conspiratorial elements would become intertwined in the following decades, Chesterton argued for a reassertion of British control to prevent further disintegration: A strong British Empire is the only protection of hundreds of millions of people against the wholesale putrefaction of their social organisms, the only possible guarantee, indeed, that the world will not become a sort of global brothel run by savages for the benefit of High Finance.52 Ongoing funding from Jeffery ensured Candour’s independent existence for the foreseeable future but made no specifications as to a further political program. Having undertaken a number of unsuccessful attempts at party activism in the past, Chesterton was initially reticent to commit his journal to any particular venture. Considering the possibility for a new party, Chesterton gave an account of the ‘common fate’ of such ventures, offering a thinly veiled allusion to his experiences with Mosley and the After-Victory Group: Three things are clearly essential.The first, in the special conditions of the day, is a combination of gifts in the leadership amounting to genius. And how rare is genius! The second is tireless dynamism and capacity for self-sacrifice in the led. . . . The third, in one word, is cash. No party can survive the hostility of entrenched financial and political vested interests unless it can lay its hand on large sums of money.53 Even if these elements could somehow be secured, Chesterton further explained that the trials of the political process would then begin in earnest, with a struggle to overcome internal division and disputes over minor policy matters. ‘Should some miracle occur to prevent that final disaster’, he concluded, the party would be beset by opportunists from the ‘old gangs’ and careerists; ‘so that in the end there will be no spiritual distinction to be drawn between the old parties and the new’. While this assessment seemed to offer no prospect for a new party, Chesterton acknowledged that younger patriots would not be deterred from attempting to forge new movements. Allowing for this possibility, he proposed a new organization whose purpose would be to influence public opinion and advocate for British interests, rather than contest elections or build a mass party.54 It was on this basis that Chesterton founded the League of Empire Loyalists (LEL), which began its formal existence on 13 April 1954, marked by a meeting at Caxton Hall in Westminster. An additional infusion of funds from Jeffery allowed the group to secure an office space in London and hire Leslie Greene, the daughter of Chesterton’s After-Victory colleague Ben Greene, to work full time on its behalf.55 Per Chesterton’s discussion in Candour, the LEL was never intended as a political party in the traditional sense, but rather as a ‘pressure group’ that would engage public opinion and attempt to influence the existing political parties in

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Britain. A constitution drafted by Chesterton outlined four ‘objects’ of the LEL’s mission but made no prescriptions for policy or campaign tactics: i) The maintenance and, where necessary, the recovery of the sovereign independence of the British Peoples throughout the world. ii) The strengthening of the spiritual and material bonds between the British Peoples throughout the world. iii) The conscientious development of the British Colonial Empire under British direction and local British leadership. iv) The resurgence at home and abroad of the British spirit.56 Aside from ratifying the group’s ultra-nationalist, imperialist orientation, the LEL’s objects also indicated a mission that expanded beyond domestic politics to draw support from Britons living overseas. In organizational terms, Chesterton hoped that the party would function on a decentralized, grassroots basis: members of the League would establish branches throughout Britain and the Empire, acting independently to raise public awareness and put pressure on figures in government that acted contrary to British interests. The formal governing structure of the LEL consisted of an executive committee, charged with appointing a chairman and approving applications for membership, along with a policy committee, comprising the chairman, an organizing secretary and the editor of Candour – the position formally occupied by Chesterton. Membership of the LEL was not formally restricted by race or nationality, though applicants who did not hold British citizenship were subject to approval by the policy committee.57 A vote at the LEL’s inaugural meeting also agreed that all sitting Members of Parliament, ‘Independents as well as Party Men’, were to be excluded from membership to avoid diluting the group’s oppositional stance towards establishment politics.58 In theory, were the LEL to achieve its initial goal of 20,000 members worldwide, it would operate without the need for the single, charismatic leader-figure sought by previous iterations of the extreme right. In practice, however, the main activities of the LEL were reliant upon Chesterton’s leadership, aided by an inner circle of dedicated activists. Apart from Greene, this circle consisted of Aiden Mackey, a teacher who acted as the group’s public relations officer, and Austen Brooks, the son of Chesterton’s colleague from Truth and the After-Victory Group. A journalist and former naval reservist, Brooks acted as Chesterton’s right-hand man, directing many of the LEL’s campaigns while also serving as the deputy editor of Candour. Brooks’s height and distinctive red beard also made him a recognizable face of the LEL during its various publicity stunts; in July 1958, he infiltrated the Lambeth Conference while dressed as an orthodox priest in order to protest against the Cypriot independence leader Archbishop Markarios III.59 A later addition to the LEL’s core membership was Rosine de Bounevialle, a Conservative Party supporter who sought out Chesterton following the Suez crisis in 1956, soon becoming a dedicated follower and close personal friend.60 Outside of its youthful inner circle, the LEL cultivated an image of upperclass respectability. Its initial chairman was Martin Burdett-Coutts, a descendant

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of the 19th-century banking scion Angela Burdett-Coutts.61 Although Chesterton maintained that the LEL was aloof from partisan politics, its ‘Colonel Blimpish’ appearance, coupled with its appeals to anti-communist, nationalist and pro-Empire sentiment, were tacitly directed towards the right-wing of British conservatism. In the first year of its existence, LEL picketing campaigns aimed to lure disenfranchised members of the Conservative Party. These efforts showed promise in July 1954 when the LEL made contact with Harry Legg-Bourke, a Tory backbencher who protested against his party’s policy in Suez. Chesterton’s initial optimism was quashed almost immediately, however, when Legg-Bourke reneged on his threat to resign from the party in protest. In Candour, Chesterton reaffirmed his belief that ‘Party Men’ were unlikely to abandon their positions: ‘Mother’s wandering boy is restored to the fold and admitted once again to the radiance of the Churchillian smile, while the Tories, their ranks closed, march forward with beaming faces towards the further disasters and surrenders of Tomorrow’.62 As Chesterton anticipated, the Conservative Party establishment made a deliberate effort to undermine the appeal of the LEL, distributing information among its members that highlighted the movement’s anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, as well as Chesterton’s personal connection to fascism.63 Frustrated by the intransigence of mainstream conservatives, he redirected the LEL’s efforts away from conventional activism and into more disruptive forms of political demonstration. The League’s activities subsequently became something of a novelty in Britain’s political scene, as members painted slogans on public property, interrupted Conservative Party meetings and verbally harangued foreign dignitaries or other public figures seen to be undermining British sovereignty.64 Although all of these tactics attracted some degree of attention from bemused onlookers, the most effective of the LEL’s demonstrations – insofar as they attracted the most attention from the media – were theatrical stunts that often involved considerable planning. Some of the LEL’s stunts reflected Chesterton’s penchant for symbolism, such as tearing down the United Nations flag or delivering a ‘scuttle’ to government figures held responsible for the loss of the Empire. In most cases, however, the LEL’s methods revolved around some form of heckling, directed either to the stage at political meetings or in public gatherings by way of a roaming loudspeaker van.65 While many of the aforementioned methods brought party members in conflict with the law, inviting arrests and small fines, the LEL’s stunts were mostly non-violent and a far cry from the paramilitary violence of interwar fascism. The most serious incidents involving the group took place in 1956, when fighting broke out between LEL activists and members of the Movement for Colonial Freedom.66 An interruption at Blackpool in October 1958 led the LEL to pursue legal action against the Conservative Party agents alleged to have assaulted two young interrupters.67 Though the case was unsuccessful, the incident brought criticism from the media, with one columnist in The Spectator going so far as to suggest a latent undertone of fascism in the stewards’ rough treatment of hecklers.68 The forceful response to LEL interrupters was a strange inversion of the situation that Chesterton had faced while campaigning with Mosley. Having once declared the right of BUF stewards

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to maintain order and forcefully defend freedom of speech at their meetings, Chesterton now found his movement on the receiving end of heavy-handed party stewards, while Brooks lamented that the Movement for Colonial Freedom’s response to LEL heckling was an affront to free expression.69 The LEL’s confrontational approach proved alienating to some of its more conservative members. In April 1956, Burdett-Coutts resigned his position as chairman following a dispute over ‘the expediency of Candour’s approach to world affairs’ and anti-communist slogans used in LEL campaigns. He was replaced by D.S. Fraser-Harris, a retired Lieutenant Colonel residing in Cornwall.70 FraserHarris’s appointment furthered the ‘Colonel Blimpish’ image associated with the LEL, whose governing council included a number of other elderly military men.71 Chesterton made no effort to dispel this reputation, which helped stave off accusations that the LEL was another disguised attempt to rekindle British fascism. As reflected in the pages of Candour, much of the LEL’s external ideology was reactionary rather than revolutionary. Brooks decried the ‘coloured invasion of Britain’ but made a point of also denouncing racial violence as a response to non-white immigration: ‘The thugs may be serving their own questionable political ends, but they are certainly not helping to preserve British society’.72 While many of the LEL’s overt activities reflected Chesterton’s desire to tackle large-scale issues of domestic and international intrigue, its politics also included elements of social and economic conservatism, with contributors denouncing the excesses of government bureaucracy, the welfare state and the general trend of moral degradation among Britain’s youth. There were notable exceptions to the conservative trend in the LEL’s membership and orientation. Some of the older military men, whose names and titles furnished the League’s general council, had long-standing ties to the extreme right. Gerard Oddie, a decorated Air Commodore, represented the British People’s Party in a 1946 by-election. John Creagh-Scott, a retired Lieutenant Colonel and a member of the Candour exective council until his death in 1957, was the author of a conspiratorial tract inspired by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Most significantly, the LEL proved attractive to young racial-nationalists who had been drawn into Chesterton’s orbit from more obscure corners of Britain’s extreme right. In November 1955, the LEL incorporated the members of British Resurgence, a small group operating in the North of England under the leadership of John Bean.73 Before agreeing to join Chesterton as the LEL’s Northern organizer, Bean had been a member of Mosley’s Union Movement and briefly attempted to make headway in the Conservative Party.74 Bean brought with him a group of dedicated followers that, whilst providing a welcome boost to the LEL’s ranks, showed a greater willingness to engage in the violent street politics that Chesterton hoped to avoid. Some of the LEL’s membership also maintained an interest in the esoteric trappings of neo-Nazism and the racial-fascist ideas promulgated in the interwar period by Arnold Leese. The most notable graduate of the ‘Leese circle’ to pass through the LEL’s ranks was Colin Jordan, a Cambridge history graduate who had previously been affiliated with the

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British People’s Party and the League of Ex-Servicemen. Jordan shared Chesterton’s penchant for anti-Semitic conspiracies and was an enthusiastic participant in many of the LEL’s public demonstrations. Although he garnered recognition as an up-and-coming activist in the third anniversary edition of Candour, Jordan’s tenure with the LEL was not destined to last: he resigned from the movement in late 1956 after unsuccessfully petitioning Chesterton to restrict membership to ‘white Gentile Britons’.75 Not long afterward, Jordan would establish his own organization, the White Defence League, which was headquartered in Notting Hill.76 Several other young activists would follow Jordan’s example in leaving the LEL to pursue more active and overtly fascistic forms of extreme right-wing activism. John Tyndall joined the LEL in late 1956, shortly after completing a period of military service in West Germany. In his autobiography,Tyndall claimed to have considered membership in the Union Movement but refrained due to his disagreement with Mosley’s plans for a federated Europe.77 Like Jordan, Tyndall was in hearty agreement with both the Empire loyalist and conspiratorial aspects of Chesterton’s program, but quickly grew frustrated with the LEL’s elderly and middle-aged leadership, who seemed unwilling to pursue any form of actual political power. This sentiment was shared by John Bean, who began organizing informal discussions among ‘radically-minded’ members of the LEL who hoped to either draw Chesterton’s organization in a more active direction or branch off into a party of their own.78 Wedged between the right-wing of the Conservative Party, the remnants of Mosley’s Union Movement and a variety of small nationalist organizations, the LEL struggled to attract a following numerous or dedicated enough to support the vision of grassroots imperial revival that Chesterton had laid out in 1953. A small ray of hope was presented by the escalation of the Suez crisis, a long recurring subject of the LEL’s activism, which brought Britain’s retreat from empire to the forefront of domestic politics. Throughout 1955 and 1956, Egyptian president Gamal-Abdel Nasser had stymied British efforts to secure its interests in the region through diplomacy, much to the frustration of Prime Minister Anthony Eden, who, along with other parts of the British government and public opinion, came to regard Nasser as a dangerous, dictatorial figure akin to Benito Mussolini. Matters were further complicated by the overarching considerations of the Cold War: in contrast to Eden’s desire to reassert Britain’s imperial control, the United States feared alienating Nasser into the hands of the Soviet Union and viewed a nationalist government in Egypt as a preferable bulwark against communism in the Middle East.79 The apex of the crisis came after Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company on 30 July 1956, thus setting the stage for an attempted military incursion by Britain acting in concert with French and Israeli forces. The invasion of Suez launched on 30 October was a military success but an immediate disaster in both domestic and international politics: there was widespread opposition to the war among the British population, with particular criticism originating from the left, as well as Conservatives who feared the blowback from Eden’s failed military adventurism. Diplomatically, the invasion was condemned

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sharply by the United States who, besides its own strategic aims in the Middle East, feared that a Western imperial incursion would undermine criticism of the Soviet invasion of Hungary that took place on 4 November 1956. The United States led international condemnation of the Suez invasion by way of the United Nations, an effort joined by other nations in the British Commonwealth.80 From the LEL’s perspective, Suez represented the brazen culmination of the different forces acting to sabotage Britain. The coalition condemning Eden’s intervention was a real-world incarnation of the conspiracy that Chesterton attributed to Britain’s declining status: American anti-imperialists, UN internationalists, British liberals and ‘defeatists’ on the domestic front, as well as the ‘third world’ leaders who replaced British colonial rule. In light of Chesterton’s wider view of finance-capitalism, the crisis was also a particularly galling example of how the United States leveraged its economic might against British interests: The results of the British Government’s surrender to the Transatlantic blackmailers were catastrophic. Nasser took over the British bases, British property in Egypt was sequestrated and Britain has never recovered from the loss of ‘face’ attendant upon her humiliation, inflicted by a so called ‘friend and ally’.81 The Suez intervention was also a final reminder that, for all Chesterton’s notions of political cowardice and inaction as the root of imperial decline, there had still been concerted efforts by successive British governments to retain control of overseas territories through the 1950s.Though in many cases these efforts resulted in a ‘hand over’ to favoured local parties, the often brutal interventions into Malaya and Kenya demonstrated that the British government had hardly abandoned its commitment to a presence abroad.82 The extent of US and UN opposition to Britain’s feigned ‘diplomatic’ intervention into Suez was in some way beneficial to Chesterton, since it gave credence to his belief that neither was a true ally of British interests. The LEL gained a small number of dedicated supporters drawn from those who viewed Suez as ‘proof ’ of an anti-Empire conspiracy.83 On balance, however, the events of 1956 were less of a rallying cry for ‘Empire Loyalism’ and more of a death knell for imperial nationalism. Much as Mosley’s championing of an ‘Empire economy’ in the 1930s had been proven unrealistic by the limits of tariffs and imperial preference, Suez showed the political and social impracticality of an aggressive reassertion of British power after 1945, rendering Chesterton and his followers ‘loyal to a lost empire’.84 In February 1957, the LEL made its first attempt to engage in electoral politics, submitting Leslie Greene as an ‘Independent Loyalist’ candidate in the North Lewisham by-election. Despite the dismal results of the election itself, which garnered Greene less than 5 per cent of the vote, the LEL’s membership was enthused by the prospect of further campaigns. Chesterton was reticent to engage the LEL in further electoral attempts, however, fearing that its resources would be squandered in attempting to ‘stand toe to toe and slog it out with the giants’. He called instead for

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a continued emphasis on protest tactics, envisioning the LEL as a kind of political ‘raiding party’.85 Chesterton’s intransigence on the LEL’s political orientation after Lewisham led to a number of core members resigning. Tyndall and Bean resigned from the movement in April 1958 to establish the National Labour Party, while another long-term supporter, Sir Richard Hilton, left to pursue his own Patriotic Front.86 The timing of Bean and Tyndall’s departure reflected another current of disagreement within the LEL over how the party should respond to the growing public concern over immigration. Although Candour and the LEL placed increasing focus on race and immigration in their campaigns, Chesterton was wary of tarnishing his movement’s reputation with accusations of violence or racial hatred following the riots at Notting Hill between August and September 1958. Other parties made an immediate effort to capitalize upon racial resentment in West London, which became hotly contested territory for Britain’s extreme right. Mosley’s Union Movement held meetings and rented a headquarters in Kensington, while Jordan’s White Defence League was based nearby and joined Bean’s National Labour Party in public demonstrations calling for restricted immigration.87 Notting Hill was an early indication of where the fortunes of the extreme right lay in the long term; not only in Britain, but in the rest of Europe and the Commonwealth, immigration was to become the core focus for a rash of groups ranging from unabashed neo-fascists and racial-nationalists to slickly professional right-wing populists. In the immediate future, however, the rising preeminence of the ‘race issue’ did not resolve the various problems that had beset Britain’s extreme right since the collapse of the BUF. While immigration offered a seemingly viable platform for mass recruitment, progress was hampered by a crowding of ideologically heterogeneous parties unable to resolve their personal and ideological differences. Some of these divisions were a holdover from the interwar period, with an ongoing divide between followers of Mosley, Chesterton and Arnold Leese, the latter of whom was responsible for promulgating neo-Nazism amongst the younger exiles from the LEL.88 Another point of division, highlighted clearly by fractures in the LEL, was the generational divide between Chesterton’s “Blimpish” Empire Loyalists, Mosley’s aging inner circle and the younger, more politically aspirational generation represented by Jordan, Bean and Tyndall. Even had it proved capable of resolving these ideological and generational fractures, Britain’s extreme right faced the ongoing problem of its connection to fascism. As Chesterton could readily attest, the combined legacies of the war, internment and the Holocaust made the failure of any overt attempt to promote fascism in post-war Britain a foregone conclusion. Candour and the LEL were both beset by accusations of harbouring fascist tendencies despite Chesterton and his supporters’ efforts to cultivate a more respectable, conservative image. As he had lamented to Beaverbrook in 1953, Chesterton’s notoriety as a member of the BUF remained in spite of his efforts to combat the fascist label. Besides his aggressive pursuit of legal recourse against any accusation of disloyalty, Chesterton attempted to directly address the ‘fascist smear’ by defending his involvement with Mosley and pointing to the many ‘sincere men and women’ who

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had joined or otherwise supported the fascists in their heyday.89 As far as accusations that the LEL represented a form of neo-fascism in disguise, Chesterton assured his followers shortly after the movement’s founding in 1954 that the ‘ghost’ of fascism lay firmly in the past: neither through Candour nor the League, have or will I at any future time, espouse openly or covertly any Fascist or other authoritarian doctrine. This does not mean that I will foreswear myself by denying historical facts which I believe to be incontrovertible, whether they reflect well or ill on any such regime in the past, but it does mean that I have renounced those beliefs which, honourably held though they were, have been outdated by events.90 Though he held an obvious political incentive to relegate fascism to its interwar context, under Chesterton’s direction the LEL showed few signs of developing into a genuine neo-fascist enterprise. Its core concern lay with the preservation of the British Empire, or Chesterton and his followers’ idealistic conception of the Empire, rather than the establishment of a radically new society. Its rhetoric and ideology contained overarching themes of cultural decadence and national regeneration, similar to those that permeated British and European fascism. These elements, coupled with the LEL’s general program of radical nationalism, anti-communism and conspiratorial anti-Semitism, made it appealing to those who aspired to neo-fascist pursuits, as did the confrontational style of its public demonstrations.91 Those hoping that the LEL would transform itself into a mass party were inevitably disappointed, however, by Chesterton’s reluctance to wager the group’s reputation and scarce resources on what he dubbed an ‘electoral orgy’.92 More so than the LEL itself, Candour invited accusations of fascism and even neo-Nazism by virtue of its blatant expressions of anti-Semitism and racial prejudice. Chesterton’s favourable discussion of the authoritarian regimes in Spain and Portugal gave credence to the notion that he harboured an abstract sympathy for dictatorship, but he made no attempt to advocate such a system in Britain. He likewise made no attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the European fascists since 1939, though he continued to insist that they, along with movements in Britain, had been part of a general ‘revolt’ against international finance and class warfare in the 1930s: Whether or not these were good ideas it would now be profitless to argue. The regimes which espoused them, turning criminally insane in their final amok-run, left as their memorials the foulness of Ravensbruck, the gas-ovens, and the vile doing to death of gallant British airmen . . . nobody recoiled with more horror from such outrages than those of us who had been advocates of the Corporate state, nobody gained a clearer perception than we did of the danger of vesting unbridled power in any one man or set of men.93 Candour largely refrained from the cruder forms of Nazi apologia and nostalgia that would become hallmarks of neo-fascist literature circulating throughout Europe

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and the United States. On many occasions, however, Chesterton’s pseudo-journalistic analysis blurred into blatant fascist revisionism, which in turn drew him into contact with the wider circles of the extreme right in Western Europe. Chesterton showed no interest in the pan-European ideals put forward by Mosley, but he retained an interest in Germany and political affairs throughout the continent. This interest was encouraged by his relationship with Otto Strasser (brother of the ill-fated Nazi dissident Gregor Strasser) who had fled Germany after Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Shortly after Strasser was granted permission to return to Germany in April 1955, he met with Chesterton in Dublin.The meeting garnered considerable interest in the English and European press, though Chesterton was quick to dismiss any suggestion that the LEL planned to collaborate with Strasser: ‘Suggestions of an organizational relationship are absurd. We shall hope to keep in close touch, but that is all’.94 The following year, a series of interviews with Strasser appeared in Candour, allowing the ‘much persecuted German patriot’ to expound upon his plans for ‘Solidarism’, a new movement ‘equally opposed to Communism and Capitalism’.95 Strasser favourably compared his plans to another incipient ‘National Renaissance’ movement in the European extreme right, the French Poujadists, whose nationalist, anti-taxation campaigns drew noteworthy support from rural areas and small shopkeepers.96 Pierre Poujade’s movement in turn attracted support from Candour as emblematic of a populist uprising against corrupt government and Jewish highfinance.97 Chesterton and Strasser held much in common ideologically, sharing a vision of a third-way alternative to capitalism and communism that drew inspiration from medieval guild systems. In addition, Strasser echoed Chesterton’s frequent denunciations of the United States’ expanding influence in Europe through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.98 This common ground never resulted in any real cooperation or alliance between Chesterton and Strasser, however, with Candour and the LEL’s international focus remaining primarily on the Empire and Commonwealth. By contrast, Oswald Mosley’s activities after 1947 were increasingly directed towards transnational cooperation with like-minded extreme right leaders in Western Europe and the United States. In order to demonstrate his commitment to the ‘new European idea’, Mosley relocated to Ireland in 1952. From this base he established The European, which ran between 1954 and 1957, and served to promote his concept for ‘pan European nationalism’.99 Before retiring to France in 1963, Mosley also took part in the Conference of Venice – a gathering which attracted neo-fascist representatives from various parts of Western Europe.100 Chesterton’s stubborn patriotism made it difficult for him to move forward from the ideals of interwar nationalism as Mosley did, and brought him ridicule from members of the Union Movement as a result: ‘He continues to repeat like a parrot the views he learned from Mosley in pre-war days, refusing to face the changed circumstances of the post-war world’.101 There is no doubt that Chesterton’s views were slow to change, where they changed at all, on matters of international politics and British national identity. Yet his conception of national sovereignty and the issue of European integration also proved to be among the more prescient and

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enduring aspects of his political thinking after 1945. While the war was still in progress, Chesterton had noted with alarm that a ‘Fashionable Fifth Column’ in Britain that favoured the nation’s entry into a union with Europe. Even proposals that deigned to increase Britain’s sphere of influence, such as Jan Smuts’s proposal that the Empire be integrated with Western Europe, he viewed with suspicion: ‘though absurd, that dream is dangerous. The bait is admirably designed to tickle the British ego, but the hook is no other thing than Federal Union’.102 While the most pressing concern for Chesterton was the prospect of a union involving Britain, he retained a general hostility towards the idea of a federated Europe, like that proposed between West Germany and France: ‘Friendships can promote common institutions’, he argued, ‘but those institutions cannot promote friendships. If there is to be FrancoGerman accord upon which the European future depends, it will not be because European federation has paved the way’.103 By 1956, renewed proposals for Britain’s entry into a European Common Market led Chesterton to denounce the plans as a form of communist takeover that would allow meddling in its members’ political and administrative affairs. Much as the Suez crisis had appeared as a real-world manifestation of Chesterton’s conspiracy theories, so the Common Market served as evidence of the ‘Money Power’ at work: the European Commission would act as a conduit for the financial domination of sovereign nations, whose political direction could be influenced by the control of labour allocation and trade restrictions. The end goal of this ‘evil design’, Chesterton concluded, would be the merger of the Common Market with the Soviet Union and the formation of a world government, thus marking the ultimate abrogation of national sovereignty.104 The urgency of the Common Market issue grew following the rise of Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister in 1957, with his government applying for membership of the community in 1961. In July 1962, the LEL distributed a pamphlet attacking Macmillan’s ‘treasonous’ attempts to enter the EEC, thus exposing Britain and her dominions to a gradual erosion of independence. Reiterating his earlier attacks on the politically hegemonic aspirations of the European Commission, Chesterton emphasized that Britain’s entry into the market would be an irreversible loss of independence: The intention, and let there be no doubt about this, is not merely to destroy British (and French and German and Italian) nationhood through the abrogation of national sovereignty, but also to effect so drastic a change in the pattern of world trade that, were a future British Government resolved to opt out of the [EEC], it would be unable to do so.105 Despite its conspiratorial underpinnings, Chesterton’s attack on the EEC predicted many of the arguments used by contemporary movements calling for Britain’s exit from Europe.106 On economic grounds, the LEL distributed material that appealed to small business owners to oppose the European Free Trade Area, warning that they would be ‘swept away in a flood of goods produced by cheap foreign labour; your living standards will tumble to Continental levels; you will no longer be masters in

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your own country’.107 In its more politically orientated arguments, the LEL invoked fears of what later critics of integration would dub the ‘sovereignty ratchet’ – a process by which Britain’s parliamentary independence would be gradually but permanently surrendered to Europe.108 Chesterton’s greatest innovation, among the early opponents of European integration on the extreme right, was to explicitly link this loss of sovereignty with the politics of immigration. In a report to Candour readers in July 1962, he warned: It does not require much intelligence to foresee that if Great Britain joins the European Economic Community the disappearance of the White Australia Policy will be only a matter of time, while the problem facing New Zealand at the next remove, and perhaps within a very short time, will be whether the country is to be colonized by Chinese, Indians, or Malays, or perhaps an amalgam of all three.109 Ironically, given the Wall Street menace that lay behind Chesterton’s conspiratorial fears of the Common Market, it was suspicion of the United States’ drive for power that kept Britain out of Europe for a decade after Macmillan’s initial campaign. Fearing that Britain would serve as a conduit for American interests, French leader Charles De Gaulle placed a restriction on new applicants to the community in January 1963.110 The reprieve failed to deter Chesterton, who declared De Gaulle’s obstruction to be another facet of the elaborate conspiracy at hand. ‘The grand strategy’, he warned, ‘is to leave Britain bare and cringing, sufficiently softened-up for absorption in the European Economic Community without reservations of any kind’.111 De Gaulle’s purpose (either as a deliberate conspirator or merely a puppet) was to delay Britain’s entry until the last vestiges of the Empire had been destroyed. At this stage, had he been willing to embark on a more populist campaign against the Common Market or entered into an alliance with the more conservative opponents of European integration, Chesterton might have leveraged the issue to establish lasting space for the LEL. As was so often the case in his post-war career, however, the conspiratorial mindset which made Chesterton alert to European integration prevented him from forming a more cogent political strategy. The most hopeful signs of international support for the LEL appeared outside the European sphere altogether, as Chesterton appealed to the white-minority populations of former British colonies in South Africa, Kenya and Southern Rhodesia. In June 1958, Chesterton embarked on a tour through Africa which yielded a number of new Loyalist branches throughout Southern Rhodesia, the Central African Federation and Kenya, which Chesterton described triumphantly as the ‘Land of Loyalists’.112 In the years following his affliction with bronchitis in October 1957, Chesterton would embark on further overseas tours in England’s winter months to avoid the effects of cold weather. The majority of these tours took place in Africa, in proximity to Chesterton’s winter residence in Cape Town, but on occasion he ventured further afield. From February through April 1960 he embarked

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on a speaking tour of the Southern Hemisphere, visiting supporters in Australia and members of the LEL’s New Zealand branch in Auckland.113 In the words of Rosine de Bounevialle, who took over the editorship of Candour following Chesterton’s death in 1973, the Candour–League movement benefitted from a small but broadly distributed network of subscribers whose dedication to the cause was strong enough to bolster the movement despite an absence of wider popular support.114 Since the settler-colonial populations of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia were directly confronted by the upheavals of decolonization and racial integration, Chesterton was optimistic that they would prove more receptive to the LEL’s mission than domestic Britons. This proved true on some occasions, such as Chesterton’s tour of Kenya in 1957, which resulted in eight new branches being established. These advances amounted to little long-term progress, however, as did the LEL’s campaigns in South Africa, where Chesterton’s anachronistic vision of a revitalized British Empire met with apathy similar to that he encountered in England.115 A tentative figure offered by Chesterton in July 1957 put the overall strength of the LEL at between 8,000 and 10,000 individuals spread throughout the Commonwealth, though this figure was likely inflated by the inclusion of supporters alongside active members.116 For most of its existence, but particularly during the 1960s, the LEL was beset by the problem of political space.Though the group’s reactionary and anti-communist traits made it potentially attractive to disaffected conservatives, particularly following the Conservative Party’s progressive turn under Harold Macmillan, Chesterton’s ongoing ideological attachment to anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism and esoteric conspiracies ran contrary to this purpose.117 Even those conservatives who were driven rightward by decolonization after 1960 sought more respectable confines, such as the Monday Club – a self-professed ‘radical right’ group within the Tory Party that was established following Macmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ speech in February 1960.118 The most severe setback for the LEL came in April 1961 with the death of its patron, Robert Key Jeffery, who succumbed to intestinal illness at the age of 91. Having relied on Jeffery for the vast majority of their funding prior to this point, Candour and the LEL stood to benefit greatly from his passing, with Chesterton named as the primary inheritor of his patron’s will.119 Shortly prior to Jeffery’s death, however, a new will was produced naming an estranged female relative as the recipient of the funds. Adding to the air of suspicion surrounding this turn of events, the new will was marked only with a fingerprint in lieu of Jeffery’s signature.120 Chesterton and his supporters immediately began an investigation aimed at contesting the new will’s authenticity, marking the start of a protracted, expensive and ultimately futile legal battle that lasted for more than a decade.121 With no other sources of funding beyond individual donations and subscriptions, Candour was forced to cease regular publication until it was able to secure enough donations to resume monthly publication in 1966.122 While the LEL was able to continue its public stunts and demonstrations, the fight over Jeffery’s will consumed money and time that might otherwise have helped the movement’s flagging domestic membership. Appeals for funding became a recurring aspect of

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the ‘interim reports’ issued by Candour in lieu of a regular publishing schedule, while Chesterton was forced to meet many of the LEL’s expenses from his personal finances. A report from Brooks (the group’s acting treasurer) in November 1963 complained that wealthy supporters of Candour and the LEL were more readily forthcoming with advice than financial support. In the absence of a large distribution or some other form of patronage, both ventures were forced to rely on the generosity of a shrinking support base whose idealism outstripped its means: ‘There is hope’, Brooks wrote in conclusion to his report, ‘but if it is to be fulfilled we must all be prepared to back our hope with our cash’.

Notes 1 Macklin, Dyed in Black, p. 56. 2 TNA KV2/1349/339a, Special Branch report, 16 July 1946. 3 Macklin, Dyed in Black, p. 41. 4 Mosley, My Life, pp. 432–433. For a general overview of the Union Movement’s founding and early existence, see Macklin, Dyed in Black, pp. 49–77. 5 TNA KV2 2/893/686, Copy of clipping from Catholic Herald, 5 December 1947. 6 Oswald Mosley, The Alternative (Ramsbury: Mosley Publications, 1947), pp. 145–152. 7 London Tidings, 29 November 1947, p. 1. 8 Macklin, Dyed in Black, pp. 54–56. 9 Dorril, Blackshirt, pp. 509–511; Holmes, Searching for Lord Haw-Haw, pp. 306–307. 10 Macklin, Dyed in Black, pp. 14–19; Richard Thurlow, ‘The Guardian of the “Sacred Flame”: The Failed Political Resurrection of Sir Oswald Mosley after 1945’, Journal of Contemporary History,Vol. 33, No. 2 (1998), pp. 241–254. 11 ‘All Aboard for Addis’, p. 20. 12 On the economic and political background to Britain’s crisis of Empire in 1945, see John Darwin, Britain and Decolonization (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 65–68. 13 See: P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction 1914–1990 (London: Longman, 1993), pp. 272–273; Wm. Roger Louis, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), p. 595. 14 See Darwin, Britain and Decolonization, pp. 79–122. 15 The People’s Post, December 1952, pp. 6–7. 16 The People’s Post, December 1952, p. 7. 17 An alliance with the United States also proved to be beneficial for those conservatives seeking to thwart communism and ease the transition of Britain’s Empire into a more manageable modern state. See Louis, Ends of British Imperialism, pp. 330–331. 18 A.K. Chesterton, Menace of the Money Power (Reprinted by A.K. Chesterton Trust, 2012. Originally published in London by Yeoman Press/Blackfriars, 1946), p. 9. 19 TNA KV2/1350/433a, Extract from The People’s Post, March 1949. 20 For the background of the Bretton-Woods agreement in relation to Imperial policy see Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, pp. 272–274. 21 TNA KV2/1348/289a, Extract from Source S.R.63 report mentioning Chesterton, 27 August 1945. 22 On the relationship between the strategic concerns of the Cold War and Britain’s Empire, see Darwin, Britain and Decolonization, pp. 140–146. 23 The People’s Post, July 1946, pp. 7–8. 24 TNA KV2/1348/289a. 25 The People’s Post, August 1946, pp. 1–2. 26 Chesterton, Menace of the Money Power. 27 TNA KV2/1349/362a. For more on Failure at Nuremberg, and other examples of postwar Nazi apologia, see Macklin, Dyed in Black, pp. 123–126.

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28 TNA KV2/1349/407a. Summary of information re London Tidings, Lillis, Reed etc., 25 September 1947. The first editorials of Candour were also delivered under the ‘Faulconbridge’ pseudonym, while Chesterton completed his contractual obligations with Lord Beaverbrook. 29 A.K. Chesterton, Truth Has Been Murdered! (London: Britons Publishing, 1953), p. 2. 30 Chesterton Collection E. 4, Letter from East Africa Ltd. to A.K. Chesterton, 13 February 1953. 31 PA BBK/C, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Lord Beaverbrook, 31 January 1953. 32 PA BBK/C, Letter from A.G. Miller to A.K. Chesterton, 29 April 1953. 33 BNML, pp. 3–5. 34 For a brief overview of West’s treatment of Joyce, see Holmes, Searching for Lord HawHaw, pp. 438–442. 35 Chesterton Collection A. 13, p. 6. 36 The Sunday Express, 12 July 1953, p. 4. 37 TNA KV2/1350/44b, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Oswald Mosley, 17 July 1953; TNA KV2/1350/44b, Letter from Lawrence Flockhart to Angus Macnab, 12 July 1953. 38 Holmes, Searching for Lord Haw-Haw, pp. 444–447. 39 USSC 238/12/4, p. 7. 40 USSC 238/7/8, p. 2. 41 USSC 238/7/8, p. 2. 42 PA BBK/C, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Lord Beaverbrook, 1 January 1953. 43 TNA KV2/1348/283a, Letter from Lord Beaverbrook to A.K. Chesterton, 6 August 1945. 44 BNML, p. 7. Chesterton’s wife recalled that her husband was in fact fired by ‘the Beaver’ after he began distributing Candour. See Chesterton Collection A. 13, p. 6. 45 Chesterton Collection E.7, Chronological record of Robert Key Jeffery (2pp. unpublished typescript), nd. ca. 1961. 46 Candour, 30 October 1953, p. 1. 47 Candour, 5 February 1954, pp. 1–2. 48 The People’s Post, February 1954, p. 1. 49 Beckett, Fascist in the Family, pp. 323–324. 50 Candour, 22 January 1954, pp. 1–2. 51 Candour, 29 January 1954, p. 4. 52 Candour, 19 February 1954, pp. 1–2. 53 Candour, 19 March 1954, pp. 1–2. 54 Candour, 19 March 1954, pp. 1–2. 55 Candour, 18 June 1954, p. 4. 56 ‘Constitution of the League of Empire Loyalists’, pp. 133–141. 57 ‘Constitution of the League of Empire Loyalists’, p. 133. 58 Candour, 29 October 1954, p. 3. 59 McNeile and Black, History, p. 57. 60 Chesterton Collection A. 16, Transcript of an interview with Rosine de Bounevialle conducted by David L. Baker (28pp. typescript), nd. ca. 1978, pp. 1–2. 61 McNeile and Black, History, pp. 20–22. 62 Candour, 29 October 1954, p. 3. 63 McNeile and Black, History, p. 25. For a more detailed overview of the Conservative Party’s response to the LEL, see Mark Pitchford, The Conservative Party and the Extreme Right 1945–1975 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 55–63. 64 Press clippings detailing the League’s stunts between 1957 and 1962 were collated by LEL member Rosine de Bounevialle and now reside in a series of scrapbooks stored alongside Chesterton’s papers at Bath University. See: Chesterton Collection C. 1 through C. 5. 65 The Times, 26 May 1958, p. 4. 66 McNeile and Black, History, p. 34. 67 The Times, 2 June 1959, p. 6. 68 The Spectator, 17 October 1958, pp. 6–7.

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69 McNeile and Black, History, p. 34. 70 Candour, 20 April 1956, p. 129. 71 Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995), p. 265. 72 Candour, 29 October 1954, pp. 7–8. 73 Candour, 25 November 1955, p. 8. 74 John Bean, Many Shades of Black (Burlington: Ostara, 2011), pp. 59–78. 75 McNeile and Black, History, p. 39. 76 This account of Jordan’s involvement with the LEL is drawn from Paul Jackson, Colin Jordan and British Neo-Nazism (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), pp. 77–91. 77 John Tyndall, The Eleventh Hour (Welling: Albion Press, 1998), pp. 48–50. 78 Chesterton Collection A. 11, ‘Transcript of a taped interview of John Tyndall conducted by David L. Baker’ (8pp. typescript), 4 April 1978, p. 2. 79 See Simon C. Smith, Ending Empire in the Middle East (London:Taylor and Francis, 2013), pp. 42–66; Louis, Ends of British Imperialism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), pp. 589–608. 80 Louis, Ends of British Imperialism, pp. 694–698. 81 A.K. Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords (London: A.K. Chesterton Trust, 2011. Reprint of the 4th revised edition originally published by Candour in October 1972), p. 70. 82 Martin Pugh, State and Society: A Social and Political History of Britain since 1870 (London: Hodder Education, 2008), pp. 316–317. 83 Chesterton Collection A. 16, p. 1. 84 The chapter heading for John Bean’s account of his time with the LEL. See Many Shades of Black, pp. 93–120. 85 Candour, 8 March 1957, pp. 73–74. 86 Chesterton Collection A. 11, p. 2. 87 Bean, Many Shades of Black, pp. 127–130. 88 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 228–229. 89 Candour, 14 November 1958, pp. 149–150. 90 Candour, 26 November 1954, pp. 6–7. 91 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, pp. 219–220. 92 Candour Interim Report, October-November 1964, p. 1. 93 Candour, 26 November 1954, pp. 6–7. 94 Candour, 25 March 1955, p. 8. 95 Candour, 23 March 1956, p. 105; 30 March 1956, p. 99. 96 Hainsworth, The Extreme Right in Western Europe, p. 100. 97 Candour, 24 February 1956. 98 Candour, 8 January 1954, p. 4. 99 For an overview of Mosley’s relationship with the post-war ‘fascist international’, see Macklin, Dyed in Black, pp. 97–114. 100 Macklin, Dyed in Black, pp. 135–139. 101 TNA KV2/1350/440a, Cutting from Union, 1 December 1951. 102 KV2/1346/102aa, Cutting from Truth, 31 December 1943. 103 The People’s Post, December 1952, pp. 1–2. 104 Candour, 19 October 1956, p. 121–122. 105 Candour Interim Bulletin, July 1962, pp. 1–2. 106 For a brief overview of extreme right parties and the issue of European integration, see Hainsworth, The Extreme Right in Western Europe, pp. 83–85. 107 Chesterton Collection C. 9, ‘Europe’s Grave’ (2pp. typescript), nd. ca. 1957. 108 For a description of this concept and its role in contemporary Eurosceptic politics, see Harold D. Clarke, Matthew Goodwin and Paul Whitely, Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), pp. 112–113. 109 Candour Bulletin, July 1962, p. 2. 110 See Richard Davis, ‘Why did the General do it? De Gaulle, Polaris and the French Veto of Britain’s Application to Join the Common Market’, European History Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2008), pp. 373–397.

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111 Candour Interim Report, March 1963, pp. 1–2. 112 Candour, 26 September 1957, pp. 85–86. 113 Candour, 1 April 1960, p. 104. 114 Chesterton Collection A. 16, pp. 16–17. 115 McNeile and Black, History, pp. 62–63. For a discussion of Chesterton’s influence on South Africa outside the activities of the LEL, see Graham Macklin, ‘The British Far Right’s South African Connection: A.K. Chesterton, Hendrik van den Bergh, and the South African Intelligence Services’, Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 25, No. 6 (2010), pp. 823–842. 116 Candour, 19 July 1957, pp. 21–22. 117 See Martin Durham, ‘The Conservative Party, the Extreme Right and the Problem of Political Space’, Cronin ed., The Failure of British Fascism, pp. 81–99. 118 See Ken Phillips and Mike Wilson, ‘The Conservative Party from Macmillan to Thatcher’, Niall Nugent and Roger King eds., The British Right (Farnborough, Saxon House: 1977), pp. 29–50. 119 A copy of the original will naming Chesterton as the recipient of Jeffery’s estate resides in the archive of materials held at Bath University. See: Chesterton Collection E. 6,Will of R.K. Jeffery (2pp. typescript), ca. 1959. 120 The Times, March 30 1962, p. 8. 121 Candour, 18/25 August 1961, pp. 56–58. 122 Candour, 30 March 1962, pp. 1–2.

6 FORWARD THE EXTREMISTS The National Front, 1967–1973

In February 1960, John Bean’s National Labour Party merged with Colin Jordan’s White Defence League to form the British National Party (BNP), under the slogan ‘For Race and Nation’.1 While the merger was initially beneficial for both parties, neither of whom had experienced any major growth in the face of competition from the Union Movement, problems soon arose from the diverging political visions of the party leadership. Bean was a committed white nationalist but felt that the only chance of such principles gaining political ground was through civil politics and the ballot box. By contrast, Colin Jordan and John Tyndall combined a distaste for democratic politics with an enthusiasm for uniformed demonstrations and violent confrontations with ‘Reds’.2 Bean later claimed to have tolerated these tendencies on the grounds that a certain amount of ‘controlled muscle’ was necessary to fend off attacks from anti-fascists who threatened the party’s public demonstrations.3 By 1961, however, Tyndall and Jordan’s jack-booted fantasies had coalesced into an amateurish attempt at paramilitarism.This took the form an internal faction known as ‘Spearhead’ that was to defend the British National Party’s platform in a similar manner to Mosley’s Defence Force in the 1930s.4 During the same period, Jordan made contact with an array of right-wing groups in Europe and the United States, including neo-Nazi and neo-fascist groups, hoping to form a coalition of like-minded parties. In May 1961, a five-day ‘Northern European’ camp was held in Norfolk with the BNP hosting delegates that Jordan had contacted in the European and North American extreme right.5 Bean jokingly recalled in his memoir that the attendees of this camp broke into two factions: the committed ideologues of Spearhead led by Jordan and the ‘Beerhead’, consisting of Bean and other members who attended mainly for relaxation and trips to the local pub.6 Early in the following year, the activities of Spearhead had become disruptive to the point where Jordan and Tyndall were expelled from the BNP. On 20 April 1962, the anniversary of Adolf Hitler’s birth, the two men

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formed the National Socialist Movement (NSM). As its name suggested, the NSM took the opposite approach to other groups in the extreme right by embracing and even flaunting its sympathy to fascism and Nazism. At a public demonstration in July 1962, a handful of NSM supporters made the fascist salute and displayed banners bearing the ‘sun-wheel’ insignia and the slogan ‘Britain Awake’.7 For this display they were mobbed by thousands of anti-fascist demonstrators, a number that dwarfed the membership of the NSM itself, estimated to be less than 100.8 Jordan’s open advocacy of neo-Nazism put him beyond the pale of the outwardly respectable right-wing extremism pursued by Chesterton, and soon brought him under suspicion from the authorities. In July 1962, he organized a meeting of National Socialists in Gloucestershire, including the leader of the American Nazi Party George Lincoln Rockwell, who had illegally entered the country through Ireland. At the end of August 1963, Rockwell had been deported back to the United States and four members of the NSM had been charged with violating the Public Order Act. A series of investigations by the police revealed that members of the NSM had engaged in training exercises that involved military-style drills in uniform. Evidence produced in the subsequent trial included a collection of Nazi memorabilia, as well as several tins of weed killer stored at NSM headquarters that the prosecution argued could be used as explosives.9 All four members of Spearhead were imprisoned, with Jordan and Tyndall receiving sentences of nine and six months respectively.10 Although it survived this ordeal, the NSM quickly succumbed to infighting, encouraged by the tabloid-worthy relationship between Jordan, Tyndall and the heiress Francois Dior. In the spring of 1964, therefore, Tyndall broke away and formed his own party, the Greater Britain Movement.11 Since the early days of the LEL, Chesterton had carefully avoided linking the LEL to political activity that could be construed as subversive or terrorist in nature. In 1955, he claimed that several ‘agent provocateurs’ had approached the organization with the aim of discrediting its cause or bringing it into association with criminal activity. Among the various activities he linked to ‘enemy agents’, Chesterton described a form of paramilitary activity similar to that which saw Jordan and Tyndall imprisoned: ‘cloak and dagger groups, usually containing no more than half-a-dozen young men, all living in a world of fantasy in which they appear to themselves as great conspiratorial heroes dealing with profound affairs of state’.12 Some years later, in 1959, Chesterton launched an attack on the White Defence League and other neo-Nazi groups after Jordan interrupted an LEL protest by letting off firecrackers. Up and down the country comes news of the proliferation of groups actuated by the same kind of impulse. From all I hear, most of them are re-living at second-hand a played-out (and by now decidedly malodorous) dream of the ‘thirties. The music is by Wagner. The words, very often, are by kind permission of Horst Wessel . . . such lightweights, shut in their inane little worlds of wish-fulfillment, are Heaven’s own gift to the enemy.13

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Along with his rebuke of Jordan and other ‘thunder-flashers’, Chesterton responded to accusations that the restrained approach to direct action adopted by the LEL – whose members were instructed not to fight back against stewards or police – was evidence of ‘flabbyness’. On the contrary, Chesterton argued, LEL activists were required to show ‘steadfast discipline’ in refraining from violence, whereas more militant activity was likely to attract negative publicity, endanger the public and ultimately harm the cause being fought for.14 As with the other disputes taking place in Britain’s extreme right at this time, arguments over violence reflected a mixture of generational and ideological discord in the movement. Few of the LEL’s mostly elderly and middle-aged membership was likely to support serious breaches of the law, let alone partake in the kind of open brawling which characterized Union Movement gatherings in the early 1950s. Despite his apologetics for fascist violence in the interwar period, Chesterton had long abandoned any interest in paramilitary vanguardism or the redemptive value of violence for its own sake. To some younger members of the extreme right, physically and socially uninhibited like their older colleagues, these notions were still valid, even if they had to be concealed or synthesized with more respectable forms of party activism. An interview with John Tyndall in 1978 captured some of the divide between Chesterton and the new generation of radicals. In addition to remarking upon the LEL’s reticence to engage in traditional party activism, Tyndall expressed disagreement with Chesterton’s perception of fascism in the 1930s: [Chesterton] had a theory that the British Union of Fascists started on its downwards slide as a result of the riot at Olympia. I always thought that rubbish, with due respect to A.K. – absolute rubbish . . . from all the accounts I’ve had from people who were there, the reds got no more than they deserved and there would’ve been no other way to have dealt with it.15 Given this difference in outlook between the LEL and the other factions, the prospects for a unified front of extreme right parties appeared unlikely in 1964. With the LEL now struggling to maintain its membership and public profile, however, there was pressure on Chesterton to seek some form of collaboration. At the LEL’s ‘Council of War’ meeting in June 1964, Austen Brooks acknowledged that ‘the two questions that cropped up at every meeting were those of the League’s title and of co-operation with other organizations’. Brooks’s outlook was pessimistic, since that past attempts at collaboration had proved troublesome and members of the LEL were unable to agree on which organizations should be contacted.16 Nevertheless, Chesterton’s address to the council suggested the vague possibility of their cause receiving ‘reinforcements’ from a younger generation: We may look glumly at the youth of the nation, at any rate at its more flamboyant elements, but there is nothing there that a haircut, a bath, a boot on the backside and a parade-ground bashing could not put right. . . . It is a

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better breed than that of the Wall-St. dollar-jugglers. Give it a chance and it will assuredly prevail.17 Over the next two years, the impetus for a united front grew even stronger, as Tyndall privately encouraged Bean and Chesterton to overcome their differences. By October 1966, negotiations between the LEL and John Bean’s British National Party had expanded to include the Racial Preservation Society, a group founded to promote repatriation of non-white migrants. In a letter to Bean the following month, Chesterton expressed dissatisfaction with comments he had made regarding the LEL’s lack of progress and electoral success. Overall, however, Chesterton’s tone in the letter was conciliatory and he expressed to Bean the potential advantages of a merger between the two organizations: You also have what we do not have to any extent, an appeal to the working classes, which seemed to us another good reason for a merger. It is not always easy to achieve a blending of different elements of the community – it was a very real difficulty in the pre-war BUF – but given genuine goodwill in the leadership I am sure it can be done.18 Tyndall, who met successively with Chesterton and Bean in 1966, further encouraged plans for a unified nationalist organization. Due to the notoriety of his recent activity, exacerbated by a conviction for possession of firearms in 1966, it was agreed that Tyndall would remain out of the National Front for the time being; members of the Greater Britain Movement were meanwhile encouraged to join the National Front on an individual basis.19 Following further negotiations with Bean and the BNP’s leader Andrew Fountaine, Chesterton put forward plans for a merger at the LEL’s annual general meeting in October 1966. After the LEL membership approved the move, the merger was completed in January 1967 thus marking the formal beginning of the National Front, amalgamated from the membership and leadership of the British National Party, the League of Empire Loyalists and parts of the Racial Preservation Society. Chesterton was appointed Chairman of the National Front’s ‘Policy Directorate’, the committee responsible for overseeing policy and the party’s membership, while Fountaine took on a corresponding role as Chairman of the party’s ‘Executive Directorate’.20 In terms of political potential, the formation of the National Front represented an important milestone for Britain’s extreme right, which had otherwise been unable to sustain a unified party of any significance since the collapse of the BUF. Particularly for Chesterton, who had remained aloof from party politics for much of this intervening period, the new party heralded a return to mass politics and, by extension, a more concerted attempt to revive or reinvent the cause of British fascism. In spite of the National Front’s importance in the broader history of Britain’s extreme right, Chesterton’s involvement – when viewed in the context of his entire political career – was relatively brief and ignominious. The same signs of personal and ideological fractiousness that had beset earlier movements were evident from the

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National Front’s inception, with the long and cautious negotiation process giving an early indication of the tenuous relationship between the LEL and BNP factions. Chesterton assured LEL members that the merger had been carefully negotiated to avoid ‘linking the League with past swastika-daubing and similar activities’, a tacit reference to the neo-Nazi affiliation of Tyndall’s Greater Britain Movement. By the same token, he sought to dispel a view, commonly held among younger members of the BNP, that the LEL was ‘old fashioned’ and ill equipped for party politics.21 The most pressing issue, as Chesterton had alluded in his letter to Bean, was whether or not the different factions could be united under some form of effective, mutually respected leadership. Chesterton claimed that the LEL harboured no real interest in the debate over who should lead the new organization: ‘We have found in our talks with other bodies a disposition to manoeuvre for the position of leader, but the matter is not one which greatly interests us’. Given that he later assumed a sole position as Chairman of the National Front, however, it was disingenuous for Chesterton to declare himself above the leadership debate. By the time the National Front was being negotiated, he was accustomed to acting as the head of the LEL and the sole editorial voice in Candour.22 This experience, coupled with Chesterton’s idealistic view of heroic leadership, meant that he was disinclined to relinquish control over the new movement to younger figures that had yet to prove their ‘capacity to lead’.23 It was not necessarily the case that Chesterton aspired to any kind of demagogic role at the head of the National Front; at an advanced age and with increasingly fragile health, he recognized that even serving as the head of the ‘Policy Committee’ would prove difficult – not least because of his healthmandated absences from England during the winter months. Despite Chesterton’s efforts to cultivate greater initiative within the LEL’s membership, however, many naturally assumed that he would assume a preeminent position within the new organization. Other participants in the merger, Tyndall in particular, ascertained the value in appointing Chesterton as a ‘father figure’ to unite the different factions.24 An unspoken advantage of this arrangement was that a more mature, stately figurehead might bolster the party against accusations of neo-Nazism or violent extremism. The period in which the National Front was formed offered a number of tactical advantages to a party of the extreme right. While the circumstances in Britain did not match those prevalent in the ‘Slump’ of the early 1930s, 1968 heralded greater political uncertainty than had prevailed through the prosperous post-war decades following the end of austerity.25 Internationally, the strikes and demonstrations held throughout Europe, coupled with the emergence of a revitalized New Left movement, gave additional impetus to those on the right who feared a new coalition of the extreme left. In France, this fear provided the initial impetus for formation of the group eventually known as the Front National, an approximate ideological counterpart to the British movement of the same name.26 In 1968, the antiimmigration movement received a significant boost from Conservative MP Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, an unprecedented public declaration against the influx of non-whites into Britain made by an otherwise respected member of the

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political establishment. Though the speech was something of a personal debacle for Powell, who was expelled from the Conservative Party, its foregrounding of the immigration debate was a boon to the recently formed National Front.27 Along with boosting the party’s profile and membership, the positive reaction to Powell’s comments from parts of the public offered to resolve two of the major problems inhibiting Britain’s extreme right: the lack of an independent political space outside the purview of British conservatism, and the absence of a legitimate identity capable of outgrowing interwar fascism. The international issues that had preoccupied the LEL were of less immediate value to the National Front but aligned with its overall stance on racial and national sovereignty. National Front policy circa 1969 dictated that the party would ‘give unremitting support to British and other European communities overseas in their maintenance of civilization in lands threatened with a reversion to barbarism’.28 To this end, the party protested the boycott of apartheid South Africa and declared its support for Ian Smith’s white-minority government in Rhodesia.29 Rather than carry forward the LEL’s somewhat dated references to the maintenance of the British Empire, the National Front proposed that the Commonwealth be replaced with ‘a modern British world system’ based on a cooperation between the United Kingdom and the white dominions. Alongside Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Rhodesia, South Africa and Eire were offered ‘an honoured place’ in the new system, while association with ‘approved Afro-Asian countries’ would be decided ‘on terms acceptable to its foundation members’.30 Despite its concessions to recent events, the system proposed was effectively the same as that proposed by Chesterton since 1945: a self-sufficient autarchy based on agricultural, economic and military independence from communism and international finance.31 There were additional parallels to be made to Mosley’s original plans for an empire economy, though the presentation of the National Front proposals could be credited in part to Tyndall, whose pamphlet Six Principles of British Nationalism described an updated system of British cooperation. Some of the National Front’s proposals bore an unmistakable similarity to Mosley’s corporatism, such as the call for the state to mediate relationships between employees and employers while ‘maintaining the principle of private enterprise within a framework of national guidance’.32 Other elements of the National Front’s 14-point policy statement echoed the spirit, if not the letter, of fascist doctrine in the 1930s. A National Front government would create a movement ‘for the healthy mental and physical development of British youth’, a task which had also preoccupied the vitalist, youth-obsessed Blackshirts. The party’s statements regarding its powers of governance were a mixture of coded authoritarianism and ‘tough on crime’ populism, calling for firm and democratic government, responsible for and to the British people, with the courage to cure the Nation of the spiritual sickness that generates more sympathy for the murderer, thug and criminal than for their unfortunate victims, and fails to provide society the backing for protection necessary to maintain the rule of law.33

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Even at face value, the wording of the National Front’s policies bore unmistakable signs of fascist influence, with oblique references to an organic national body afflicted by some kind of spiritual ailment.34 If this suggested the covert or unconscious resumption of fascism within Chesterton’s political activism, however, then other parts of the National Front’s policy seemed to suggest a continuation of the LEL’s radical conservatism. Point five of the party’s program called for constitutional reforms to combat ‘the disturbing trend towards over-centralization and irresponsible bureaucratic dictatorship’ and ‘reaffirming the basic Rights and Freedoms that are the prerogatives of the British people’.35 Although this could be viewed simply as pseudo-libertarian posturing on the part of the National Front, policies of this kind were not without precedent in the recent history of Britain’s extreme right. Measures for constitutional reform had been proposed by members of the After-Victory Group circa 1945, and more recently, Candour provided a regular platform for articles criticizing fiscal irresponsibility and other forms of governmental overreach. In a more immediate sense, following the passage of the Race Relations Act in 1965, the National Front and other political opponents of racial integration had renewed incentive to rally behind the principles of free speech and the right to protest. To aid five members of the Racial Preservation Society, charged with violating the Act, Chesterton established a ‘Free Speech Defence Committee’ which raised some £4,000 to cover the cost of the successful defence. This sum was, according to the committee’s honourary treasurer, ‘a small price to pay in order to preserve through the courts our cherished constitutional right to freedom of speech’.36 During the first year of the National Front’s existence, Chesterton trained much of his attention on the affairs of Britain’s former colonies, a tendency encouraged by the six months he spent wintering in South Africa each year for health reasons. His focus returned to domestic affairs in April 1969 following the resignation of French president Charles de Gaulle, which removed a major obstacle to Britain’s entry into the European Common Market. With the Conservative Party under the direction of the pro-European Edward Heath, Chesterton’s dire prediction of a resurgent drive for European integration came true. Not every member of the National Front shared Chesterton and his LEL cohorts’ determination to avoid European entanglements. John Bean had entertained the idea of a more continental focus in the foundation of the BNP and counselled the readers of Spearhead, John Tyndall’s nationalist magazine, on the potential benefits of closer cooperation with Europe.This was an exception to the party’s general preoccupation with a resurgent British nationalism, which in Tyndall’s view required a greater focus on the United Kingdom and the white nations of the Commonwealth.37 Following de Gaulle’s resignation, therefore, Chesterton oversaw the launch of a National Front campaign against the Common Market in May 1969, rallying under the slogan of ‘Keep Britain Out’.38 Although this campaign was of little immediate consequence for the National Front, opposition to European integration remained a permanent fixture of the party’s platform throughout the 1970s and a wider legacy of Chesterton’s influence on the British extreme right.

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The National Front’s dual-directorate system was envisioned as a means to prevent leadership disputes and avoid exacerbating the split between the LEL and BNP factions of the new party. Chesterton’s forced absences made the administration of the party difficult, however, and permitted infighting. Following his return from South Africa in the spring of 1968, Chesterton became embroiled in a factional dispute with the Executive Directorate led by Fountaine, who alleged that Chesterton had been incommunicative while overseeing National Front affairs via ‘remote control’ from overseas. Fountaine and his supporters further alleged that Chesterton had invited extremism into the Front’s ranks by his efforts to make Tyndall a formal member, had demanded excessive displays of ‘loyalty’ from other members, and had failed to properly manage the party’s funds.39 In May 1968, Chesterton clashed with Fountaine again over a directive written by the latter in response to rioting in Paris – which included instructions for members in the event of a ‘revolution’ spreading to Britain. After preventing the directive from being distributed, Chesterton attempted to consolidate the two directorates of the National Front leadership into a single council, prompting further protests from Fountaine and others who resented the autocratic nature of their chairman’s leadership. This dispute came to a head in June 1968 when Fountaine was expelled from the National Front on grounds of ‘insubordination’.40 He would soon be reinstated to the party, however, after a high court judge ruled that his expulsion had violated the National Front’s constitution.41 Following the spat with Fountaine, Chesterton resolved to simplify the National Front’s governance by consolidating the two directorates into a single body with himself at the head. This temporarily resolved the leadership question but fostered resentment among the members of the party dissatisfied with the dominance of Chesterton and the LEL faction. Even Tyndall, a supporter of Chesterton’s leadership and later the party’s leader, acknowledged in retrospect that his position on the directorate was ‘in a way autocratic’, driving dissident members of the party to ‘plot against him behind the scenes’.42 An even deeper source of dissent against Chesterton was his unwillingness to capitalize more heavily on the backlash against immigration yielded by Powell’s speech. Besides his general reticence to engage in a broader campaign of anti-immigration populism, his attitude towards Powell precluded any notion of an alliance with the former MP or his supporters. In the pages of Candour, Chesterton attacked Powell as a ‘fortunate gentleman’ whose late arrival to the immigration issue was a sign of political opportunism: ‘Never before has there been a heretic more prized and petted than this heretic’.43 Besides his bitter recrimination of Powell’s rapid rise to prominence, Chesterton also expressed concern over the now-deposed minister’s other political views. Powell took a decidedly different view of the Empire to loyalists like Chesterton, arguing that the ‘myth’ of a lost golden age had limited rather than enabled England’s ability to flourish culturally and economically.44 In the General Election of June 1970, the National Front ran 10 candidates but received disappointing returns, with all candidates failing to retrieve their deposit by exceeding 5 per cent of votes cast. In the wake of these results, another rift

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emerged within the party leadership, this time in the form of an ‘Action Committee’ made up of members who accused Chesterton of abusing his authority and promoting his personal clique at the expense of more capable members.45 Although he enjoyed the support of prominent members like Tyndall and Bean, the challenge from the Action Committee confirmed Chesterton’s fears that the party had succumbed to factionalism and backbiting like so many of its predecessors. Exhausted and outraged by an act of ‘subordination’, he resigned from the National Front, bringing with him most of the remaining LEL members. In the December issue of Candour, Chesterton outlined the reasons for his departure: There is some fine material in the National Front but too many people of little minds and meaner souls have been allowed to rise into the higher echelons. Get rid of them and the movement has a future. Keep them where they are and so much time will be spent in petty intrigues that none will be left for fighting the enemies of Britain.46 Chesterton quickly made arrangements for a new, non-party entity known as the Candour–League movement to support his publishing efforts and replace the nowdefunct LEL.With recent events having confirmed his antipathy towards traditional political organizing, Chesterton determined that the new organization would ‘keep clear of the political market-place, squalid in-fighting’ and ‘do for the Right what the Fabian Society did for the Left’. In a somewhat belated acknowledgement of the LEL’s anachronistic posture, Chesterton also admitted that the new organization would avoid the ‘Empire’ moniker, which had long since ‘come to mean any big (and dubious) financial, commercial or industrial complex’.47 With Chesterton’s resignation, leadership in the National Front had been assumed by John O’Brien, a former Powellite who intended to draw the party towards a more restrained form of right-wing populism. O’Brien saw the National Front through a period of steady growth in 1971, with a report in The Times predicting that the party was poised to reach 15,000 members across the United Kingdom.48 In 1972, however, O’Brien and a number of other moderate leaders resigned following revelations that Tyndall, then vice-chairman of the party, had been in contact with neo-Nazi groups active on the European continent.49 Tyndall’s subsequent ascent to the party’s leadership roughly coincided with the event that would provide its most promising boost in membership and electoral performance to date: the arrival in Britain of thousands of Asian migrants who had been expelled from Uganda by Idi Amin.50 Having been responsible for O’Brien’s entry into the National Front in 1970, Chesterton did not appear concerned by his departure and maintained a friendly relationship with Tyndall after he assumed the party leadership.51 On occasions, Chesterton even lent practical support to Tyndall’s party: when a group of National Front members were arrested for protesting the arrival of refugees from Uganda at Heathrow Airport in October 1972, Chesterton appealed for financial support on their behalf in Candour.52 In 1973, Chesterton was contacted by Tyndall

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regarding the possibility of his being appointed as the National Front’s President, a figurehead position that would facilitate further cooperation between the party and other nationalist organizations.53 Despite the opposition of Martin Webster, whom Chesterton had once derided as ‘the fat boy from Peckham’, the National Front’s directorate voted in favour of this measure. Chesterton was formally offered the role by Tyndall in June 1973. Having postponed his decision until the National Front’s next annual general meeting, however, Chesterton was unable to assume the role prior to his death in August 1973.54 Had his health not decided the matter, Chesterton’s willingness to rejoin the National Front may have been influenced by other matters relating to the party’s increasing links to neo-Nazism. In a brief piece of correspondence with Tyndall in May 1973, Chesterton requested information regarding ‘the participation of some N.F. members in an operation called 88’.55 This number referred to ‘Column 88’, a neo-Nazi group that emerged in the National Front’s ranks in the early 1970s, along with an array of other clandestine factions that would later be implicated in right-wing terrorist activity and the neo-fascist subcultures of Western Europe.56 Alongside his ongoing dealings with the National Front, Chesterton spent the final months of his life in pursuit of a unified effort to protest Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community. In May 1973, he met with Don Bennett, a former Vice Marshall for the RAF and one-time Liberal MP who had begun planning an ‘umbrella organization’ to draw together various political groups opposed to European integration known as the Free British.57 In the following month, Chesterton raised the possibility of seeking Bennett’s direct financial support for the costs of operating the Candour–League. Bennett had recently donated generous sums to Powell to support his opposition to the Common Market and Chesterton appeared optimistic that Candour, being ‘the first to smell out the plot to engulf Britain in the EEC’, would also warrant a contribution.58 Chesterton further confided in a letter to Aidan Mackey, a friend and close supporter of the Candour–League movement, that his motives for seeking financial support were not solely political: ‘in the event of funds drying up’, he wrote, ‘I would not be able to winter in South Africa – which, my doctor says, would give me only a fifty-fifty chance of survival’.59 As events transpired, Chesterton’s health would deteriorate rapidly due to cancer a short time after this letter was written. Despite the personal and financial troubles that dogged Chesterton’s final months he managed to maintain an active correspondence, both domestic and international, while continuing to oversee the publication of Candour. In July 1973 he sent a message to the Free British asking its council to consider ‘special activities likely to focus public attention on the anti-Common Market cause’, like those employed by the LEL ‘without violence but with audacity and tremendous panache’. In a fitting summation of his political career up to that point, Chesterton’s final recommendation to the council before his death called on them ‘to disregard the statement of the gentleman who said that the problem has to be approached without emotion. If ever there was a time for appealing to public sentiment it is surely today, when we are faced with the loss of

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our national identity and our sovereign rights as an historic people’.60 By the end of July 1973, Chesterton had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and, facing uncertain results in the event of surgery, opted to ‘let events take their course’.61 He succumbed to his illness on 16 August 1973, at the age of 74, and was honoured the following month by a double-issue of Candour bearing tribute from his friends and close supporters.62

Legacy and aftermath Since leaving the National Front, Chesterton had drafted his memoirs and was near the completion of a follow-up to his 1965 book, The New Unhappy Lords. Published posthumously under the title Facing the Abyss, the volume represented his final foray into conspiratorial analysis and focused primarily on Britain’s social degeneration. Chesterton’s criticism of the various youth movements emerging in Britain, which he took as evidence of its growing spiritual corruption, included a passing reference to ‘skinheads’. This encapsulated the extent to which he had grown detached from the youthful undercurrents of Britain’s extreme right, as skinhead culture would become synonymous with the movement during the 1980s.63 In private correspondence shortly before his death, Chesterton had confessed to a friend that his optimism regarding a British revival had begun to wane in light of its entry into the European Common Market: ‘eventually it must break-down, but what will then be left to us, with our former Dominions pushed into the dollar empire and no longer interested in the British market’.64 Between the continued decline of Britain’s international prominence and the fractious ineffectiveness of the nationalist movement, there was ample reason for Chesterton to remove himself from the continued struggle against a malevolent global conspiracy. It appeared, however, that the thought of abandoning a cause he traced from the trenches of the First World War was more distasteful to Chesterton than publicly declaring the extent of Britain’s decline. He thus counselled readers in Facing the Abyss to maintain a spirit of transcendent optimism in the face of an ever-deepening crisis: ‘Victory is for the brave in heart and the tough in spirit. In these respects we have not the pretext that our fathers left us ill-endowed’.65 For a brief period after Chesterton’s death, there were signs that these triumphant sentiments would actually translate into a genuine political revival for Britain’s extreme right. Sustained by its ongoing campaigns against immigration and European integration and offered new opportunities by deindustrialization and the breakdown of the post-war consensus, the National Front had grown steadily since Chesterton’s departure. In addition to the supporters drawn by the ‘Ugandan Asians’ issue in late 1972, a split in the Monday Club over the Common Market issue also drove a number of ex-Conservatives into the party’s upper ranks.66 After the National Front saw modest gains in the October 1974 General Election, it appeared that the populist faction, headed by former Powellite John Kingsley Read, would lead the party out of the political wilderness and into the more respectable position occupied by its counterparts in Western Europe. Chesterton’s

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warning about the dangers of ‘petty intrigue’ went unheeded, however, as another protracted bout of political infighting broke out between Read’s populists and the extremists lead by Tyndall and Webster. In October 1975, acting as Party Chairman, Read attempted to purge the directorate by suspending Tyndall and nine other leaders.67 When this action was overturned by a court order two months later, Read resigned along with his close supporters and founded the short-lived National Party of the United Kingdom. Tyndall, who had taken measures to prevent Read from poaching the National Front’s membership and infrastructure, was reelected as Chairman in January 1976.68 Having weathered further infighting and the resolute opposition of anti-fascist and anti-racist groups, Tyndall mounted an ambitious campaign leading up to the 1979 general election, spurred on by a strong result at the London County Council Election in 1977. Fatefully, however, the ascent of Margaret Thatcher’s ‘New Right’ left no space for the National Front, whose 303 candidates failed to secure a single seat.69 This expensive and humiliating result triggered another series of internal schisms:Tyndall resigned as Chairman in 1980, leaving Webster to oversee the party until his expulsion in 1984. Protesting against the National Front’s lurch into esoteric neo-Nazism and violent hooliganism, Chesterton’s old foe Andrew Fountaine formed another splinter group in 1980 which coalesced into the Nationalist Party. Of the various grouplets that emerged from the 1979 collapse, it was Tyndall’s New National Front which proved the most enduring. In 1982, the party reinvented itself as yet another iteration of the British National Party, which Tyndall led in a dictatorial fashion through the political wilderness of the Thatcher era. Though it failed to replicate the successes of its counterparts in Western Europe, the BNP clawed its way back into relevance during the 1990s, through cultivating a more outwardly respectable image. Tyndall’s departure in 1999, the result of a bitter leadership struggle with his former deputy and successor Nick Griffin, heralded another ‘false dawn’ in the recent history of Britain’s extreme right.70 Under Griffin’s leadership, the BNP’s efforts to withdraw from the streets, tap into public fears of Islamic terrorism and seek a more legitimate identity in local politics resulted in some unprecedented electoral successes – which culminated in the election of Griffin and Andrew Brons (a former member of Jordan’s National Socialist Movement) to the European Parliament in 2009.71 Like the National Front before it, however, the BNP was unable to sustain this success into subsequent election cycles and has since succumbed to another (possibly terminal) bout of infighting.72 The rapid rise and decline of the BNP in the last two decades speaks to both the precariousness of the extreme right’s position and the diligence of its opponents.73 On the fringes of British politics, the emergence of smaller anti-immigration and Islamophobic grouplets such as the English Defence League serves as a worrying reminder of the movement’s persistence in contemporary society. At the time of writing, however, the BNP and its ilk have been politically eclipsed by the rise of the United Kingdom Independence Party, which has successfully poached the extreme right’s hard-Eurosceptic and populist anti-immigration platforms. The outcome of the 2016 ‘Brexit referendum’, determined in no small part by UKIP’s

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aggressive campaigns, stands as a crowning achievement of the new radical right in Britain, though not one that guarantees its further electoral success.74 As demonstrated in the preceding chapters, A.K. Chesterton played a significant role in sustaining the movement that emerged from the ashes of interwar British fascism, though his personal imprint on the contemporary extreme right becomes harder to discern when moving further towards the new millennium. Unusually, in an age of anonymous blogs and social media, Candour persists as a print publication and maintains a semi-regular publishing schedule overseen by the trust established by Rosine de Bounevialle in 1996. Since de Bounevialle’s death in 1999, the trust continues to reprint and distribute Chesterton’s work, and recently published its own official history of the LEL and Candour.75 These efforts, comparable to those carried out by the Friends of Oswald Mosley, ensure that Chesterton’s literature remains available to those willing to seek it out. With the proliferation of online communities, as well as the increasingly ‘transnational’ dynamics of radical politics, however, Chesterton is likely to remain something of an obscure character when compared to the iconic Mosley or the allegedly prophetic Enoch Powell. Despite his diminished stature, there are still some valid grounds to consider Chesterton’s thinking in relation to contemporary trends relating to the extreme right. In a recent book examining the role of the extreme right leading up to the 2016 ‘Brexit referendum’, Paul Stocker writes: The mainstreaming of the far-right does not mean that those who hold fascist or Nazi ideologies are any more welcome in British politics. . . . Rather, the broader worldview of far right, one which sees the ‘nation’ as the be all and end-all in politics and seeks to scapegoat foreigners for Britain’s problems, has become the new normal. The far right, as a movement, has failed but its ideas have become absorbed into the mainstream.76 Whether or not one accepts this diagnosis of contemporary British society, it is impossible not to see echoes of Chesterton’s ideology in the recent history of populist or radical right-wing politics in the United Kingdom. This is especially true when considering the drastic imagery deployed by some proponents for Britain’s departure from the EU – replete with dire warnings of an impending crisis brought about by flooding waves of migration and the irreversible loss of national sovereignty to distant, cosmopolitan bureaucrats. Within the narrower confines of the extreme right, however, Chesterton’s most profound ideological legacy is his work as a conspiratorial analyst of global affairs and modern history. We have seen in the preceding chapters how conspiratorial anti-Semitism played a profound role in both enabling and constraining Chesterton’s career as political activist from 1933 until his death. In order to fully appreciate this aspect of Chesterton’s legacy, however, we need to look more deeply at the lineage of his conspiratorial anti-Semitism, its evolution into the post-fascist era and the manner in which it became intertwined with the other racial obsessions of the extreme right after 1945.

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Notes 1 Bean, Many Shades of Black, p. 141. 2 Eatwell, Fascism, p. 264. 3 Bean, Many Shades of Black, p. 106. 4 Jackson, Colin Jordan, pp. 100–105. 5 The Times, 2 August 1962, p. 10. 6 Bean, Many Shades of Black, pp. 146–147. 7 These two elements were notable as recurring features of extreme right displays between 1945 and 1967. The sun-wheel symbol, represented by a circle with a cross, was comparable to the BUF’s ‘flash and circle’ or the Nazi swastika, though Bean claimed that it represented a pagan icon of Northern European origin that predated fascism. The symbol appeared as at the head of the BNP’s newspaper Combat. ‘Britain Awake’ was a slogan used in Mosley’s campaigns during the 1930s that later gained usage in Union Movement publications. 8 The Times, 2 July 1962, p. 12; Jackson, Colin Jordan, p. 110. 9 The Times, 29 August 1962, p. 5. 10 Details of the case against the Spearhead members are preserved in the records of the Central Criminal Court. See:TNA CRIM 1/3973,The Queen against John Colin Campbell Jordan, John Hutchyns Tyndall, Dennis Pirie and Ian Kerr-Ritchie, 11 September 1962. 11 Tyndall, The Eleventh Hour, pp. 190–191. 12 Candour, 11 November 1955, p. 2. 13 Candour, 27 March 1959, pp. 89–90. 14 Candour, 27 March 1959, pp. 90. 15 Chesterton Collection A. 11, p. 7. 16 Candour Interim Report, June–July 1964, p. 8. 17 Candour Interim Report, June–July 1964, pp. 10–11. 18 Chesterton Collection E. 14, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to John Bean, 1 November 1966. 19 Bean, Many Shades of Black, p. 184.The Greater Britain Movement was formally dissolved in August 1967, though Tyndall refrained from joining the National Front immediately to avoid internal disputes. See Candour, August 1967, p. 64. 20 For a general overview of the National Front’s founding, see Martin Walker, The National Front (London: Fontana, 1977), pp. 51–68. 21 Candour, November 1966, pp. 162–164. 22 Chesterton Collection A. 13, p. 7. 23 Candour, November 1966, pp. 162–164. 24 Chesterton Collection A. 11, Baker interview with John Tyndall, 4 April 1978. 25 On the political opportunities for Britain’s extreme right leading up to 1970, see Herbert Kitschelt, The Radical Right in Western Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 247–248. On the link between domestic racial politics, immigration and the rise of the National Front see Anthony M. Messina, Race and Party Competition in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 103–126. 26 Michalina Vaughan, ‘The Extreme Right in France: “Lepenisme” or the Politics of Fear’, Luciano Cheles, Ronnie Ferguson and Michalina Vaughan eds., Neo-Fascism in Europe (Essex: Longman, 1991), pp. 216–218. 27 On Powell’s comments on immigration, see Douglas E. Schoen, Enoch Powell and the Powellites (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1977), pp. 25–44. For the specific impact of Powell’s speech on the National Front, see Stan Taylor, The National Front in English Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982), pp. 18–27. On Powell’s wider influence on postwar British politics, see Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Post-Colonial Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 28 Candour, March 1969, p. 19. 29 On the background to the Smith government’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, see James Barber, Rhodesia:The Road to Rebellion (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 268–305.

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30 Candour, March 1969, p. 19. 31 On the development of economic ideas within the National Front after 1967, see John E. Richardson, ‘The National Front: The Search for a “Nationalist” Economic Policy’, Copsey and Worley eds., Tomorrow Belongs to Us, pp. 48–68. 32 Candour, March 1969, p. 19. 33 Candour, March 1969, p. 19. 34 See A.K. Chesterton, ‘A Spiritual Typhus’, cited by Roger Griffin ed., Fascism: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 178–180. 35 Candour, March 1969, p. 19. 36 Candour, June 1968, p. 64. 37 John Tyndall, Six Principles of British Nationalism (Welling: Albion Press, 1966), pp. 10–15. 38 Candour, May 1969, p. 45. 39 Chesterton Collection E. 17, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Andrew Fountaine, 27 May 1968. 40 Chesterton Collection E. 17, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Andrew Fountaine, 19 June 1968. 41 The Times, 20 August 1968, p. 3. 42 Chesterton Collection A. 11, p. 5. 43 Candour, May 1969, pp. 41–42. See also: Ken Phillips, ‘The Nature of Powellism’, Nugent and King eds., The British Right, pp. 99–132. 44 Enoch Powell, ‘The Decline of Britain’, quoted in Frank O’Gorman, British Conservatism (London: Longman, 1986), pp. 214–215. 45 WCML SUBJ/FASCISM/1/4, Action Committee to A.K. Chesterton, 6 October 1970. 46 Candour, December 1970, pp. 199–200. 47 Candour, February 1971, pp. 15–16. 48 The Times, 16 March 1971, p. 5. 49 Taylor, The National Front in English Politics, pp. 55–56. 50 Regarding the impacts of the ‘Ugandan Asians’ issue upon the National Front, see Taylor, The National Front in English Politics, pp. 24–25. 51 Candour, April 1971, pp. 29–32. 52 Candour, October 1972, p. 193. 53 Chesterton Collection E. 28, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Martin Webster, 11 May 1973. 54 Chesterton Collection E. 28, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to John Tyndall, 13 June 1973. 55 Chesterton Collection E. 28, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to John Tyndall, 17 May 1973. 56 For brief comments on the activity and exposure of terrorist and paramilitary factions in the British extreme right, see Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, p. 262. 57 Chesterton Collection E. 28, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Don Bennett, 16 May 1973; Candour, June 1973, p. 60. 58 Chesterton Collection E. 29, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Aidan Mackey, 23 June 1973. 59 Chesterton Collection E. 29, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Aidan Mackey, 23 June 1973. 60 Chesterton Collection E. 29, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Kevan Bleach, 4 July 1973. 61 Chesterton Collection E. 29, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Professor R.P. Oliver, 27 July 1973. 62 Candour, August–September 1973, pp. 89–90. 63 A.K. Chesterton, Facing the Abyss (Liss Forest: A.K. Chesterton Trust, 1976), p. 51. 64 Chesterton Collection E. 29, Letter from A.K. Chesterton to Charles Hill, 8 May 1973. 65 Chesterton, Facing the Abyss, p. 118. 66 Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain, pp. 109–110. 67 The Times, 20 December 1975, p. 3. 68 The Times, 10 February 1976, p. 2. 69 See Christopher T. Husbands, ‘When the Bubble Burst:Transient and Persistent National Front Supporters, 1974–79’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1984), pp. 249–260.

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70 Goodwin, New British Fascism, pp. 171–182. 71 Goodwin, New British Fascism, pp. 55–76. 72 Matthew J. Goodwin, ‘Forever a False Dawn? Explaining the Electoral Collapse of the British National Party (BNP)’, Parliamentary Affairs,Vol. 67, No. 4 (2014), pp. 887–906. 73 See Copsey, Anti-Fascism in Britain, pp. 187–223. 74 On UKIP’s role in the 2016 referendum, see Clarke, Goodwin and Whitely, Brexit, pp. 111–145. 75 See prior references to McNeile and Black, History of the League of Empire Loyalists and Candour. 76 Paul Stocker, English Uprising (London: Melville House, 2017), p. 202.

7 WHAT IS BEHIND IT ALL? Racism, anti-Semitism and conspiracy after 1945

The origins of Chesterton’s ‘Money Power’ thesis can be traced back to a long tradition of conspiratorial anti-Semitism, which began in earnest with the distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in the early 1900s. First appearing in Russia at the turn of the 20th century, the Protocols were a forged document that described a meeting of Jewish ‘elders’ plotting to solidify their power over world affairs. Many of the tropes that remain ubiquitous in anti-Semitic thought and literature to this day can be identified in the Protocols; most importantly, however, the conspiracy it alleged was highly versatile, and could be adapted and invoked as ‘proof ’ that Jewish influence was the unifying factor behind a range of unrelated ideas and movements, including Marxism, Darwinian theory and Nietzschean philosophy. Freemasonry also featured prominently in the Protocols, which described Masonic societies as the conduit through which Jewish plans could be transmitted and inflicted upon the Gentile world.1 The occult aspects of the Protocols provided a hint as to their connection with earlier forms of conspiratorial myth that had grown in connection with religious rather than political anti-Semitism. In 1921, Anglo-Jewish journalist Lucien Wolf published a book critiquing references to a global conspiracy in the British press, tracing the concept to religious tracts published in the late 18th century.Wolf noted that these earlier works were absent of any mention of Jews and instead pointed to a ‘triple conspiracy of Philosophers, Freemasons, and Illuminati, who formed an actual sect aiming deliberately and methodically at the overthrow of the established religions and governments throughout Europe’. Only after the European revolutions in 1848 had the Jews been transplanted into the conspiracies, with the Protocols representing a convenient but highly dubious form of proof for their centrality in the ‘Formidable Sect’ long suspected of driving unrest throughout the world.2 Wolf ’s book was followed by further investigations into the Protocols which identified them as the most successful in a series of falsified anti-Semitic documents that emerged in the mid-19th century.3

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Efforts to debunk the ‘Elders conspiracy’ culminated in legal proceedings carried out by a Swiss court in 1934, which ruled the original text to be a forgery.4 Long prior to this point, however, various adaptations of the Protocols had been widely disseminated throughout the Western world. In the United States, the industrialist Henry Ford funded the mass printing and distribution of an English-language translation entitled The International Jew. In Britain, copies were circulated largely through the efforts of the Britons, the small but fanatically anti-Jewish organization founded by Henry Harold Beamish in 1919.5 Having incubated many of the antiSemitic and fascist ideas that Chesterton would inherit during his time in the BUF, the Britons’ publishing arm was revived in the aftermath of the Second World War. Based in Devon, the company was responsible for printing and distributing many of Chesterton’s books and pamphlets after 1945 alongside a range of other antiSemitic works that drew their inspiration from the Protocols conspiracy.6 The earliest and most influential interpretation of the Protocols in British circles was produced by Nesta Webster, an author who promoted a vast and esoteric conspiracy that incorporated Masons, the Bavarian Illuminati and the Jews, among many other ‘secret societies’ responsible for the manipulation of world events. Though Webster can undoubtedly be credited with shaping Chesterton’s anti-Semitic ideas, it was her method of approaching world affairs that had the most profound influence on his work as a whole. Webster conducted her study of history and contemporary politics with the assumption that hidden and malevolent forces were responsible for both everyday events and the wholesale upheaval of human society. This worldview was an early example of what Richard Hofstadter described as the ‘Paranoid Style’ in an essay concerning the American radical right in the 1960s: The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a ‘vast’ or ‘gigantic’ conspiracy as the motive force in historical events. History is a conspiracy, set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power.7 The conspiratorial nature of Webster’s approach to history placed her work at odds with the ‘materialist’ analysis of Marxism, as well as the empirical traditions of liberalism, by seeking to explain the world in terms of deliberate human action rather than natural or economic forces. In taking this approach, Webster complemented the presumptions of nationalism and fascism, which she identified as the ideological foundations for a movement that would combat subversive and ‘occult’ Jewry.8 Certain aspects of Webster’s conspiracy theory did not transfer directly into A.K. Chesterton’s work, especially those with overtly religious connotations. A selfprofessed agnostic, Chesterton was careful to avoid alienating his followers in the Candour movement – which included a number of staunch Roman Catholics – by promoting a vague, non-denominational support for ‘Christian values’. According to Rosine de Bounevialle, he was also reticent to discuss or criticize Masonry, for

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fear of upsetting the small number of Candour supporters who were English Freemasons.Whatever his deeper feelings regarding the ‘occult’, Chesterton’s conspiracy theories were never solely reliant upon religious inspiration. He instead constructed the ‘Money Power’ conspiracy from a variety of sources that combined anti-Semitic myth with pseudo-materialist analysis of global politics, economics and social history. He took considerable inspiration in this method from A.N. Field, the New Zealand–based author of The Truth About the Slump, a book linking the economic depression of the 1930s to conspiracy by international finance. In its initial stages, Field’s investigation took an almost academic tone, which made no mention of the occult traditions detailed by Webster and focused on the dynamics of international markets and central banking. As the book progressed, however, Field turned to an open discussion of a Jewish conspiracy and dedicated a chapter to discussing the ‘Mystery of the Protocols’.9 Quite contrary to the stolid economic analysis that introduced the book, Field’s discussion of the Protocols bore similarities to Webster’s Secret Societies, detailing the same continuous patterns of conspiracy running through Freemasonry and the Bavarian Illuminati.10 Despite this lurid explanation of the occult forces running behind the conspiracy, the response which Field proposed was more prosaic than Webster’s fascistic appeals to a national resurgence. He proposed a broad plan for financial reform that, as a starting point, recommended the work of American economist Irving Fisher. Field was also adamant that his exposure of the predominantly Jewish ‘Money Power’ not be taken as an incitement for anti-Semitism, insisting that ‘[he] would gladly have omitted from his pages all reference to race and creed had it been in any wise possible for him to have done so. Nothing is further from the author’s desire than to inspire his readers with feelings of hatred or aversion towards Jews because they are Jews’.11 In his later career, Chesterton would make a similar and equally unconvincing attempt to downplay the anti-Semitic implications of his work, insisting that his critiques applied only to a ‘minority’ of the Jewish population.12 Journalistic prudence should have disqualified the Protocols from Chesterton’s serious consideration, regardless of their popularity among other conspiratorial anti-Semites. Like Webster and Field, however, Chesterton’s burning desire to validate his worldview made it difficult for him to dismiss a document that appeared to have predicted the movements of ‘World Jewry’ so vividly. In 1947, he claimed to have broken a ‘self-imposed rule which hitherto I have always kept’ by quoting from ‘that mysterious and evil document known as the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion’ citing it in an article for London Tidings. Anticipating backlash from readers, Chesterton echoed Field’s assertion that ‘the enormous significance of the Protocols is in their fulfilment’ rather than their authenticity.13 If any reader writes to say that I have been quoting from a forgery, I shall not argue with him. The proof of the matter is not in my hands and in any case it does not really greatly interest me. To my mind there is only one relevant question – Is the policy detailed in the Protocols being carried out?14

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Developments in 1947 seem to have sparked in Chesterton a renewed fascination with this question, even prompting him to consider a book on the subject.15 It is almost certain that Chesterton was versed in the lore of the Protocols well prior to 1947, despite his unwillingness to make mention of them in public before that time. In June 1961, the BBC devoted an hour-long radio program to discussing their authenticity, prompting an attack from Chesterton in Candour. In light of the BBC’s pre-existing bias regarding ‘Jewish interests’, ‘nobody should have been surprised to discover the aim of the programme was not merely to present the Protocols as a forgery but to have them uttered as the melodramatic ravings of a maniac’.16 Putting aside his critique of the BBC’s aesthetic choices, Chesterton’s argument boiled down to a strange defence of the Protocols as a possible forgery that nevertheless gave accurate predictions of the rise of Jewish power: It is, with submission, impossible for any intelligent person, aware of what is happening in the world, to read or listen to the reading of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion without being astounded by their prophetic insight, their knowledge of the weaknesses in Gentile society, their proposed techniques for exploiting those weaknesses.17 In a surprising turn, Christopher Sykes (the BBC producer responsible for the program) replied to Chesterton’s criticisms in a letter reprinted for Candour readers two weeks after the original article appeared. After politely assuring Chesterton that neither himself nor those directly overseeing the program were Jewish, Sykes reiterated his case that the Protocols were indeed a forgery, as determined by the ruling of the Swiss courts, and that the conspiracy it alleged was merely an antiSemitic variation on an age-old theme: ‘Many Governments, many parities, many groups of men have been guilty of many of the abominations in which the “Elders” exulted’.18 Chesterton’s rejoinder offered another plea on behalf of the Protocols’ value, protesting that Sykes’s program ‘never hinted at the undoubted spiritual relationship’ between the real ‘Money Power’ conspiracy and ‘pretensions attributed to the “Learned Elders” ’. He concluded, however, that the historicity of the work itself remained dubious and that ‘we [the Candour–League] are the first to dub as lunatics those who attempt to argue our case on the basis of the authenticity of the Protocols, strange, disturbing and well worth reading though they be’.19 From a cynical point of view, the existence of documents alleging to offer a peek behind the curtain of Jewish power was of use to Chesterton in attempting to leverage public opinion against the Jews. At a meeting of the National Front Council in July 1945, for example, he produced a letter that had allegedly come into his possession by mistake from a Jewish organization ‘calling on all Jews to vote Liberal, as the Liberal Party had always made it easy for the Jews to get into this country and prosper’. Chesterton proposed that the letter be published in National Front literature as it ‘would carry great weight with the anti-Jewish’.20 In this instance, the document in question may well have been a legitimate piece of political advertising geared towards the interests of Jewish voters. In Chesterton’s eyes, however, even mundane revelations of a common interest among British Jews was evidence of an

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ever-deepening conspiratorial plot. He was thus willing to overlook the empirical weakness of the Protocols due to his broader conviction that history had been subject to conspiratorial forces, and his prejudicial belief that ‘the Jewish mind’ was driven to seek ‘a world monopoly of political power’.21 Inevitably, throughout his life on the edges of British political thought, Chesterton came into contact with an even more marginal ‘lunatic fringe’, comprising individuals whose belief in Jewish world conspiracy was driven by deep mental instability. In one memorable encounter described by Doris Chesterton, a man contacted the couple at their home claiming to have evidence of a Jewish ritual murder plot to be carried out the same night. After being informed by the man of the time and place this murder was to be carried out, Chesterton replied bluntly: ‘In that case my dear fellow ring the police at once. Don’t waste time calling me’.22 However irrational or prejudicial his concept of the Jewish ‘Money Power’ was, Chesterton maintained certain standards in his approach to world affairs and was often driven to frustration by those who, in his view, had descended into ‘crankery’. He chided members of the British social-credit movement for proposing that Hitler was ‘an illegitimate descendent of the Rothschilds’ unconsciously carrying out a Jewish plot. Such outlandish claims, Chesterton warned, were likely to do more harm than good in serving to ‘thoroughly discredit all criticism of the financial system’.23 As Chairman of National Front in 1970, Chesterton also requested that copies of the Protocols not be displayed in the party’s bookshop. This suggested that he had grown warier of the document’s sinister reputation, though later editions of the New Unhappy Lords still recommended that readers seek out Ford’s The International Jew.24 Chesterton’s ambiguous relationship to the Protocols conspiracy allowed him to maintain a veneer of intellectual respectability among the various ideologues of the extreme right. On balance, Chesterton’s attachment to anti-Semitic conspiracies was a hindrance to his wider political aspirations: as much as he sought to differentiate himself from ‘lunatic fringe’, the racism and paranoia that permeated his works rendered them unpalatable to mainstream audiences, often evoking the same ‘crankery’ that he derided in others. In the foreword to David Baker’s Ideology of Obsession, Richard Thurlow depicted the mass of conspiratorial literature left in the wake of Chesterton’s death as a kind of monument to the fruitless delusions that underpinned his political career: ‘This is the story of how the obsessions of an able man led him down the wrong track, and how acres of forest were pulped to carry the prolific literary output of his fantasy politics’.25 True to this assessment, few readers would have been compelled by editorials in Candour, let alone the hundreds of stultifying pages in Chesterton’s New Unhappy Lords. To those predisposed to conspiratorial, racial-nationalist or anti-Semitic ideas, however, Chesterton’s analysis of ‘world government by finance’ could be revelatory. Speaking as leader of the National Front in 1978, John Tyndall credited Chesterton with introducing him to ‘the conspiracy theory of history’. There seemed to be a hidden factor in world politics that was bringing about, among other things, the destruction of this country. I had a vague feeling it

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was there, but couldn’t identify it. . . . It was like I knew a crime had been committed and somewhere in the background there was some master criminal lurking. Chesterton had done all the detective work and found out much more about him.26 Outside of the United Kingdom, Chesterton’s conspiratorial literature was received by a broad audience throughout the Commonwealth, former British colonies and the United States. On occasion, his works even found their way into the hands of powerful or influential figures, such as Henrikh Van Der Berg, the head of South Africa’s Bureau of State Security.27 Despite its absurdities and esoteric roots, the ‘paranoid style’ of political analysis that Chesterton adopted during the interwar period held an appeal beyond the ‘lunatic fringe’, particularly to those that shared his sense of disenfranchisement with mainstream politics. Just as the rapid and disorientating changes of the interwar period had spurred Chesterton’s initial interest in conspiracies, therefore, so did the disruptions of the post-war era provide a new audience and endless fodder for those seeking the ‘hidden hand’ in world affairs.28

Chesterton, the Holocaust and historical revisionism The aftermath of the Second World War yielded fertile ground for political conspiracy theorists, many of whom would draw inspiration from Cold War paranoia and popular fears of communist subversion. For Chesterton and other proponents of a Jewish conspiracy, however, the legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust meant that anti-Semitism – even of the coded or quasi-intellectual variety – had moved beyond the pale of acceptable discourse. If Chesterton had any awareness of the atrocities being committed by the Nazi regime prior to the war’s end, it did not have any diminishing effect on his anti-Semitism. In March 1945, a Security Service informant repeated an anecdote delivered by Chesterton to a small meeting of extreme right activists: Two girls of about 18 were talking and one said: “I hate the Jews. There’s one thing I will say for Hitler, he had the right idea but he went too far”. Chesterton, who had overheard this conversation, had turned round and said: “Don’t you believe it; he didn’t go far enough”. As documented during his involvement with the BUF and the After-Victory Group, Chesterton and many other fascist anti-Semites vastly overestimated the depth of anti-Semitic feeling in Britain, while also underestimating the public’s antipathy towards Nazism. It is important to note, nevertheless, that disinterest or disbelief regarding the stories of Nazi atrocities filtering into Britain was not confined to fascists or political anti-Semites. In his study of wartime anti-Semitism, Tony Kushner noted the reticence among some members of the British government to risk ‘sensational’ reports pertaining to Jewish concentration camps.29 Even as such information became more concrete in the later years of the war, the government

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maintained a policy of not specifying Jews as the primary victims of concentration camps or other abuses in its propaganda, fearing that such claims would be met with scepticism by the public. This fear proved exaggerated, as Kushner observed, given the sympathy for European Jews among the general populace, but it demonstrated the inconsistency of British responses to Nazi atrocities while the war was still in progress.30 When the full extent of such atrocities was documented in the wake of the Allied victory in Europe, Chesterton’s response was muted. An article he penned for The Weekly Review concerning the news reports emerging from Germany in June 1945 made mention of the ‘abominations’ uncovered in the Buchenwald concentration camp but quickly devolved into a defence of Mussolini’s political record and a general attack on the media, whose wartime reporting he regarded as out of touch with ‘the sweat and toil and stark realities of life’.31 It was not until 1948 that Chesterton would attempt a more earnest discussion of wartime atrocities in The Tragedy of Anti-Semitism, a book he coauthored with the Anglo-Jewish writer Joseph Leftwich. Chesterton claimed to have conceived the concept for this book, which focused on the ‘often disturbed relationship between Gentile and Jew’, while in conversation with a friendly Jewish officer during the Second World War.32 To prevent this discussion from becoming one-sided, and to give the book a better chance of publication, Chesterton had sought out a Jewish writer ‘to put the case for Jewry’.33 Leftwich, whose courteous friendship with Chesterton and his wife traced back to the 1930s, was noted by the Security Service for his ‘all-embracing’ political interests: ‘He is secretary of the Committee for a Jewish Army, which originates from the extreme right wing of Zionism. At the same time he is secretary of the Jewish Fund for Soviet Russia’. Throughout the course of his dialogue with Chesterton, however, Leftwich identified himself as a non-Zionist for whom ‘Jewishness’ was a religious rather than racial demarcation.34 The vast gulf between Leftwich’s perspective and Chesterton’s conspiratorial, racially deterministic worldview resulted in an unproductive dialogue. ‘It cannot be said that we have reached an agreement,’ the book’s preface read, ‘or even come within visible distance of one’. Nevertheless, Leftwich succeeded to some extent in forcing Chesterton to confront the ugly implications of the ‘Jewish question’ in Nazi Germany. Although they fell short of outright denial, Chesterton’s replies were characteristic of anti-Semitic responses to the Holocaust, combining the same mixture of equivocation and rationalization he had once employed in BUF propaganda. Until the horrors of the gas-chamber were instituted by a Germany gone berserk in war – the Russian Revolution was the bloodiest, most murderous affair in modern times, and it was carried out by a regime over ninety per cent of whose commissars were Jews!35 Like a number of revisionists in the post-war the extreme right, Chesterton did not deny the Holocaust in the crudest, most literal sense. While acknowledging that the Nazi regime had engaged in the deliberate mass killing of Jewish prisoners,

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however, he doubted both the scale of the atrocities and the motivations of those seeking to prosecute German war criminals. In June 1956, he referred to Otto Strasser’s ‘exposure of the lie about six million Jews being done to death in gaschambers’.36 A similar objection later appeared in Candour regarding the ‘statistical absurdity’ of charges levelled against Adolf Eichmann in 1960 that accused him of complicity in millions of Jewish deaths: The Bonn correspondent from the Times . . . writes of the mind boggling at this ‘diminished total’. How much more would it boggle if the real total of all the Jews murdered were to be revealed! A computing machine specifically made for the job would be needed to undertake the gigantic labour of subtracting all the bogus deaths. Not that a man or regime engaged in murder is any less abominable because the victims be numbered in thousands rather than millions.37 Further coverage of the affair appeared in subsequent issues, with Chesterton speculating on the shadowy methods through which Israel had kidnapped Eichmann and the propagandistic motives of the upcoming trial.38 He dissembled on the question of Eichmann’s actual complicity in the murder of Jews, focusing instead on what he perceived to be a vast overreach of Jewish power through his extradition: to act illegally to secure the ‘full exposure of the Nazi regime’s atrocious crimes’ brings the whole business down from considerations of justice to the expedition of brazen propaganda. . . . Utterly indefensible as were the crimes against innocent Jews (and it is damn nonsense to suppose that none were committed) the fact today is that there is not the slightest danger of the same kind of treatment being meted out to Jewish people.39 When the trial against Eichmann commenced in April 1961, Chesterton joined Colin Jordan and the British National Party in denouncing the process as Jewish propaganda.40 Candour featured a leading article describing the ‘orgiastic festival’ of media coverage following the proceedings, though Chesterton once again demurred on the question of Eichmann’s guilt, offering a variation of the defence counsel’s argument that the accused may have been forced, under threat of violence, to participate in the murders against his own judgement: ‘I do not even know what Eichmann did, if in fact he did do it, was repugnant to his own conscience’.41 The remainder of the article devolved into a general disparagement of ‘Jewish arrogance’ as exemplified by the prosecution, with Chesterton concluding that ‘the only acceptable “final solution” of the Jewish problem’ would be the widespread recognition of this tendency.42 As much as he lamented the ‘din’ of coverage surrounding Nazi atrocities and often paid greater attention to the suffering of Allied airmen in concentration camps than Jews or other victims, Chesterton did seem to acknowledge, at a bare minimum, that Jews had been systematically murdered

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during the war. Y   et he was unable to accept that ‘the horrors of the gas-chamber’ were a foreseeable product of anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology: They [the makers of international policy] prefer to think that the German attitude was based on the race theories of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, later adopted by Alfred Rosenberg. In truth, however, most Germans – including many ‘good party members’ – ridiculed Rosenberg and refused to swallow the Chamberlain doctrine.43 Nor was he able to acknowledge that the anti-Jewish measures implemented under Nazism between 1933 and 1939 were a prelude to genocide: ‘Not until the war did the German dislike of the Jews turn into the deplorable frenzy which led to the final abomination of slaughtering them’.44 Chesterton’s retrospective view of the Second World War was grounded in the same anti-Semitic conspiracy put forward by the ‘peace movement’ in the 1930s, which alleged that Jewish finance had manipulated the nations of Europe into another conflict. With hindsight, Chesterton admitted that this plot had been difficult to accomplish, as it had required ‘convincing’ Hitler to turn his attention from East to West and persuading the wary Allied governments to commit their nations to another war. Despite the forces allayed against it, however, Chesterton concluded in The New Unhappy Lords that ‘so far as immediate objectives were concerned, International Finance won the day’.45 He made only a vague admission of Hitler’s stated intent to pursue a war with the West in Mein Kampf ‘many years before’, emphasizing that the Reich had been established as a ‘rebellion’ against International Finance and the danger posed to Germany by ‘upwards of a million communists whose salutation was “Heil Moskow” ’.46 Much as he did not consider support for fascism incompatible with loyalty to Britain, Chesterton saw no incompatibility between his attitude to Jews and the commitment with which he had fought against Germany. Unlike some neo-Nazi revisionists and Holocaust deniers, therefore, Chesterton was not driven by a desire to rehabilitate the actions of Nazi Germany during the war, and he held little regard for members of the British extreme right who went out of their way to defend Hitler after his ‘amok run’ in 1939: ‘It might seem strange’, he observed in June 1956, ‘that loyalty to Hitler should be recommended to British nationalists as the true measure of a man’.47 For all his dalliances in crude historical revisionism and conspiracy, there is evidence to suggest that Chesterton felt genuine remorse when he became aware of the horrors perpetrated by a regime he had long defended. Colin Cross, the author of an early study of British fascism, described an interview with Chesterton that he had conducted in 1960: In himself he was a very likeable chap. . . . At one moment, during lunch, I saw tears running down his cheeks; the cause was that he was explaining that his antisemitic [sic] writings during the 1930s had never been meant to lead to gas chambers or anything like that.48

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Chesterton’s visceral response to the systematic mass-murder of Jews prevented him from engaging in the more sophisticated and dispassionate forms of Holocaust denial that gained popularity in Britain’s extreme right during the 1970s. Unable to admit the terrible consequences of fascist anti-Semitism, which he had enthusiastically promoted in his interwar career, however, he reverted to conspiratorial anti-Semitism to explain away the link between fascist ideology and the Holocaust. He also laid the groundwork for a later generation of denialists by presenting the remembrance and public discussion of the Holocaust as a form of unalloyed propaganda: ‘Nazi atrocities, far from being hushed up, have been dinned into the public ear without ceasing and in the process they have been quite fantastically exaggerated’.49 Whether to assuage his own guilt, or simply to further his own conspiratorial theses, Chesterton was a willing progenitor of the revisionist ideas that would spread throughout the post-war extreme right, providing fuel for neo-fascist and neo-Nazi subcultures in decades to come.50

Race, immigration and the ‘Jewish Question’ after 1945 While the aftermath of the war and the Holocaust did little to alter Chesterton’s basic commitment to anti-Semitism, it did herald a change in his stylistic approach to addressing the ‘Jewish question’. His columns for The Weekly Review provided several examples of the more covert approach adopted by political anti-Semites after 1939, as demonstrated in a column regarding ownership of the press in December 1943: There is nothing to prevent wealthy foreigners from stepping into buy British papers. . . . Research reveals the presence on several newspaper directorates of men with names difficult to pronounce, names which certainly were not found on the muster-roll of the English Army of Agincourt!51 Although coded language of this sort was not sufficient to stave off allegations of anti-Semitism or fascism altogether, it provided a greater legal standing on the occasions when Chesterton or his editors were driven to pursue libel action against accusations of disloyalty, incitement or ‘Jew-baiting’. In December 1943, for example, The Weekly Review reported its successful prosecution of such a case against The Jewish Chronicle for allegations that it advanced ‘covert defeatism and anti-Semitism’.52 Legal technicalities aside, The Jewish Chronicle’s accusation of anti-Semitism can be granted in retrospect when considering the lightly veiled disparagement of Jews that appeared in Chesterton’s columns alone. His critique of a pamphlet issued by Jewish secularist Chapman Cohen examining Christianity returned to some of the themes that had preoccupied anti-Semites in the BUF: there are scores of cases wherein Mr. Cohen’s kinsmen have found asylum here after persecution abroad, a fact which nevertheless has not prevented them, after mastering the barest rudiments of our language, from standing upon soap boxes and inveighing against British institutions.53

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This passage demonstrated yet another rhetorical method for the subtle advancement of anti-Semitic ideas: by couching his criticism of Jewish practices in religious terms, Chesterton was able to avoid (or at any rate deny) association with racial antagonism towards Jews. Given his own lack of religiosity, this was not a method which Chesterton employed with great regularity. In the wider context of Britain’s interwar extreme right, however, Christianity was used frequently as a banner for nationalist or anti-Semitic ideology, as in the case of the Militant Christian Patriots.54 In a similar vein, an early draft of the 1945 National Front’s policy included the following provision among its seven points: ‘To ensure that what the late Archbishop of Canterbury [Dr. William Temple] called “the real Jewish problem” is recognized without rancour and an honourable, just and lasting solution found for it’. While it was unpopular among many of those planning the National Front itself, a Security Service report remarked that this phrasing was ‘a rather ingenuous attempt to make anti-Semitism look respectable’.55 A more straightforward approach to concealing anti-Semitism was to use coded language that implicitly referred to Jews, a method employed by several extreme right factions before 1939, and with some success by Chesterton in post-war literature.56 Although the very concept of a Jewish problem was tainted by its affiliation with Nazism, the turmoil leading up to the foundation of Israel in 1948 provided a renewed opportunity for anti-Semites in post-war Britain. Despite his professed interest in an ‘honourable, just and lasting solution’ to problems arising from Jewish migration, Chesterton had a long-standing opposition to the Zionist project in Palestine, which he perceived as an open attack on the British Empire by World Jewry. Following the Peel Commission in 1937, which recommended that the British government partition Palestine in order to establish a Jewish state, Chesterton took to the pages of Blackshirt to protest: ‘At long last Jewry has had the blind folly to come out into the open, boasting to the British people of its power to smash to pieces the British Empire’.57 The emergence of a violent insurgency against the British mandate in 1945 reignited Chesterton’s hostility towards Zionism, while also appearing to turn public opinion against the Jews. ‘The British Press is to be congratulated’, he wrote in December 1946, ‘for putting an end to the embargo which, until recently, prevented the word “Jew” from appearing in any but the most favourable context’.58 From a rhetorical standpoint, ‘Zionism’ provided another useful cover for passages which would otherwise have appeared blatantly anti-Semitic. In Truth, for example, Chesterton gestured openly towards a ‘Zionist conspiracy – surely the most tremendous in the world’s history’ that had enlisted the cooperation of the United States and Soviet Russia to facilitate mass Jewish migration to Palestine. By way of explaining this ‘happy accord’ between the two opposing world powers, Chesterton launched into a conspiratorial explanation of the Jews’ influence over the Soviet Union: New York financiers found the money for the Czar’s overthrow. They supplied Trotsky with funds. They championed the Bolshevik cause at Versailles. They fed the Soviet Union with loans. Is it possible that Russia repaid some

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of the debt when she furnished the Jews for the great trek of 1945–46 and required Czechoslovakia to supply them with heavy armaments in 1948?59 The actions of the Zionist insurgency leading up to 1948 also provided ample fodder for general attacks on ‘Jewish terrorists’.60 In an odd contradiction of his imperialist tendencies, Chesterton turned to the plight of Palestinians (who had previously sought independence from the British) as a further indictment of Zionism and the record of world Jewry: ‘the reign of terror begun by the massacre of 300 Arab men, women and children at Deir Yassin had made possible the Jewish occupation of the country, because the panic-stricken flight of 1,000,000 refugees enabled the Jews to seize their deserted farms’.61 In a vague sense, Chesterton did entertain the idea that a permanent settlement for Jews might be established in a more agreeable fashion. One proposal of his own, inspired by Joseph Leftwich’s suggestion of a Jewish community in Northern Australia, involved ‘damming the Webi Shebeli and the Juba [rivers] in Somaliland and turning the desert into quite a fertile land for the Jews’.62 He made no serious attempt to develop or promote these plans, however, nor did he propose any other peaceful solution to the conflict in Palestine. Having been spurred initially by concerns over British foreign interests, Chesterton’s anti-Zionism was inflamed and sustained by anti-Semitism. The forcible establishment of a Jewish state in the Middle East appeared to Chesterton as an overt incarnation of the world conspiracy that he perceived in more subtle forms throughout other parts of the world. After 1948, Zionism and the state of Israel became woven into the fabric of Chesterton’s conspiracy theories, representing a manifestation of Jewish power with ‘ambitions far beyond the creation of a Jewish State in the Levant’.63 Quite contrary to those anti-Semites that hoped Zionism would eventually resolve the problem of Jewish rootlessness, therefore, Chesterton saw only an additional arm of the drive for world government.64 What then, did Chesterton see as the resolution to the so-called Jewish problem after 1945? In the absence of an overriding political organization equivalent to the BUF, it became even more difficult to discern what action he deemed necessary in regard to the Jews or the wider ‘menace’ of international finance. No doubt acutely aware of the greater scrutiny applied to anti-Semitism after 1945, Chesterton insisted that the onus arising from the conspiracy of World Jewry lay equally, if not primarily, with non-Jews: ‘Had we of the Gentile nations stood firm in defence of our own values . . . the Jews would have remained what they ought to be – a small sect living contentedly and at peace with their neighbours’. The appropriate response was therefore ‘to make a determined stand for our own legitimate and distinctive interests’ rather than focus a movement on the persecution of the Jews.65 In Chesterton’s argument, therefore, the response to Jewish internationalism was the positive expression of national pride rather than the purely negative sentiment of racial or religious prejudice: I am what is called an anti-semite mainly because I am a nationalist – a nationalist in the sense that I believe every nation to have its own guiding

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star which it must follow, its own ideal pattern which it must trace, its own integration which it must maintain. . . . Whether I am right or wrong, that is my belief, and my further belief – no less firmly held – is that Jewry at almost every level of contact exerts an influence hostile to this national ideal.66 Despite nesting his hostility towards the Jews within a positive concept of nationalism, theoretically separate from the destructive or authoritarian drives of fascism, Chesterton was still faced with how to manage anti-Semitism within the context of his broader political aims. Was it permissible, for example, to encourage or tolerate violence against ‘aliens’ so long as those actions sparked a resurgence in national pride and an influx of electoral support for nationalist parties? In 1945, Chesterton explained his practical objection to such actions in a meeting with League of ExServicemen leader Jeffery Hamm: ‘to raise a riot against the Aliens in the East End might give the participants a little well deserved pleasure but the Englishman living in the country usually reacted by feeling sympathy for the Aliens and disgust for the people responsible for the riot’. Better, he argued, to conduct campaigns raising awareness of the international conspiracy: ‘Persuade a man in the country that his standard of life, his customs and his Government were to be dependent on a World Security Council ruled in reality by Alien International Finance and he would be the first to hunt down the Aliens in his area’.67 Chesterton made no attempt to explain why this spontaneous uprising against ‘Aliens’ was to be any more judicious than that incited by street activists. Two years later, he revisited the subject of anti-Semitic violence, once again considering its undesired consequences to those opposing international finance: He who hopes to avert it [the Jewish plot for world power] by going into side-streets to smash the windows of Jewish shops or to stir up racial prejudices not only acts against people innocent of all knowledge of the great World Plan, but shows himself to be a moron who behaves exactly as the plotters want him to behave.68 There was a practical motivation for Chesterton to tone down his language in order to broaden his audience and avoid the social consequences of blatant ‘Jew-baiting’ like that practiced in the 1930s. As he demonstrated in Menace of the Money Power, Chesterton was capable of presenting his political ideas, including the implication of a Jewish conspiracy, without the use of racial invective. Had he wished to abandon subtlety altogether, he could also have adopted another pseudonym or full anonymity for the purposes of distributing virulently anti-Semitic literature with relative impunity. There is good reason to believe, however, that Chesterton did moderate his approach to anti-Semitism after 1945 in earnest rather than just to avoid the social or political consequences of encouraging violence or other forms of persecution. He displayed a greater consideration of the innocent Jews who were liable to suffer from a general wave of hostility against their race, something that

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was often conspicuously absent from the anti-Semitic propaganda in the 1930s. He also refrained from invoking or denigrating the physical appearance of Jews, having come to regret such attacks as a ‘juvenile’ form of prejudice that ultimately ran counter to his cause.69 While these changes may have indicated a softening in Chesterton’s attitudes, it did not signal his willingness to abandon anti-Semitic ideas altogether. He remained convinced that the only intellectually and politically honest course of action was to engage with the ‘Jewish problem’ directly, taking comfort from the belief that his anti-Semitism did not arise from personal prejudice. In childhood, he claimed to have happily coexisted with ‘scores’ of Jewish classmates: ‘I not only had some among my friends but resisted the pressure of elders who tried to make me give them up’. He counted Jewish soldiers among his ‘comrades-in-arms’ from his service in both world wars and recalled no great contention with those Jews he encountered between 1918 and 1939: ‘[I] liked some of them, disliked none so much as I dislike some Gentiles, received kindnesses from several and am happy to think that I was sometimes able to do them kindnesses in return’. He therefore protested against the notion that his attitude towards the Jews was based on ‘personal prejudice’, going so far as to suggest that, ‘if personal prejudice were involved, my own would clearly be on the Jewish side’.70 This was a profoundly unconvincing argument, since Chesterton made clear on several occasions that the problems he associated with ‘World Jewry’ could be traced back to their innate qualities. Furthermore, despite his muddled conceptions of culture, ethnicity and nationality, Chesterton’s own work argued that the Jews were best understood as a race rather than a religious grouping: the Jews derive from two main stocks – the Sephardim, who are true Semites, and the Ashkenazim, who come of Turco-Mongoloid stock and who embraced Judaism long after the birth of Christ. But when it came to the creation of the State of Israel no difference was recognized between the two stocks, and we have thus to regard World Jewry as one race, just as the British, with their Anglo-Saxon and Celtic components, are recognized as being one nation.71 There is a theoretical distinction to be made between Chesterton’s concept of the Jewish race and that of other anti-Semites, particularly those who subscribed to the ideas associated with Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Alfred Rosenberg and other Aryan or Nordic supremacists. The chief concern in that form of anti-Semitic ideology, infamously demonstrated in Germany in the lead-up to the Holocaust, was the ‘purge’ of Jewish blood from the racial stock.72 While Chesterton’s anti-Semitism was racially deterministic, he did not regard the presence of Jews in Britain as a demographic threat; on the contrary, a core tenet of his anti-Semitic beliefs was that Britain’s Jews represented an alien presence that had gained a disproportionate amount of cultural and political clout despite its minority status. His prejudice against ‘coloured’ migrants was, by contrast, deeply bound up with an aversion to

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race-mixing as a biological threat to the survival of the white race, as he explained to Joseph Leftwich in 1948: ‘I do not take up any racial attitude except to abominate the intermixture of white and coloured peoples. Nations, providing their elements are assimilable, do not require pure stock in order to be nations’.73 Chesterton’s broad views on racial integration and ‘coloured’ immigration can be experientially linked to the ambient racism of his childhood. It was only during the later stages of life, however, that he was driven to seek intellectual or theoretical justification for his understanding of white superiority and racial difference. This was also the case with anti-Semitism, which Chesterton cultivated under the assumption that he was making a rational judgement about the Jewish race and its members’ involvement in global politics. Though both forms of prejudice could be traced back to the same ‘racialist’ mentality, Chesterton’s expressions as an antiSemite and as a white supremacist reflected different sources of inspiration and reinforcement. He was able to buttress his anti-Semitic ideas against a wide range of anti-Semitic tropes drawn from English and South African culture, as well as his family’s literary inheritance, resulting in a form of quasi-intellectual prejudice that expressed itself in a noticeably different fashion to the explicit but paternalistic racism which characterized Chesterton’s attitude toward migrants, minorities and colonial populations. Jews represented an overarching presence within the international sphere, possessing many of the attributes that Hofstadter used to describe the generic ‘enemy’ of political conspiracy theorists: ‘sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. . . . He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way’.74 People of colour, by contrast, were associated with the qualities which Chesterton ascribed to colonized Africans: rarely evil by nature but prone to violence, sexual misconduct and other ‘barbarous’ behaviours when not guided by the benevolent strictures of white rule. The interplay between anti-Semitism and Chesterton’s other racial views became significant during the final decades of his life, as he sought an explanation for the two forces threatening his assumptions about race, decolonization and immigration. Up until the end of the Second World War, these ideas had largely been supported by the policies of both domestic and colonial authorities, who maintained the discriminatory order overseas and enacted policies that amounted to ‘an undeclared immigration policy aimed at restricting non-white settlement’ in Britain itself.75 It was only after the process of decolonization begun that these norms began to shift, in an interconnected fashion that would serve to bolster Chesterton’s conspiratorial interpretation of racial disorder. The shift to self-governance or independence within parts of the Empire previously under central administration, such as India and the Caribbean territories, resulted in more relaxed immigration policies; this in turn led to an increase in the number of Commonwealth subjects migrating from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean to settle in the United Kingdom after 1945.76 For Chesterton, the influx of non-white migrants was not only a risk to the racial order and social structure of Britain itself but a symptom and reminder of the Empire’s disintegration.77

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As the dissolution of Britain’s colonial presence grew more rapid and widespread in the 1950s, Chesterton endeavoured to establish a link between the disestablishment of white supremacy and hegemonic aspirations of the Jews. He turned to various sources from overseas to support his view that, rather than an organic movement, the push to desegregate was part of a worldwide process being driven by Jewish international interests. As the United States was undergoing the process of integrating public schools in late 1957, for example, Candour reprinted an article from a US anti-Semitic newsletter Common Sense arguing that ‘Jewish communists and their gentile stooges from New York’ were responsible for indoctrinating black Americans in the South into agitating against their interests for desegregation.78 In South Africa, Chesterton and other Candour contributors alleged that Jews were overwhelmingly represented among those supplying arms to anti-apartheid ‘terrorist’ groups or otherwise engaged in ‘communist subversion’.79 Chesterton also warned that ‘Rothschild finance’ was mounting a simultaneous bid to infiltrate the ‘Afrikaner business world’: ‘we may be certain that the financial infiltration is not to uphold White rule but to undermine and eventually eliminate it’.80 Chesterton’s analysis of decolonization and integration in British Africa reflected his two, mutually supporting prejudices: Jews were depicted as an opportunistic and subversive minority attempting to leverage the situation and foment dissent among native Africans, who in turn were depicted as a dangerous, unruly mass, vulnerable to the lure of communism and predatory capitalism. The same dynamic applied to how Chesterton and his followers in the LEL viewed the ‘coloured invasion’ of post-war immigration to Britain, which became a recurring focus in Candour from late 1954. From the beginning, Chesterton was concerned with the deeper implications of immigration as a subset of the global conspiracy. He was initially sceptical of the notion that immigrants from the West Indies and Africa were being encouraged in order to weaken Britain’s economy, reasoning that ‘the numbers of migrants concerned, although too large for our national health, is not large enough to accomplish an aim of that kind’.81 He posited instead that the ‘coloured mob’ being transported to Britain was part of a worldwide scheme to foment revolution: Taken in conjunction with the mass migrations of West Indians to Great Britain, of Puerto Ricans to the United States, and (illegally) of the Chinese to Australia, such pacts certainly suggest that there is a deliberate world policy to infiltrate the White nations with people of African and Asian blood. The purpose, I am convinced, is the creation of an international revolutionary proletariat ready for action when the hour strikes.82 In some ways, this argument was a reformulation of the anti-Semitic tropes that Chesterton had leveraged during the interwar period, suggesting that Jewish agitators were part of a deliberate campaign to foment communism in an otherwise disinterested British populace.83 In June 1956, he summarized this thesis to Candour readers: ‘Karl Marx said that as the British were too stupid to make their own

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revolution, foreigners would have to do the job for them. There is no question of the Blacks thus acting in the Briton’s despite’.84 Wider events in Britain throughout the late 1950s encouraged Chesterton’s belief that ‘coloured’ migration had come to represent a new incarnation of the ‘Alien Problem’ associated with Jews in the pre-war and interwar periods. The riots at Notting Hill between August and September 1958 brought widespread attention to the problems that accompanied the influx of ‘coloured’ migrants, despite the fact that much of the violence could be attributed to whites.85 Familiar themes emerged in the subsequent depiction of the migrants who, much like the Eastern European Jewish migrants after 1880, were affiliated with crime, crowded housing conditions and the spread of disease.86 Not all stereotypes could be easily transposed between the two periods. Whereas Jews had been affiliated with the unscrupulous accumulation of wealth and shady business practices, African and Asian migrants were now tarred with accusations of idleness and depicted as a drain on the modern welfare state.87 Lingering imperial ideas also affected the stereotypical depiction of migrants, with Candour suggesting in August 1961 that a series of disturbances in Brixton were evidence of ‘tribal warfare’ and other forms of foreign ‘barbarism’ having been imported to Britain through ‘coloured’ immigration.88 The widespread use of the ‘race issue’ as a campaign platform for extreme right parties (including the LEL, the Union Movement and the National Labour Party) also fed the perception that recent immigrants now found themselves in the same position as Jews had several decades prior. Though sceptical of some of the other groups campaigning against ‘coloured’ migrants, Chesterton argued that the same ‘smear-techniques’ employed by the media against anti-Semites in the 1930s were now being used ‘to make objects of ridicule, if not infamous figures, of people who insist that the White man is not a Black man and should not be encouraged to act as though racial differences did not exist’.89 Unlike many of the younger elements within the extreme right, however, Chesterton was both tactically and ideologically opposed to abandoning his wider crusade against the international Jewish conspiracy and decolonization in favour of the immigration issue. In his mind, the two issues were effectively inseparable from one another, since the conspiratorial aims of Jewish finance could be directly traced to the failure of the government to effectively bar the influx of immigrants: So disastrous has been the flooding of the country by the sea of coloured immigrants that one wonders what economic motives have prompted its sponsors. . . . The dominating motive may well have been not economic but political – the conspiratorial plan, everywhere being carried out, of securing the mongrelisation of mankind.90 The conspiratorial explanation accounted for two problems with the influx of nonwhite migrants which, in Chesterton’s mode of thought, could not be satisfactorily accounted for by economic factors. First, due to the deterministic nature of his views on race, it was difficult for Chesterton to accept that African,West Indian and

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other populations would willingly leave their natural homes for places to which they were not acclimatized. Though he acknowledged that some of the British government’s interwar policies had created economic and political conditions that drove migrants in search of better prospects, Chesterton was unconvinced that so many could be induced ‘to leave their sunny lands and shiver in misery throughout the long English winters’.91 Second, he questioned why British politicians had been unwilling to take more strident action to reduce the ‘flood’ of migrants despite the clear political advantages in doing so. The mainstream impact of the race issue in British politics became more obvious after the passing of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which represented the first major attempt by the Conservative government to restrict the number of ‘coloured’ migrants settling in Britain.92 This was followed by a General Election in 1964 which, in Chesterton’s eyes, seemed to suggest that politicians (‘to whom votes are all-important’) would be driven to a harder stance on immigration, if not by their own convictions, then by sheer self-interest.93 That the responses to immigration continued to be so mild and practically ineffective, he argued, was evidence of deeper forces at work within the political system: ‘that the vested interests sponsoring “coloured” immigration had become so strong that anybody rash enough to offer real opposition might well be committing political suicide’.94 Who then was ultimately responsible for the ‘deeper forces’ behind immigration and racial integration? Chesterton pointed to the same culprit with whom he had associated the erosion of British pride and interests since the 1930s, Jewish internationalists, who had now been driven to abolish the concept of race in a backlash against German racial fascism: Hitler’s Germany had to some extent been founded on a concept of race – not a very clear concept in its positive aspect but exceedingly clear in its negative aspect. It was anti-Jewish. If the Gentiles were not allowed to attach value to race, obviously all racial concepts had to be eradicated and – not only that – the races themselves had to become so inter-mixed, so ‘integrated’, that no further pride in them would be possible.95 The evidence for this Jewish campaign to abolish ‘pride of race’ lay throughout all parts of the world where the traditional order was being dismantled: the antiapartheid movement in South Africa, the drive to abolish the White Australia Policy and in Britain, the efforts to outlaw racial discrimination. Each of these movements had been accompanied by ‘the cry for integration everywhere on earth – except among the Jews’.96 The great injustice and irony of this conspiracy for racial integration, Chesterton argued, was that the Jews themselves maintained an integrated racial identity that could be freely expressed through Zionism, while supporting ‘measures [that] are intended to safeguard the one race which claims exclusion, and claims it not on racial grounds but on grounds of religion’.97 As with many of the adjustments and additions to Chesterton’s conspiracy after 1945, this theory had its roots in anti-Semitic tropes from the interwar period. In

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Chesterton’s own mind, the roots of the conspiracy lay in the Jews’ association with any force working to undermine nationalistic sentiment. The political ramifications of Chesterton’s argument for a Jewish hand in shaping the politics of race and immigration were significant, therefore, in drawing an ideological link between interwar anti-Semitism and the anti-immigrant racial nationalism of the post-1945 extreme right. Although not attributable to Chesterton alone, this dual form of racial nationalism and anti-Semitic conspiracy would find expression within elements of the National Front during the 1970s, whose position on race could be described bluntly as ‘[blaming] the Jews for the blacks’.98 Chesterton’s influence could also discerned in the begrudging respect afforded by some members of the anti-Semitic extreme right to Jewish and Zionist communities for managing to maintain their homogeneity and sovereignty far more effectively than many white nations.99 There were some advantages to the continuation of Jewish conspiracy theories within Britain’s extreme right, despite the demonstrated weakness of anti-Semitism as a political platform after 1933.100 For one, the overarching premise of a global conspiracy driven by a cosmopolitan enemy was more conducive to the ideological assumptions of fascists and ultra-nationalists than immigration alone.101 Whereas the latter presented a problem theoretically solvable through conventional politics, the grand nature of a conspiracy demanded a wholesale revival of national values and the transcendence of politics. Hofstadter summarized this as the moral logic adopted by conspiracy theorists: ‘Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do’.102 Another factor with specific relevance to the National Front was the utility of conspiracy theories in supporting more virulent, politically repellent forms of racism and anti-Semitism that followed in the tradition of neo-Nazism or Leese’s racial fascism. Chesterton himself did not view the conspiracy as validation of these ideas, as he made clear during the planning stages of the National Front in 1966. A suggestion made by a British National Party member that membership ‘should be confined to people of Natural British/European descent’ was immediately quashed by Chesterton, who argued that any effort ‘to reproduce such discredited Rosenberg nonsense’ would rule out the involvement of his organization.103 Following his departure from the organization, however, Chesterton’s conspiratorial anti-Semitism did become interwoven with the Leese tradition under the guidance of the ‘hard line’ faction of the National Front’s leadership, represented by John Tyndall and Martin Webster.104 As much as Chesterton’s concept of an international conspiracy proved to be persistent and adaptable to the shift of political circumstances after 1945, his uncompromising and Manichean approach to politics ultimately hindered his ability to make any political progress against the changing racial dynamics in Britain and the wider world.This was especially evident in the way he reacted to the otherwise promising signs of mainstream support for immigration control after the issue came to prominence in the 1950s. It was not enough, in the eyes of Chesterton and

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his dedicated supporters, to pursue policies that screened migrants based on their health or financial security. Nor was it acceptable to implement legislation that restricted immigration on a general basis, like the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, since this would result in the exclusion of migrants from the former white dominions and in turn isolate them further from British influence.105 That these measures amounted to a tacit enforcement of racial discrimination mattered little to Chesterton, who demanded an ideological as well as practical campaign to preserve racial order. As a result, he was dismissive even of Enoch Powell, whose pronouncements against immigration heralded an upwelling of popular support.106 Where many extreme right activists saw hope, Chesterton saw a false prophet and a symbol of political opportunism: One or two dramatic speeches, perhaps a letter or two to The Times, and they consider their annual stint handsomely performed. But although he keeps quiet on race relations, the publicity attracted by his Wolverhampton speech has led to a ready demand for White Champion Powell to write and speak on finance, economics, philosophy, the classics and everything in the world except coloured immigration.107 While he did not abandon the cause of white Britain after leaving the National Front in 1971, Chesterton’s final years were, in many respects, a retreat from politics back into the quasi-intellectual mire of global conspiracy. In the final issue of Candour published before his death, Chesterton warned of the potential for a respectable figurehead to act as a ‘safety valve’, thus releasing the pressure that might otherwise have driven a more revolutionary revival of white nationalism: ‘The function of a safety valve, let us remember, is not to bring about change but to ensure that dynamism which could cause change is allowed to escape into the desert air’.108 This assessment would prove prescient in some respects, as both the National Front and the British National Party would eventually see their antiimmigration platforms usurped by more conservative or populist iterations of the radical right. As his critics in the National Front’s ‘Action Committee’ pointed out, however, Chesterton’s rejection of Powell left the extreme right with little hope of attracting a popular following: Whether or not Powell is genuine cannot yet be ascertained and anyway is unimportant. What is important is that rightly or wrongly, he is respected by a huge majority of the British people, and to attack him incurs the hostility of that majority. Let us devote our energies to attacking those who are unpopular with the people, and whom we know to be definitely on the other side.109 As was the case with his approach to European integration, Chesterton’s ability to leverage immigration for political gains was hindered by ideological extremism. An unwillingness to separate populist concerns of space and cultural difference from a more esoteric framework of racism and conspiracy ensured that he could not hope

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to achieve Powell’s status as a voice for aggrieved white Britons. Chesterton’s influence could be felt profoundly, however, in the policies and ideas of the National Front in the 1970s. It is significant that John Tyndall, the most eager student of Chesterton’s work as a conspiracy theorist, was among the most enduring figures in Britain’s extreme right after 1967.110 While Tyndall’s conception of race was largely derivative of ‘universal Nazism’, his worldview carried Chesterton’s assumptions about the inherently conspiratorial nature of global affairs, finance, the media and even the patterns of migration that determined the National Front’s political fortunes. This mode of thinking also facilitated the internationalization of Britain’s extreme right after 1967, encouraging Tyndall and other radicals to see other bastions of white supremacy in Rhodesia and South Africa as ‘besieged’ by the same conspiratorial enemy arrayed against Britain.111 In the long term, the persistence of anti-Semitic conspiracies after 1945 was a political liability for the extreme right, which anchored its fortunes to the failed legacy of interwar fascism. By providing an overarching framework which connected disparate issues together, however, Chesterton’s ‘Money Power’ thesis also offered a degree of cohesion to a movement otherwise awash with ideological conflict.

Notes 1 For a brief overview of the origins and content of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, see Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 97–99. See also: Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). 2 Lucien Wolf, The Myth of the Jewish Menace in World Affairs (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1921), pp. 3–8. 3 Mosse, Towards the Final Solution, pp. 115–118. 4 Laqueur, The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism, p. 96; Mosse, Towards the Final Solution, p. 140. 5 Lebzelter, Political Anti-Semitism in England, pp. 50–54. 6 See Gisela Lebzelter, ‘Henry Hamilton Beamish and the Britons’, Kenneth Lunn and Richard Thurlow eds., British Fascism (London: Croom Helm, 1980), pp. 41–55. 7 Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Vintage, 1967), p. 29. 8 Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (Hawthorne: Christian Book Club of America, 1964), p. 405. 9 A.N. Field, The Truth About the Slump (Nelson: A.N. Field, 1934), pp. 128–154. 10 Field, The Truth About the Slump, pp. 131,139–153. 11 Field, The Truth About the Slump, p. 192. 12 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, pp. 157–158. 13 Field, The Truth About the Slump, p. 152. 14 London Tidings, 6 September 1947, pp. 1–2. 15 TNA KV2/1349/408a, B.1.z./2422 Report re A.K. Chesterton and proposed book, 31 October 1947. 16 Candour, 9 June 1961, pp. 177–180. 17 Candour, 9 June 1961, p. 177. 18 Candour, 23 June 1961, pp. 193–195. 19 Candour, 23 June 1961, p. 195.

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20 TNA KV2/1348/279a, Report re National Front Council meeting mentioning Chesterton, 11 July 1945. 21 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, p. 158. 22 Chesterton Collection A. 24, Doris Chesterton, ‘Kenneth and the “Lunatic Fringe” ’ (8pp. manuscript notes), nd. ca. 1979. 23 The Weekly Review, 16 March 1944, p. 293. 24 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, p. 180. 25 Thurlow, foreword to Baker, Ideology of Obsession, p. vii. 26 DLB interview with John Tyndall, p. 4. 27 Macklin, ‘The British Far Right’s South African Connection’, pp. 823–842. 28 For more on Chesterton’s international influence as a conspiracy theorist, see Graham Macklin, ‘Transatlantic Connections and Conspiracies: A.K. Chesterton and The New Unhappy Lords’, Journal of Contemporary History,Vol. 47, No. 2 (2012), pp. 270–290. 29 Tony Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), p. 157. 30 Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice, pp. 156–160. 31 The Weekly Review, 21 June 1945, pp. 151–152. 32 Chesterton and Leftwich, Anti-Semitism, p. 7. 33 TNA KV2/1348/261x, p. 2. 34 Chesterton and Leftwich, Anti-Semitism, p. 36. 35 Chesterton and Leftwich, Anti-Semitism, p. 213. 36 Candour, 15 June 1956, p. 192. 37 Candour, 3 June 1960, p. 176. 38 Candour, 17 June 1960, p. 188. 39 Candour, 1 July 1960, pp. 3–4. 40 Jackson, Colin Jordan, p. 97. 41 Candour, 21 April 1961, p. 122. 42 Candour, 21 April 1961, p. 123. 43 Candour, 12 December 1958, pp. 185–186. 44 TNA KV2/1349/362a. Note re A.K. Chesterton, 8 November 1946. 45 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, p. 24. 46 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, p. 22. 47 Candour, 15 June 1956, p. 192. 48 Chesterton Collection A. 45, Letter from Colin Cross to David Baker, 27 January 1982. 49 Candour, 1 July 1960, p. 3. 50 For further comments on the development of ‘historical revisionism’ in Britain after 1945, see: Macklin, Very Deeply, pp. 115–135; Mark Hobbs, ‘The men who rewrite history: Holocaust denial and the British far right from 1967’, Copsey and Worley eds., Tomorrow Belongs to Us, pp. 9–27. 51 The Weekly Review, 30 December 1943, p. 162. 52 The Weekly Review, 23 December 1943, p. 151. 53 The Weekly Review, 4 May 1944, pp. 58–59. 54 See Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted, p. 48. 55 TNA KV2/1348/296ab. 56 TNA KV2/1348/307Ab, Source AB report mentioning Chesterton, 23 March 1946. 57 The Blackshirt, 14 August 1937, p. 5. 58 TNA KV2/1349/369b, Extract from People’s Post, December 1946. 59 Truth, 4 February 1949, p. 116. 60 TNA KV2/1349/361b. 61 Candour, 21 April 1961, pp. 121–123. 62 TNA KV2/1348/261x, F.3. report re Edmonds and Chesterton, 8 March 1945. 63 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, p. 202. 64 Truth, 4 February 1949, p. 116. 65 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, p. 205. 66 Chesterton and Leftwich, Anti-Semitism, p. 10.

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67 TNA KV2/1348/289a, Extract from Source S.R.63 report mentioning Chesterton, 8 September 1945. 68 London Tidings, 6 September 1947, p. 2. 69 Chesterton Collection A. 16, p. 22. 70 Chesterton and Leftwich, The Tragedy of Anti-Semitism, p. 10. 71 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, p. 201. 72 Dalia Ofer, ‘Nazi Anti-Semitism’, Berel Lang ed., Race and Racism in Theory and Practice (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), pp. 70–71. 73 Chesterton and Leftwich, Anti-Semitism, p. 72. 74 Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style’, p. 32. 75 Ian R.G. Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939 (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 19. 76 Spencer, British Immigration Policy Since 1939, p. 22. 77 On the perception of non-white immigration as a sign of British decline, see: Robert Miles and Annie Phizacklea, Racism and Political Action in Britain (London: Routledge, 1979), pp. 5–6. 78 Candour, 8 November 1957, pp. 146–147. 79 Candour Interim Report, September 1963, pp. 9–10; Candour Interim Report, November 1963, p. 14. 80 Candour Interim Report, February 1964, p. 5. 81 Candour¸ 5 November 1954, p. 3. 82 Candour, 7 June 1957, p. 179. 83 The Blackshirt, 17 October 1936, p. 3. 84 Candour, 15 June 1956, pp. 189–190. 85 John Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1993), pp. 59–60. For a brief overview of racial violence at Notting Hill and its impact on the immigration debate, see Spencer, British Immigration Policy, pp. 98–102. 86 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, p. 158. 87 Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain, pp. 60–61. 88 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, pp. 158–159. 89 Candour¸ 4 August 1961, pp. 33–35. 90 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, pp. 158–159. 91 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, pp. 157. 92 On the nature and implementation of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act, see: Solomos, Race and Racism in Britain, pp. 61–64; Spencer, British Immigration Policy, pp. 129–134. 93 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, p. 156. 94 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, p. 157. 95 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, p. 209. 96 Chesterton, The New Unhappy Lords, p. 209. 97 Candour, 12 December 1958, pp. 185–186. 98 David Edgar, ‘Racism, Fascism and the Politics of the National Front’, Race and Class, Vol. 19, No. 1 (1977), pp. 111–121, cf. 120. 99 Edgar, ‘Racism, Fascism and the Politics of the National Front’, pp. 118–119. 100 Holmes, Anti-Semitism in British Society, pp. 227, 233–234. 101 Edgar,‘Racism, Fascism and the Politics of the National Front’, p. 120. See also: Richard Thurlow, ‘The Powers of Darkness: Conspiracy Belief and Political Strategy’, Patterns of Prejudice,Vol. 12, No. 6 (1978), pp. 1–12. On the persistence of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories in the contemporary extreme right, see Michael Billig, ‘The Extreme Right: Continuities in Anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theory in Post-War Europe’, Hainsworth ed., The Extreme Right in Europe and the USA, pp. 146–166. 102 Hofstadter, ‘The Paranoid Style’, p. 31. 103 Candour, February 1967, p. 10. For his part, Chesterton had argued that the LEL should be open to ‘coloured’ members who were loyal to the Empire. See Candour, 26 October 1956, pp. 137–138.

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104 Thurlow, Fascism in Britain, p. 282. 105 Candour, 22 September 1961, pp. 93–94. 106 Candour, July 1970, pp. 153–155. 107 Candour, August 1968, pp. 75–77. 108 Candour, July 1973, p. 73–76. 109 WCML SUBJ/FASCISM/1/4,Action Committee to A.K. Chesterton, 6 October 1970. 110 Copsey and Worley eds., Tomorrow Belongs to Us, p. 2. 111 See Tyndall, The Eleventh Hour, pp. 88–135.

CONCLUSION Evolution, stagnation and the ‘fascist ghost’ after 1945

From a biographical standpoint, it easy to characterize A.K. Chesterton as either a tragic figure, led astray by misguided patriotism and utopianism, or a pathetic one, mired in bigoted fantasies by a lack of imagination and intellectual rigour. Evoking the latter perspective, Francis Beckett recalls a stubborn and stagnant ideologue who went to his grave ‘like the Bourbons in 1815, [having] learned nothing and forgotten nothing’.1 For all his bigotry and obstinance, however, Chesterton made substantial contributions over his lifetime to a movement which has proved both adaptable and disturbingly persistent in the inhospitable conditions of post-war modernity. Chesterton’s personality and intellectual disposition, the ideology of obsession that Baker and Thurlow so aptly described, are only part of the reason why he was able to persist in extreme right activism for as long as he did. Luck played a significant role in sparing Chesterton from the worst consequences that befell British fascists, though it is doubtful whether internment would have deterred him from further political activity. Graham Macklin has demonstrated how internment served to strengthen rather than diminish the faith of many BUF die-hards. Even John Beckett, who was profoundly cynical of the revivalist atmosphere surrounding Mosley, chose to return to politics after his release. It is likely that Chesterton would have done the same, had he too become ‘Mr. Morrison’s Prisoner’ in 1940.2 Although the foundation of the Union Movement in 1947 provided a welcoming enclave for those personally loyal to ‘the Leader’, there were few positive incentives for other ex-BUF members to resume their struggle after the war. Understandably, many of the men in Chesterton’s immediate circle faded into quiet retirement. After failing to secure clemency for William Joyce, John Macnab left Britain to settle permanently in Franco’s Spain.3 Rex Tremlett, who briefly vested his hopes in the After-Victory Group, returned to his original calling as a farmer when the movement floundered.4 Beckett remained active the longest, working

156 Conclusion

with the British People’s Party until 1953 when the death of his friend and financial patron, the Duke of Bedford, prompted him to seek meaning in religion rather than politics.5 As his wife often lamented, Chesterton did not lack the talent or opportunity to leave politics aside and focus solely on literary or journalistic pursuits. Rosine de Bounevialle, for all her political commitment, echoed this sentiment after Chesterton’s death: ‘it would [have been] much more natural if he just retired from the whole situation and taken up playwriting. He was brilliant. He could’ve done anything on Fleet Street’.6 In addition to his strong ideological convictions, however, Chesterton’s path after 1933 was shaped by circumstances that made it difficult for him to return to normalcy. Partly because of the reputation he had acquired from the BUF, Chesterton struggled to maintain a satisfying career in journalism outside of sympathetic publications like Truth. The unexpected arrival of a generous and undemanding patron, R.K. Jeffery, made political activism a viable (if not lucrative or successful) vocation for Chesterton in the latter half of his life. With access to funding and support, Chesterton was able to establish himself during the 1950s as a senior figure within the extreme right, first as the de facto head of the LEL, and briefly as the sole chairman of the National Front. Despite coming to hold this position, however, Chesterton never came close to attaining the personal prominence that Mosley acquired in the 1930s, nor did he attempt to replicate the charismatic or semi-mythical profile of the man he once touted as Britain’s saviour. This was a disadvantage in the immediate aftermath of the war, when Mosley’s return to politics easily overshadowed any other extreme right movement, but Chesterton’s more prosaic style of activism proved durable in the long term. By positioning himself as an advocate for grassroots patriotism rather than an anointed leader, Chesterton maintained a lower profile and provided a more tangible link between the interwar and post-war eras in Britain than Mosley, who grew increasingly aloof from domestic politics as time progressed.7 This refusal to fade into the purely ‘metapolitical’ realm occupied by much of Europe’s extreme right after 1945 remains a point of pride for Chesterton’s most dedicated followers, who appended the following preface to a 2010 reprint of Why I Left Mosley: it should not be forgotten that whilst A.K. continued to write, speak, organise and fight in the frontline until his death – a struggle that was fraught, painful, but manly – Mosley, ‘the Leader’, took himself off into exile to await ‘the call of the English people’, a call that never came and was never seriously expected.8 As he lamented to Beaverbrook in 1953, and to readers of Candour in years afterward, Chesterton spent his post-war career haunted by the ‘ghost’ of fascism. Like Mosley, he was quick to insist that fascism was strictly a product of its era and, in Britain as in the rest of Europe, was buried permanently in the ashes of the Second World War. Needless to say, this interpretation does not provide an accurate picture of Chesterton’s transition into the ‘post-fascist’ era. In the most basic sense, the ideological views professed by Chesterton until his death in 1973 retained the core

Conclusion  157

aspects of Roger Griffin’s ideal type – ultra-nationalism, an obsession with cultural decline and the palingenetic pursuit of national regeneration. A more enlightening picture emerges, however, when we analyze each of Chesterton’s main political endeavours after 1940 on its own terms.9 The After-Victory Group’s aspirations for a new party between 1943 and 1946 were, in many respects, a straightforward exercise in nostalgic fascism. Chesterton and other ex-BUF members in the planning committee had every intention of harnessing a populist, grassroots nationalism and anti-Semitism to support their movement, and made repeated references to a leader of military background emerging organically to spearhead the process of national regeneration. Chesterton anticipated that the aftermath of the Second World War would be a repeat of the years after 1918, and that a new wave of veterans would embrace nationalism and anti-Semitism, just as he had in the 1930s. His fixation on ‘winning the peace’ and accomplishing tasks that had eluded the BUF implied that the party debuting in 1945 was to be a fairly orthodox attempt to revive British fascism, stripped only of its foreign overtones, overt paramilitarism and the personality cult surrounding Mosley. Despite its nostalgic orientation, the After-Victory Group did give a preview of the ideological heterogeneity and organizational complexity that would come to characterize the extreme right after 1945. Collin Brooks, Chesterton’s closest ally in planning the National Front, spent much of his political life vacillating between conservatism and the extreme right. The party’s platform also incorporated conservative principles, promising to combat the growth of state bureaucracy and affirm the dignity of individual British citizens. Such ideas were hardly typical of ‘state worshipping’ interwar fascist parties and bore closer resemblance to the quasilibertarian platforms of the contemporary extreme right in Western Europe.10 Chesterton’s proposals for mass chalking and leafleting campaigns also gave an early indication of the direction his political activism was headed – towards the confrontational but mostly non-violent protest tactics of the LEL. In organizational terms, the After-Victory Group was something of a predecessor to the small, non-party entities which constituted much of the extreme right after 1945: an overlapping cluster of pressure groups, reading circles and clandestine paramilitaries that bore varying degrees of ideological and methodological proximity to interwar fascism. New circumstances, ideas and alliances on the extreme right were accompanied by an array of old and new problems. The absence of a clearly appointed leader exacerbated the internal divisions which had beset the movement even under Mosley’s stewardship. Reconciling the revolutionary, anti-Semitic aspects of British fascism with the more conservative tendencies of the British right proved difficult, as illustrated by the abrupt departure of the After-Victory Group’s patron, Granville Soames, in 1945. Chesterton’s experiences with the After-Victory Group, and later with the LEL, confirm Mark Pitchford’s overarching thesis that relations between conservatives and the extreme right became far more circumspect after the collapse of interwar fascism in Britain. Ironically, just as Chesterton and other radicals were becoming more open to conservative ideas, the establishment circles of British

158 Conclusion

conservatism were becoming more unified and diligent in their opposition to fascism and anti-Semitism.11 Financing and other mundane necessities of political organizing subsequently proved a constant struggle for Britain’s post-war extreme right, which was forced to rely on the generosity of aristocrats like the Duke of Bedford, eccentric businessmen like R.K. Jeffery, or an audience of followers endlessly harangued for small donations. The clearest demonstration of Chesterton’s altered relationship with fascism after 1945 was the LEL. Reading through the issues of Candour, which consistently featured overt anti-Semitism, strident nationalism and vague authoritarianism, opponents could plausibly accuse Chesterton and his followers of harbouring fascist or ‘semi-fascist’ inclinations. Yet the membership, platform and tactics of the LEL were both consciously and unconsciously out of step with the methods and ideals of fascism. Chesterton opted for a selective membership, eschewing populism and electioneering in favour of publicity stunts and a constant stream of quasi-intellectual literature. What little violence did accompany LEL activities often appeared in a strange inversion of the situation that had accompanied BUF meetings the 1930s, with Chesterton accusing Tory stewards of excessive force. While most of these events were little more than a political sideshow, the LEL did inspire other extreme right activists to deploy stunts as a way of garnering media attention.12 Aside from demonstrating a generational divide, the LEL’s failure to retain the young extremists like Jordan, Bean and Tyndall was indicative of its ideological orientation. While Chesterton’s influence brought echoes of the fascist tradition via anti-Semitic conspiracies, the LEL was primarily focused on restoring traditional British values and recapturing a faded sense of imperial glory. Rather than exulting in youth and modernity, Chesterton and his followers were engaged in an anachronistic, increasingly one-sided struggle against the tides of history. Despite the presence of ‘palingenetic’ themes within this struggle, it is difficult to identify any coherent vision of a radical ‘new order’ emerging from a platform that so emphasized the recapturing of an idealized past. With the benefit of hindsight, the LEL appears ultra-reactionary rather than fascist. This distinction was not obvious enough, however, to spare Chesterton’s reputation or to alleviate the problem of political space that beset other extreme right-wing organizations after 1940. The emergence of radical right groups like the Monday Club, coupled with Chesterton’s unwillingness to reexamine anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, ensured that the party remained on the very fringes of British conservatism. During his brief tenure at the head of the National Front, Chesterton maintained the cautious approach he had adopted with the LEL and attempted (without success) to keep the party free of undesirable elements. Having spent decades attempting to transcend his affiliation with the BUF, Chesterton viewed tactics that invited comparisons to fascism as both counterproductive and contrary to the principles of the movement he was hoping to build. He correctly assumed that street violence, covert paramilitaries and overt displays of racial hatred were a hindrance to the political fortunes of Britain’s extreme right, which struggled to attain the legitimate reputation or electoral success garnered by some of its counterparts

Conclusion  159

in Western Europe after 1970. For all of Chesterton’s tactical restraint, however, the prevalence of a genuinely populist, palingenetic ultra-nationalism within the National Front’s ideology and platform made for a party that was potentially more fascistic than either the League of Empire Loyalists or its arthritic successor, the Candour–League movement. After Chesterton’s death, his friends and close supporters were understandably eager to dissociate his reputation from the party for which he had served as founding chairman; Doris Chesterton referred to her husband’s decision to found the party as ‘the biggest mistake of his life’.13 It is fair to assume that Chesterton would not have agreed to act as a figurehead for the party in 1973 had he been aware of Tyndall and the other leaders’ ongoing affiliation with neo-Nazism at home and overseas. Nor would he have endorsed the National Front ‘kicking its way into the headlines’ under the direction of Martin Webster.14 Despite the generation gap highlighted by his brief tenure as chairman, however, Chesterton’s involvement with the National Front cannot be dismissed as a mistake or aberration in an otherwise moderate post-war career. In the grand scheme of things, his ideological legacy owed more to the extremist faction that prevailed in 1976 than the ‘trimming populists’ who exited with John Kingsley Read.15 Just months before his resignation in 1970, Chesterton delivered the following appeal to readers of Candour: Whoever thinks that this task can be undertaken without extreme activity, without getting mud bespattered on hands and cuffs and without being called many nasty names, is a weakling, a political flaneur whose only service is to keep a hundred miles away from the battlefield. Forward the Extremists!16 In a sign of things to come, Chesterton’s declaration received its heartiest endorsement from Tyndall, who wrote in the pages of Spearhead: Our country and the very civilization with which it is bound up are faced with an extreme peril. To meet that peril calls for extreme effort and extreme sacrifice, and these things can only come from extreme strength of ­conviction – conviction that Britain is worth the effort and the sacrifice, conviction that the perils that threaten her cannot be bargained with but must be destroyed.17 With all its emphasis upon the need for militant self-sacrifice in response to an impending national crisis, Tyndall’s sentiment bore a distinct similarity to Creed of a Fascist Revolutionary. Whether he recognized it or not, therefore, Chesterton’s influence on the National Front served to usher in another generation of fascist radicals in Britain.This new generation shared his obsessions with societal decadence, racial miscegenation and the threats to British sovereignty posed by European entanglement and a cabal of international conspirators. Significantly, however, they did not share Chesterton’s sense of disillusionment with mass politics, nor his aversion to political violence and ‘racial vigilantism’. With the post-war consensus fading

160 Conclusion

further into the background, the activists that followed in Chesterton’s footsteps saw Britain in similar terms to the Blackshirts in the 1930s – a nation in a state of upheaval that made a surge of revolutionary nationalism all but inevitable. It would become apparent before long, however, that they faced the same unpleasant choice that had confronted Britain’s extreme right since emerging from the wreckage of the interwar movement: pursue moderation, and risk losing political and ideological independence, or embrace extremism, and face a lifetime of marginalization, failure and disillusionment.

Notes 1 Beckett, Fascist in the Family, p. 363. 2 Macklin, Dyed in Black, pp. 13–14. 3 Holmes, Searching for Lord Haw-Haw, 444–445. 4 TNA KV2/3328/195a, Letter from T. Selmes Taylor to Colonel G.H.W. Goode, 6 March 1957. 5 For details of Beckett’s turn towards Roman Catholicism, see Beckett, Fascist in the Family, pp. 320–340. 6 Chesterton Collection A. 16, p. 23. 7 Macklin, Dyed in Black, pp. 135–139. 8 Creed of a Fascist Revolutionary/Why I Left Mosley (London: BM Candour, 2010), p. 16. This reprint was issued by the A.K. Chesterton Trust that combined two pamphlets written by Chesterton in the 1930s. Italics in original. 9 See Stanley Payne, ‘Commentary on Roger Griffin’s “Fascism’s New Faces” ’, Griffin, Loh and Umland eds., Fascism Past and Present,West and East, pp. 175–178. 10 Mann, Fascists, pp. 367–368. 11 Pitchford, The Conservative Party and the Extreme Right, pp. 219–228. 12 Jackson, Colin Jordan, p. 100. 13 Chesterton Collection A. 13, p. 7. 14 Bean, Many Shades of Black, p. 214. 15 Sykes, The Radical Right in Britain, pp. 110–111. 16 Candour, February 1970, pp. 113–114. 17 Spearhead, May 1970, pp. 6–7.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Archives and Collections National Archives of the United Kingdom KV2 – Records of the Security Service, Personal (PF) Files KV4 – Policy (Pol F) Files BT 389 – Registry of Shipping and Seamen: War of 1939–1945 CRIM 1/3973 – Central Criminal Court: Depositions, 11 September 1962

University of Bath Special Collections GB 1128 – Catalogue of the papers and correspondence of Arthur Kenneth Chesterton (1899–1973).

United Kingdom Parliamentary Archives BBK – The Beaverbrook Papers

British Library, St. Pancras G.K. Chesterton Papers

University of Sheffield Special Collections MS 238 – John Beckett Collection

162 Bibliography

Working Class Movement Library, Salford Fascism: Fascist Groups Series

Extreme right-wing books and pamphlets Aldred, Guy and John Wynn, It Might Have Happened to You (London: Black House Publishing, 2012). Chesterton, A.K. (as Caius Marcius Coriolanus), No Shelter for Morrison (London: Dorothy Crisp, 1944). Chesterton, A.K., Creed of a Fascist Revolutionary (London: BUF Publications, 1936). Chesterton, A.K., Facing the Abyss (Liss Forest: A.K. Chesterton Trust, 1976). Chesterton, A.K., Menace of the Money Power (Reprinted by A.K. Chesterton Trust, 2012. Originally published in London by Yeoman Press, Blackfriars, 1946). Chesterton, A.K., The New Unhappy Lords (London: A.K. Chesterton Trust, 2011. Reprint of the 4th revised edition originally published by Candour in October 1972). Chesterton, A.K., Oswald Mosley: Portrait of a Leader (London: Sanctuary Press, 1937). Chesterton, A.K., Truth Has Been Murdered! (London: Britons Publishing, 1953). Chesterton, A.K., Why I Left Mosley (London: National Socialist League, 1938). Chesterton, A.K. and Joseph Leftwich, The Tragedy of Anti-Semitism (London: Anscombe, 1948). Field, A.N., The Truth About the Slump (Nelson: A.N. Field, 1934). Mosley, Oswald, The Alternative (Ramsbury: Mosley Publications, 1947). Mosley, Oswald, Fascism: 100 Questions Asked and Answered (London: BUF Publications, 1936). Mosley, Oswald, The Greater Britain (London: BUF Publications, 1934). Tyndall, John, The Eleventh Hour (Welling: Albion Press, 1998). Tyndall, John, Six Principles of British Nationalism (Welling: Albion Press, 1966). Webster, Nesta, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (Hawthorne: Christian Book Club of America, 1964).

Extreme Right-Wing Newspapers and Periodicals Action, The Blackshirt, Candour, Fascist Quarterly (later British Union Quarterly), Fascist Week, London Tidings,The People’s Post, Spearhead,Truth,The Weekly Review.

Contemporary Newspapers and Periodicals The Jewish Chronicle,The Johannesburg Star,The Sunday Express,The Spectator,The Sunday Times, The Times.

Selected Secondary Sources Full details of all sources can be found in the footnotes. The following list contains those secondary works most relevant to this book. Baker, David L., ‘A.K. Chesterton: The Making of a British Fascist’, PhD Diss., University of Sheffield, 1982. Baker, David L., Ideology of Obsession (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996).

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INDEX

Abyssinia 51, 67 – 8, 92 Action 52 Adventures in Dramatic Appreciation 23 After-Victory Group 77 – 80, 84, 86, 99 – 100, 121, 157 All Quiet on the Western Front 23, 25 anti-Americanism 4, 75, 98, 101, 158 anti-fascism 17, 32, 42 – 3, 49, 73, 79, 84, 90, 115 – 16, 126 anti-Semitism 10 – 11; as biological racism 44 – 5, 48; conspiratorial 18, 21, 42, 102 – 3, 106, 127; influence in British culture 20 – 22; and interwar British fascism 41 – 3, 56, 58 – 61, 131 – 3, 135 – 6, 140 – 5, 147 – 9; persistence during Second World War 136 – 7 Apotheosis of the Jew 45 – 6 Asquith, Herbert Henry 20 Atlantic Charter (1941) 92 Australia 109 – 10, 120, 142, 146, 148 authoritarianism 3 – 4, 57, 78, 81 – 2, 91, 106, 120 – 1, 143, 158 Baker, David L. 1 – 2, 8, 135, 155; analysis of Chesterton as a British fascist 22 – 4; analysis of Chesterton’s anti-Semitism 44 – 7 ‘Battle of Cable Street’ 49 Battle of Épehy 12 Beamish, Henry Hamilton 43, 132 Bean, John 102 – 3, 105, 115, 118 – 19 Beaverbrook, Lord (Max Aitken) 34, 95 – 7, 105, 156

Beckett, Francis 49 – 50, 155 Beckett, John 14, 24 – 5; arrest and internment 66, 69, 71 – 2; break with Mosley 51, 57 – 9; as a BUF member 39; campaigns with British People’s Party 83 – 4, 98; relationship with Chesterton 49 – 50, 98; withdrawal from politics 155 – 6 Bedford, Duke of (Hastings Russel) 69, 83 – 4, 158 Belloc, Hillaire 20, 22, 28n89, 73 Bennett, Don 124 Black House 24 – 5, 36, 49 Blackshirt 37, 39 – 40, 42, 44, 48 – 9; Chesterton as editor of 51 – 2 Board of Deputies of British Jews 77 Boer War, Second 8 – 9 Bolshevism 21, 85, 141 – 2 Box, F.M. 39 Brexit (2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum) 126 – 7 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 68, 78, 134; Chesterton applies for work at 69 British Brother’s League 42 British Fascists 14, 30 British National Party (1965–1967) 115, 118 – 19, 121 – 2 British National Party (1982–) 2, 126, 150 British People’s Party 69, 83 – 4, 102, 110 – 11, 117 – 18 British Resurgence 102

168 Index

British Union of Fascists 1, 12 – 13, 31 – 2; ‘Defence Force’ 36 – 7, 115; East London campaigns 48 – 9, 51; funding 32; historiography 31 – 2, 37 – 8, 49; internal culture 24, 38 – 9, 41; international ties 31 – 2, 49; internment and dissolution 62, 64n35; leadership 14, 56 – 8; membership 38 – 9, 42 – 3; policies 32 – 6, 47 – 8, 80, 104, 120; propaganda 14 – 15, 32, 35 – 6, 39, 42, 44, 49 – 50; support base 17 – 18, 48 British Vigil 60, 70 Britons Publishing 43, 132 Brockway, Fenner 71 Brons, Andrew 126 Brooke, Rupert 67 Brooks, Austen 100, 102, 117 Brooks, Collin 37, 73 – 9, 81, 83, 98, 157 Burden-Coutts, Martin 100 – 1 ‘Camel Corps’ 68 Canada 120 Candour 97 – 100, 119; after Chesterton’s death 127; audience 110 – 11; ideological orientation 102, 105 – 7, 121 Candour-League Movement 123 – 4 Cape Town 67, 92; Chesterton’s winter residence in 109 capitalism 17, 32 – 4, 76 – 7, 86, 94, 98, 104, 107, 146 Carlyle, Thomas 20, 33 Catholicism 132 – 3 Chesterton, Arthur George 8 Chesterton, Arthur Kenneth (A.K.) 1 – 2; agnosticism 132; alcoholism 12, 49 – 50, 56, 63, 68, 97; anti-Semitism 10 – 11, 17 – 18, 20 – 2, 43 – 9, 56 – 7, 59 – 61, 76, 78, 82, 95, 98, 131 – 51, 158; attitude to violence 36 – 7, 49, 59 – 60, 82, 101 – 2, 105, 117, 124, 143 – 4, 158; attraction to fascism 24 – 6; avoids internment 60 – 7; childhood 8 – 11, 114; colonial experience 8 – 11, 18, 45, 51, 68 – 9, 145; conspiracy theories 9, 21 – 2, 43 – 4, 58 – 9, 86, 91, 93 – 5, 98, 104, 108 – 9, 131 – 51; cultural pessimism 22 – 4, 40 – 1, 75; death 124 – 5; early impressions of fascism 24 – 5; education 9, 16, 20; employed by Lord Beaverbrook 95 – 7; employed by Truth 77, 95; experiences in First World War 11 – 14, 23, 59; experiences in Second World War 66 – 9, 91 – 2; family 8 – 9, 19 – 22; fascist ideology 5, 13 – 16, 19 – 20, 22 – 6, 32 – 6, 39 – 41, 44, 57, 59 – 61, 63, 80 – 2, 85 – 6, 106 – 7, 120 – 1, 132, 139 – 40,

149; fictional works 75; founds Candour 98; founds League of Empire Loyalists 99 – 100; health and illness 11 – 12, 68, 119, 121, 124 – 5; imperialism 9 – 10, 51, 104; international influence 109 – 10, 136; joins BUF 25 – 6; journalism 14 – 16, 19, 21 – 2, 51, 69 – 70, 72 – 3, 75, 77, 95 – 7, 156; legacy 125 – 7; legal actions 73, 101, 105, 110, 140; literary interests 19, 40 – 1, 156; marriage 24, 77, 75; patriotism 9 – 10, 11, 60 – 1, 63, 80, 96 – 7, 107 – 8, 155 – 6; personality 155; propaganda 13, 17, 32 – 6, 39 – 41, 45, 48 – 9, 50 – 2, 66, 68, 75 – 6, 78, 83 – 4, 94, 137 – 8; pseudonyms 95; public speaking 25, 59 – 60; reaction to Olympia meeting 36 – 8, 81, 117; resigns from BUF 52, 56 – 8; resigns from National Front 122 – 3; theatrical criticism 21 – 3, 40 – 1; views on leadership 5, 24, 32 – 3, 57 – 9, 75, 78 – 81, 93, 99 – 100, 119, 122, 156; visits Nazi Germany 50 – 1 Chesterton, Cecil 20 – 2, 45 Chesterton, Doris (nee Terry) 9, 24 – 5, 37, 135, 159 Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (G.K.) 20 – 2, 43, 45 – 7 Chesterton, Harriet 8, 11, 14, 19 Chile 98 China 76 Churchill, Winston 31, 71 – 2, 78, 101; Chesterton’s views of 92 – 3 Clarke-Goldthorpe, John 60, 70, 73 Cold War 86, 92, 94, 97, 103, 136 ‘Colonel Blimp’ 101 – 2, 105 ‘colour bar’ 10, 16, 18 ‘Column 88’ 124 Commissars Over Britain 95 Common Market see European Economic Community (EEC) Common Sense 146 Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) 142, 150 communism 17 – 18, 32, 35, 85, 94, 98, 103, 107, 146 – 7 Communist Party of Great Britain 91 Conference of Venice 107 conservatism 46, 80, 101 – 2, 120 – 1; relationship with fascism and right-wing extremism 3 – 5, 30, 86, 97, 157 – 8 Conservative Party 3, 30 – 1, 93, 121, 148; relationship with extreme right after Second World War 83, 101 – 3, 110, 125; relationship with interwar fascism 38, 73

Index  169

Constitutional Research Association 70 – 1, 79, 81 Coriolanus, Caius Marcius see Chesterton, Arthur Kenneth (A.K.) corporatism 25, 33 – 4, 75, 80, 120 Council Against European Commitments 58 Creagh-Scott, John 102 Creed of a Fascist Revolutionary 39 – 41 Crisp, Dorothy 85 Daily Worker 60, 73 De Bounevialle, Rosine 100, 110, 127 De Gaulle, Charles 109, 121 decolonization 86, 91 – 3, 110, 145 – 7 Douglas, C.H. 69 East Africa campaign (First World War) 8, 11 – 12, 43 East Africa campaign (Second World War) 62, 66 – 8, 91 – 2 Eden, Anthony 103 – 4 Edmonds, Harry 70 – 1, 79, 81 – 2 Egypt 67, 103 – 4 Eichmann, Adolf 138 English National Association 69 – 70, 78 eugenics 31, 48 Eurofascism 91 European Economic Community (EEC) 108 – 9, 121, 124, 125 European Parliament 126 Euroscepticism 4, 126 – 7 extreme right 1; etymology 3 – 4; as a political family 3 – 4; relationship with fascism 4 – 5 Eye Witness 87n44 Fabianism 24, 123 Facing the Abyss 125 fascism, British 31 – 1; cultural dimensions 40 – 1; failures of 57 – 8, 79 – 80, 82, 159 – 60; foreign influences 50; generic 2 – 5; historiography 37 – 8; international dimensions of 50, 61; interpretations 1 – 3, 5; Italian 15, 50 Fascist Quarterly 45 Fascist Week 32, 42 Faulconbridge, Philip see Chesterton, Arthur Kenneth (A.K.) Federal Union 60, 108 Field, A.N. 133 Findlay, Archibald 66 Flockhart, Lawrence 96 Flower, Archibald 22, 25

Forgan, Robert 39, 57 Fountaine, Andrew 118, 122, 126 France 11 – 13, 21, 107 – 8, 119 Francis-Hawkins, Neill 39, 51 – 2, 56 Franco, Francisco 61, 73, 155 Fraser-Harris, D.S. 102 Free British 124 Free Speech Defence Committee 121 Freemasonry 131 – 3 Friends of Oswald Mosley 127 Front Generation 13 – 14, 25, 27n37, 80 Front National 119 Fuller, J.F.C. 71, 78, 83 G.K’s Weekly 87n44 General Election (1929) 24 General Election (1964) 148 General Election (1970) 122 General Election (1974) 125 General Election (1979) 126 German National Socialist Workers Party (NSDAP) see Nazi Germany Germany, West 108 Girvan, Ian Waverly 78 – 9 Godfrey, Edward 70 Great War see First World War Greater Britain 31 – 4 Greater Britain Movement 116, 118 – 19, 128n19 Green, George 72, 78 Greene, Ben 69, 78, 87n22, 99 Greene, Leslie 99, 104 Griffin, Nick 126 Griffin, Roger 2, 5, 156 – 7 Hamm, Jeffery 79, 83 – 4, 90 – 1, 94, 143 Heath, Edward 121 Hilton, Richard 105 Hitler, Adolf 36, 38, 45, 48, 61, 79, 91, 107, 115, 135; Chesterton’s opinion of 25, 50 – 1, 58 – 9, 71, 136, 139, 148 Hofstadter, Richard 132 – 3, 145, 149 Holocaust 44 – 5, 47, 105, 137; denial 136 – 40 Hore-Belisha, Leslie 73 Ideology of Obsession see Baker, David L. immigration 46, 102, 105, 119 – 20, 122; as a conspiracy 145 – 51; and European integration 109, 125 – 6 Imperial Fascist League 30 Independent Labour Party 14, 71 Independent Nationalists 78, 81, 83 India 34, 63, 92, 145

170 Index

‘international finance’ see ‘Money Power’ internationalism 92, 104, 142 internment 58, 62 – 3, 66, 69 – 70, 78 – 9, 82, 85, 91, 105, 155 Isaacs, Godfrey 20 Islam 126 Israel 103, 138, 141 – 2, 144 Jebb, R.D. 28n89, 73 Jeffery, Robert Key 97 – 9, 156; disputed inheritance 110 Jewish Chronicle 59, 73 – 4, 140 ‘Jewish problem’ 45, 47, 138, 141 – 2, 144 ‘Jewish question’ 10, 20, 22, 41 – 2, 47, 73 – 4, 137, 140 – 51 Johannesburg 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 – 19 Johannesburg Star 14 – 17, 19 Jordan, Colin 102 – 3, 105, 138, 158; Chesterton’s criticisms of 115 – 17 Journey’s End 23 Joyce, William 14; in the BUF 39 – 40, 42, 48 – 9; Chesterton’s attempt to rehabilitate 96 – 7; Chesterton’s relationship with 57 – 9, 72, 73; establishes National Socialist League 51; flight to Germany 62 – 3, 66 Kent, Tyler 62, 64n35 Kenya 104; LEL presence in 109 – 10 Kipling, Rudyard 40 – 1 Knight, G. Wilson 22 – 3 Kristallnacht 58 Krugersdorp 8 Ku Klux Klan 83 Labour Party 24 – 5, 31, 69, 85 League of Empire Loyalists 99 – 100; electoral campaigns 104 – 5; funding 99 – 100, 110 – 11; ideology 100 – 1, 158 – 9; membership 9, 100 – 3; overseas branches 109 – 10; political stunts 101 – 2, 157; public image 100 – 1 League of Ex-Servicemen 83 – 4, 103, 143 League of Nations 14 – 15, 85, 92 Leese, Arnold 30 – 1, 45, 59, 82, 102, 105, 149 Leftwich, Joseph 137, 142, 145 Lewis, Wyndham 40, 54n58 Liberal Party 20, 124, 134 Linton-Orman, Rotha 14, 30 Liverpool 62, 75 London County Council Election (1977) 126 London Tidings 95

Lord Haw-Haw see Joyce, William Lymington,Viscount (Gerard Vernon Wallop) 59 – 61, 73, 78 Mackey, Aiden 100, 124 Macmillan, Harold 108 – 10 Macnab, John 57, 74, 104 McCarthy, Joseph 98 Mein Kampf 139 Menace of the Money Power 94, 143 MI5 see Security Service Militant Christian Patriots 59, 141 Monday Club 110, 125, 158 ‘Money Power’ 93 – 4, 98 – 9, 108, 131, 133 – 5, 139, 143, 151 money reform 71, 77 Montgomery, Bernard 79 Morgan, J.P. 17 Morrison, Herbert 71 – 2, 85 Mosley, Oswald 1 – 2, 73 – 4, 79; antiSemitism 41 – 4, 47 – 8; arrest and internment 62 – 3, 69, 71 – 2; attraction to fascism 31 – 2; as BUF leader 32 – 3, 36 – 8, 51 – 2, 94; Chesterton’s relationship with 24, 56 – 9, 61 – 2, 71 – 2, 81, 90, 97; economic philosophy 33 – 5, 104; European idea 91 – 2, 107; fascist ideology 33 – 5, 41, 80; founds Union Movement 90 – 1; international ties 49 – 50, 107; legacy 127, 156; released from internment; 72 – 3, 81; retirement 107; war experience 13 – 14 Movement for Colonial Freedom 101 – 2 Mussolini, Benito 30, 36, 49 – 51, 59, 70, 74, 79, 103, 137 National Fascisti 30 National Front (1945–1946) 77 – 82, 91, 94; dissolution 83 – 74 National Front (1967–1990) 117 – 18, 123 – 5; decline 126; electoral attempts 122 – 3, 125 – 6; leadership disputes 119, 122 – 3, 125 – 6; policy and ideology 120 – 1, 135, 149, 150 – 1 National Labour Party 105, 115, 147 National Party of the United Kingdom 126 national socialism 77 – 8, 80 National Socialist League 51, 57 – 8, 70, 73 National Socialist Movement 115 – 16 nationalism 2 – 4, 9, 25, 30, 32, 46, 69, 80, 95, 104, 106 – 7, 121, 132, 142 – 3, 149, 156 – 60 Nationalist Party 126

Index  171

Nazi Germany 2, 16, 45, 47 – 50, 58, 62, 137, 139 neo-fascism 1 – 5, 105 – 7, 115, 124, 148 neo-Nazism 2 – 3, 102 – 3, 105 – 6, 115 – 16, 119, 123 – 4, 126, 139 – 40, 149, 159 New National Front 126 New Pioneer 59 – 60, 73, 78 ‘New Right’ 3, 126 New Unhappy Lords 125, 135, 139 New Witness 20, 87n44 New Zealand 109 – 10, 120, 133 Nietzsche, Fredrich 131 Nordic League 59 – 61 Norris, Alfred 69 – 71 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 107 ‘nostalgic fascism’ 5, 86, 91, 157 Notting Hill race riots (1958) 105, 147 nuclear arms 86, 91 Nuremberg trials 95 O’Brien, John 123 Oddie, Gerard 102 Olympia meeting 36 – 9, 41 – 2, 49, 56, 74, 81, 117 Oppenheimer, Ernest 17 pacifism 15, 24, 50, 61, 69, 85 Pakistan 92 Palestine 47, 92, 141 – 2 paramilitarism 5, 30, 36, 101, 115 – 17, 157 – 8 ‘paranoid style’ see Hofstadter, Richard Patriot 70 Patriotic Front 105 Paxton, Robert O. 2, 4 – 5, 41 People’s Post 84, 98 populism 4, 120, 122 – 3, 158 Portsmouth, Earl of see Lymington, Viscount (Gerard Vernon Wallop) Portsmouth, Lord see Lymington,Viscount (Gerard Vernon Wallop) Portugal 82, 106 post-fascism 2, 4, 80, 127, 156 Potter, Gillie 78 Poujade, Pierre 107 Pound, Ezra 54n58 Powell, Enoch 119 – 20, 122, 124, 127; Chesterton’s attitude towards 150 – 1 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 43, 102; Chesterton’s citation of 134 – 5; influence in Britain 131 – 3 Public Order Act (1936) 49 Public Order Act (1963) 116

Race Relations Act (1965) 121 Racial Preservation Society 118, 121 racism 3 – 4, 135, 149 – 50; biological 44 – 5, 144 – 5; colonial 10 – 11, 31, 51, 145; ethnocentric 45; scientific 48 Ramsay, Archibald 59 – 60, 69, 74, 78 Rand Revolt (1922) 16 – 19, 43 rationalism 15 Read, John Kinglsey 125 – 6, 159 Red Book 60, 62 Reed, Douglas 95 Rhodesia 10, 95, 109 – 10, 120, 151 Right Club 60, 62 ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech see Powell, Enoch Rockwell, George Lincoln 116 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 92 Rosenberg, Albert 45, 139, 144, 149 Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) 62, 67 Russian Revolution (1917) 94, 137; conspiracy theories regarding 141 – 2 Salassie, Haile 51 Scotland 95 Seale, Barney 78 Security Regulation 18b see internment Security Service (MI5) 39, 51, 56, 60 – 1, 63, 70 – 1, 77 – 8, 80, 82, 136 – 7, 141 Shakespeare, William 19, 24, 41, 95; works as interpreted by Chesterton 22 – 3 Shakespeare Review 22 – 3 Shaw, George Bernard 40 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 19, 22 Sieff, Israel Moses 58 – 9 Six Principles of British Nationalism 120 Skidelsky, Robert 13, 17, 31, 38 skinheads 125 Smith, Ian 120 Smuts, Jan 17, 43, 108 Soames, Granville 83, 157 social credit movement 69 social Darwinism 34 – 5 socialism 2, 17, 33 – 4, 76 Somaliland (British) 67 South Africa 8 – 10, 14, 24, 36, 120 – 2, 124; anti-Semitism in 43 – 4, 145 – 6; Bureau of State Security (BOSS) 136; LEL campaigns in 109 – 10; racial politics of 18, 148, 151 Soviet Union 69, 76, 92 – 4, 103, 108; alleged Jewish influence in 141 – 2 Spain 1, 73, 82, 96, 106, 155 Spanish Civil War 50, 59 Spearhead (paramilitary group) 115 – 16

172 Index

Spearhead 121, 159 Staples, Ronald 95 Stewart-Chamberlain, Houston 45 Strasser, Otto 107, 138 Stratford-Upon-Avon 22 – 3, 25 Suez crisis 100 – 4, 108 Sunday Express 96 Tabouis, Geneviève 58 – 9 Tavistock, Marquis of see Bedford, Duke of (Hastings Russel) terrorism 116, 124, 126, 142, 146 Thatcher, Margaret 3, 126 Thurlow, Richard 23 – 4, 135, 155 Torquay Citizens Defence League 23 Torquay Times 23 totalitarianism 66 Tremlett, Rex 24, 39, 42, 70, 73, 75, 78 – 9, 83, 155 ‘trench socialism’ 24 Truth 73 – 4, 77, 95, 98, 100, 141, 156 Tyndall, John 103, 105, 115 – 21, 126; Chesterton’s influence upon 122 – 4, 135 – 6, 149, 151, 158 – 9 Union Movement 90 – 1, 102 – 3, 105, 107, 115, 117, 147, 155 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) 3, 126 – 7 United Nations (UN) 92, 101, 104

United States of America 21, 48, 69, 76, 92 – 3, 97 – 8, 103 – 4, 106 – 7, 109, 141; extreme right activity in 115 – 16, 132, 136, 146 Van Der Bergh, Henrikh 136 Vansittart, Lord Robert 83 – 4 vitalism 16, 19, 140 Webster, Martin 124, 126 Webster, Nesta 132 – 3 Weekly Review 61, 73, 75, 77, 80 – 1, 87n44, 87n45, 96, 137, 140 West, Rebecca 96 West Indies 146 – 7 Western Front (First World War) 11 – 12, 23, 25, 59 White Defence League 103, 105, 115 – 16 white nationalism 102, 105, 115, 135, 149 – 50 Why I Left Mosley 56 – 7, 156 Witwatersrand 8, 11, 16, 18 – 19 Wolf, Lucien 131 Wolkoff, Anna 64n35 ‘world government’ conspiracy 108, 135, 142 Yorkshire 57 Zionism 47, 137, 141 – 2, 148 – 9