In his autobiography Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, devoted several pages to explaining how he determined that his followers should wear black shirts. He recalled wanting something that radiated strength and virility. He then added: “Soon our men developed the habit of cutting the shirt in the shape of a fencing jacket, a kindly little tribute to my love of the sport.”1 Being an inordinately vain man, he could not prevent himself from alluding to both his success as a swordsman and to the devotion he inspired in his acolytes. Mosley obviously did not appreciate that a good portion of the press and public would regard a man so proud of his fencing triumphs, and with such sartorial preoccupations, as being more of a playboy than a serious politician.2
We have seen how the media constructed a narrative in which the Mayfair playboy personified many of the stresses associated with changes in class and gender relations.3 The same is true for the world of politics. Those who debated such important issues as the rise of fascism at home and appeasement abroad sought to shore up their arguments with references to the otherwise apolitical man-about-town. Where did one locate the mythical Mayfair man or playboy on the political spectrum? Given conservatives’ parading of their disdain for the idle and unproductive it might be assumed that he was a creature of the left. Most observers no doubt regarded him as largely indifferent to formal politics but nevertheless assumed that logically the self-centered man, devoted to the pursuit of personal pleasures, would necessarily find his natural habitat on the right. Indeed, some on the left argued that the unbridled pursuit of self-interest could in Britain, as had been the case on the continent, lead to fascism. Representatives of the right replied that those who blathered on about the threat of fascism were actually creating the stressful conditions in which political extremism would flourish. Regardless of political stripe, commentators in the 1930s assumed that personal lifestyle choices were often predictive of a person’s politics.
Under the headline “Former Playboy of Mayfair Renounced Society to Aid Workers,” the New York Post announced the death, on March 19, 1938, of the Labour peer Lord Kinnoull (George Harley Hay-Drummond). The New York Times reported that he “was at one time known as a Mayfair playboy” and once said that nothing in life was worthwhile except “pour le sport.” His devotion to nightclubs, motorcars, and airplanes led to him losing his family’s 16,000-acre Scottish estate. Remarkably enough, he gave up his old pursuits, switched allegiances from the Conservative to the Labour Party, and before his early death at age thirty-five won a reputation as a devoted supporter of progressive causes.4
Few would have predicted Kinnoull ending up as a supporter of the Labour Party. In 1916, at the age of thirteen, he inherited a Scottish earldom in Perthshire. Eton educated, he sat in the House of Lords as Baron Hay. He first came to public attention in 1922 when, as a minor, he became entangled with a woman six years his elder, described by the press as a previously married former chorus girl. His family scotched the possibility of the nineteen-year-old marrying a gold digger by having the Registrar-General intervene and packing off the boy to South Africa.5
His mother’s goal was to have him wed an heiress, as the estate he inherited was heavily encumbered. The family’s plans all seemed to fall into place when, after a whirlwind courtship, Kinnoull, in December 1923, married Enid Hamlyn Fellows, granddaughter of Sir Frederick Wills, who had made a fortune in tobacco. After the wedding reception at the Hyde Park Hotel the couple set off for the south of France, the press reported, in a “racing car which is the Earl’s gift to his bride.”6
Like many bright young people of the 1920s the couple was addicted to speed. Kinnoull raced at Brooklands, and on public streets they both collected dozens of traffic tickets. In 1926 he committed four driving offenses in two days: causing an obstruction, speeding, and driving without a license. He got off after his solicitor argued that he had been acting as a special constable during the general strike and believed that as such he would not be summoned for minor offenses.7 Yet the couple was proud to report that Enid had paid a fifty-shilling fine for exceeding the ten-mile-an-hour speed limit in Perth. They boasted that to get Enid in court on time they flew the 900 miles from London to Perth and back again, passing under the Forth Bridge on the way.8 They were happy to be photographed taking flying lessons and to have their daring mishaps logged. “Lord Kinnoull,” the Times reported in July 1925, “who made a bad landing at Le Bourget on Tuesday night, and was slightly injured, was removed yesterday from Beaujon Hospital to a hotel.” His “touring aeroplane” had flipped over.9
Aside from nightclubbing, driving, and flying, the couple seemed to have enjoyed what members of the upper class were supposed to enjoy—London in the season, Scotland in the summer, Egypt or the south of France in the winter. There were, however, causes for concern. In 1925 their infant son died.10 The earl might have wandered; in any event the couple ceased living together. In 1926, Kinnoull, who had always had trouble handling money, appeared before the Bankruptcy Court having liabilities of £26,972 and assets of £587. He was forced to sell off the furnishings of the family estate in Perthshire and eventually lost Balhousie House as well, largely due to dealing with unscrupulous moneylenders. Mr. Allcorn, the assistant official receiver of the court, asked, “Looking back, do you not think that, although you attribute your failure and insolvency to extravagance in living, an additional cause is your reckless and stupid dealings in these bills?” Kinnoull answered, “Yes.”11 As luck would have it, just as the earl was having to deal with demanding creditors, his estranged wife Enid inherited the bulk of her mother’s enormous estate of £1,965,183. It did not save the marriage. Citing her husband’s adultery, the countess launched a Scottish divorce action in March 1927; it was granted in November.12
On the face of it, Kinnoull was the classic interwar playboy, but at the age of twenty-five he closed that chapter of his life and began another. Twenty-four hours after his divorce became final he announced his engagement to Mary Meyrick, daughter of the most famous nightclub owner in London, Kate Meyrick.13 Though jailed on multiple occasions for violation of liquor laws at the 43 Club, Kate ran several other venues, including the Silver Slipper, which Mary managed. At Kinnoull’s second marriage, in June 1928, the press pointedly reported that none of his family were present, whereas the nightclub world was well represented. Eustace Hoey, the best man, was known as the wine order boss of the West End.14 Mrs. Meyrick was in attendance despite that the previous week a Bow Street magistrate had granted twenty-six summonses against her and her customers for illegal drinking. She obviously regarded having an aristocrat as a son-in-law as a sign of her success; the respectable took this mésalliance as an example of the dangers posed by the mingling of classes, which the nightclubs encouraged.15
Kinnoull did not simply change spouses; he went through a political conversion.16 In 1929 he ceased to sit in the House of Lords as a Conservative and was formally accepted as a member by the Labour Party.17 His driving did not improve, but to the surprise of many, he became a hardworking advocate in the Lords for progressive causes.18 During the general strike of 1926 he, like many wealthy young men, had served as a special constable, protecting property owners from possible threats by the poor. Though still clearly a member of the elite, in the 1930s he attacked the dangers posed by economic disparities. As Labour junior whip in the upper house he called for the nationalization of all transport and the restriction of hours for truckers. In 1934 he accompanied the unemployed marchers’ representatives when they attempted to present a petition to the minister of labour.19 As the Times reported, he opposed the supporters of the “means test,” who insisted that public assistance be restricted to the unemployed who passed a humiliating screening. “The Earl of Kinnoull said that men who were welcomed in 1918 as heroes were now being treated as criminals. He would agree to no means test. The workers had the right to demand work or, if no work were available, to be kept by the State with a decent standard of living without being subjected to the indignity of the means test or the degradation of the Poor Law.”20
On the continent, fascists had succeeded in exploiting the middle classes’ fear of social unrest. Kinnoull raised the alarm that what had happened in Austria and Germany could be replicated in Britain. In 1934 he pointed out that British fascists, employing “Hitler-like” tactics, including the use of uniforms, barracks, and fleets of steel-sheathed lorries, were already causing public disturbances. Journalists and ministers had been threatened. Five different fascist parties in Britain competed for attention. Lord Rothermere and the Daily Mail offered them some financial support, but Kinnoull pressed the government to determine who else provided funding.21
Kinnoull came to see how injustices at home were related to injustices abroad. He sought to draw attention to the treatment of political prisoners in Nazi Germany.22 At the same time he noted that Britain also employed arbitrary methods of incarceration. In Parliament he quizzed the government on the detention in India of Subhas Bose, an anti-imperialist activist who had never been tried but was held as a terrorist under regulation III of 1818. There were altogether 2,000 detainees in India, which to Kinnoull smelled “very much of Fascism and savours very strongly of the Nazi concentration camps.”23 He demonstrated his support of the Indian nationalists by attending (with Lord Churchill, another radical peer) India Independence Day celebrations at the National Trade Union Club.24
Like others on the left, Kinnoull was especially worried by the Spanish Civil War. In November 1936 he, along with six other British politicians visited Madrid to raise public awareness of the besieged city’s plight.25 He was a member of the Spanish Youth Foodship Committee—as were Aneurin Bevan, Harold Laski, Naomi Mitchison, D. N. Pritt, Lord Churchill, and David Low—whose goal was to raise 100 tons of food and £1,000 in aid. He offered to deliver personally the relief supplies on his converted trawler, the Mino. The popular press obviously relished the image of a peer, wearing a red muffler and giving the communist salute, setting sail from Southampton on such a quixotic adventure.26 In fact, because of government regulations, the consignment had to be sent by regular cargo ship. The newspapers did not have to embellish their account of Kinnoull’s life. The true story of how a playboy gave up a life of cocktails and racing cars to turn his energies to improving the social conditions of the working class was remarkable enough.
When the press in March 1938 announced Kinnoull’s death it recalled him saying: “ ‘I have renounced cocktail parties, night clubs, racing and motor cars for political work. My youth may have been misspent, but I don’t regret it altogether. Every man has to make a fool of himself at some time, and it is better to get it over while he’s young.” The nightclubs had provided “contact with life … and made me understand and sympathize with human weakness.”27 No one claimed—he least of all—that he was an especially insightful student of British politics. The simple fact is that he was only one of many men-about-town who came to appreciate that the threats posed to Britain at home and abroad meant that life could not go on as usual.
“Today the forces of life and progress are ranging on one side, those of reaction and death on the other. We are having to choose between democracy and fascism, and fascism is the enemy of art.” So wrote the literary critic Cyril Connolly, in Enemies of Promise (1938). Perceptive middle- and upper-class intellectuals who recognized the coming political crisis were, he asserted, throwing their lot in with the workers. “I think a writer ‘goes over’ when he has a moment of conviction that his future is bound up with that of the working class. Once he has felt this his behaviour will inevitably alter. Often it will be recognized only by external symptoms, a disinclination to wear a hat or a stiff collar, an inability to be rude to waiters or taxi-drivers or to be polite to young men of his own age with rolled umbrellas, bowler hats and ‘Mayfair men’ moustaches or to tolerate the repressive measures of his class.”28 It says something of the sense of crisis felt in the late 1930s that a social climber like Connolly made such an avowal.29 A scholarship boy at Eton and Oxford, he had been dazzled by the elite. He, too, had volunteered as a special constable during the 1926 general strike; now he was declaring his support for the workers. If what this meant in practice remained rather vague, Connolly and Kinnoull reflected a common sentiment on the left that supporting the labor movement was linked to opposing fascism at home and abroad.
As early as 1925 the Manchester Guardian pointed out the connections of the playboy, the fascist, and Sir William Joynson-Hicks, or “Jix,” the authoritarian home secretary. When the British fascist leader General R. B. D. Blakeney, who blamed the Jews for the Russian revolution, visited Manchester, the paper teasingly noted, “The British Fascists—hasn’t someone called them Jix’s Playboys of the Postwar World?”30
In May 1938 several MPs likened the Hyde Park Hotel robbers to Italian fascists. The occasion was Lieutenant Colonel Charles Barclay-Harvey’s defense in the Commons of the government’s failure to stop the Italians from invading and occupying Ethiopia. “If we are charged with condoning this so-called crime now,” he said, “I would remind those who make the accusation that only a few weeks ago the Press of this country was filled with news about what was known as the Mayfair jewel robbery. Four young men were convicted of a brutal crime and sentenced to varying terms of imprisonment. Some time those young men will come out of prison. Does anyone suggest that because they will be let out of prison that this country will be condoning that crime?” Sydney Silverman pointed out the analogy’s obvious flaw. “Does the honourable Baronet suggest,” he asked, “that when those four men come out of prison they ought to be left in undisturbed enjoyment of the proceeds of their crime?” Barclay-Harvey offered a petulant response. “Certainly not. That is not the point that I am making. My point is that we are accused of condoning a crime. The fact is that the Italians are in occupation of Abyssinia. We could only eject the Italians from Abyssinia by war, and I am certain that nobody wants to do that.”31 He was led by the logic of his argument to admit that might made right, that the state would punish the playboy turned bully but think twice before standing up to a fascist state.
Such elements of an appeasement policy were hard to sell. In the past the Conservative Party wrapped itself in the flag, supported bellicose policies, and mocked the Labour Party’s timidity. Now the roles were reversed, with the left pushing for interventions in Europe and the right opposed. Although few newspapers supported Labour, their presentation of complicated foreign conflicts in an accessible language heightened the pressure on the government. When in 1936 they called Italy’s aggression in Abyssinia “robbery” and in 1938 spoke of Hitler’s “smash and grab raid” on Austria, they necessarily led readers to ask themselves why the government did nothing.32
Those who took the view that the Hyde Park Hotel robbers could be called “fascists,” no doubt saw themselves as consciously or unconsciously doubly damning the felons by yoking them to a discredited ideology. There were other commentators, however, who took the opposite view and attacked those whose tactics were to denigrate a legitimate belief system by associating it with criminality. Evelyn Waugh, regarded by many as Britain’s finest living novelist, in a March 1938 letter to the New Statesman was the first to advance this argument.
SIR,—I am moved to write to you on a subject that has long been in my mind, by an anecdote I have just heard. A friend of mine met someone who—I am sure, both you and he himself would readily admit—represents the highest strata of “Left Wing” culture. The conversation turned on the “May-fair” jewel robbers and the Socialist remarked that they exhibited “typical Fascist mentality.” This seems to me an abuse of vocabulary so mischievous and so common, that it is worth discussing. There was a time in the early twenties when the word “Bolshie” was current, it was used indiscriminately of refractory school children, employees who asked for a rise in wages, impertinent domestic servants, those who advocated an extension of the rights of property to the poor, and anything or anyone of whom the speaker disapproved. The only result was to impede reasonable discussion and clear thought. I believe we are in danger of a similar, stultifying use of the word “Fascist.” There was recently a petition sent to English writers (by a committee few, if any of whom, were English professional writers), asking them to subscribe themselves, categorically, as supporters of the Republican Party in Spain, or as “Fascists.” When rioters are imprisoned it is described as a “Fascist sentence”; the Means Test is Fascist; colonisation is Fascist; military discipline is Fascist; patriotism is Fascist; Catholicism is Fascist; Buchmanism is Fascist; the ancient Japanese cult of their Emperor is Fascist; the Galla tribes’ ancient detestation of theirs is Fascist; fox-hunting is Fascist … Is it too late to call for order? It is constantly said by those who observed the growth of Nazism, Fascism, and other dictatorial systems (not, perhaps, excluding the USSR) that they were engendered and nourished solely by Communism. I do not know how true that is, but I am inclined to believe it when I observe the pitiable stampede of the “Left Wing Intellectuals” in our own country. Only once was there anything like a Fascist movement in England; that was in 1926 when the middle class took over the public services; it now does not exist at all except as a form of anti-Semitism in the slums. Those of us who can afford to think without proclaiming ourselves “intellectuals,” do not want or expect a Fascist regime. But there is a highly nervous and highly vocal party who are busy creating a bogy; if they persist in throwing the epithet about it may begin to stick. They may one day find that there is a Fascist party which they have provoked. They will, of course, be the chief losers, but it is because I believe we shall all lose by such a development that I am addressing this through your columns.33
In the 1920s Waugh struck the pose of the apolitical satirist in comic classics such as Decline and Fall (1928) and Vile Bodies (1930). In fact, embarrassed by his family’s middle-class background, he constantly strove to associate himself with the aristocracy and hopelessly pursued a number of society beauties, including Diana Guinness.34 Hypnotized by the glamour of the landed elite, disdainful of the working class, he was, as one biographer succinctly put it, an “assiduous opportunist driven by a fear of failure to excesses of vindictive snobbery.”35
Waugh never fully recovered from his first wife leaving him for John Heygate, a BBC news editor and well-known playboy.36 One result of this betrayal was the inclusion in his novels of raffish playboy characters like Basil Seal in Black Mischief (1932) and Tommy Blackhouse in Men at Arms (1952). Waugh as a young man was himself a sort of dandy who was fascinated by decadent playboys like the poet Brian Howard. It was not surprising that he took a special interest in the Mayfair men. Moreover, he was well acquainted with the Hyde Park Hotel, using it as retreat when a writing project required an uninterrupted block of time. He was clearly titillated when staying in the very rooms once occupied by the robbers, confiding to his diary September 28, 1942: “On 14th we went to London by the night train. I met Laura and we spent the night at the Hyde Park Hotel in the suite where the ‘Mayfair men’ attacked Mr Bellinger.”37
The ending of his first marriage and his conversion to Catholicism in 1930 pushed Waugh well to the right, a trajectory most obviously apparent in his travel writings. In 1935 he reported on the beginnings of the Second Italo-Abyssinian war for the Daily Mail. In Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), he defended the imperialist adventure, asserting that the country was “a savage place which Mussolini was doing well to tame.” Leftist writers naturally responded. David Garnett dismissed the book as propaganda. Rose Macaulay wondered what was more influential in Waugh’s producing this “Fascist tract,” his dislike of the League of Nations or his obedience to the Catholic Church.38
A 1938 trip to Mexico offered Waugh another opportunity to publicize his conservative views. The title of the resulting book, Robbery under Law (1939), made clear his take on leftist nationalization programs. Describing himself as a “partisan of Franco,” he declared: “I believe that inequalities of wealth and position are inevitable and that it is therefore meaningless to discuss the advantages of their elimination.” According to him, the danger was that the “frivolous and vindictive” demands of trade unions would push the middle class into embracing radical solutions. “Self preservation and patriotism combine to produce Fascism,” but it too, he conceded, attracted “cranks and criminals.”39
Waugh advanced a “blame-the-victim” argument. Fascism, he acknowledged, was in many ways a nasty political ideology, yet it only succeeded when the left threatened to make life intolerable for the propertied. Since Britain at the moment did not face such a crisis there was no fascist movement, but as he argued in his letter to the New Statesman, the left labeled as “fascist” anyone or anything it did not like.
Because Waugh’s letter succinctly pointed out how a word could be so easily debased, it has been frequently reprinted; the response of the New Statesman has not. It is worth being fully quoted inasmuch as its editors made the crucial observation that by a skillful sleight of hand, Waugh had avoided saying anything about the actual activities of Mayfair men that led some to call them fascists.
Mr Waugh is very enigmatic about the author of the remark to which he objects, but a similar comment was made to us by a friend who based his opinion not upon political bias but upon a conversation he had had with two of the guilty men. Moreover, anyone who, like Mr Waugh, has studied the growth of Fascism and Nazism, knows that among the most active champions of these movements were a number of young men with tastes which a repugnance or disability for work prevented them from gratifying. These, too, did not stop short of either brutal assaults or common dishonesty in their efforts to improve their position, and they can now be seen alike in Italy and in Germany enjoying the agreeable sinecures which their violence has earned. We do not suggest that the mentality of the Mayfair gangsters is that of all Fascists, but it is a historical fact that Fascism attracted men with just such a mentality and just such an economic position. Finally it will not have escaped Mr Waugh’s attention that at least one of the guilty men had been active in selling arms to General Franco. We agree, however, that to call fox-hunting “Fascist” is a gross abuse of language.40
As the editors stated, it was highly unlikely that Waugh could have been unaware of the Mayfair men’s involvement in the sale of arms to Franco. Moreover, in his “confessions” written for a Sunday newspaper, Lonsdale clearly stated that he joined the British fascists and offered his services as a machine gunner in the Spanish Foreign Legion.41
The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. In July the army declared itself opposed to the constitutional government. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in July and August sent troops to support the rebels. Ultimately there would be seventy thousand Italians and twenty thousand Germans in Spain, as well as a thousand or so Catholic and anti-Communist volunteers. General Francisco Franco emerged in October as the Falangist military leader. Civilian militias had in the meantime formed to defend the republic, which won the assistance of the Soviet Union and the thirty thousand members of the International Brigades.42
Public opinion in Britain was overwhelmingly in support of the republic, but the Conservative prime ministers Baldwin and Chamberlain were pro-Franco.43 Britain and France sought to contain the conflict by placing an embargo on the sale of weapons to either side. The result was the creation of an arms trafficker’s paradise, what one newspaper called “El Dorado.”44 Peter Jenkins had hoped to take advantage of the situation. His plan on selling weapons to the Spanish fascists was only scuttled by the robbers who stole his savings. His colleagues were slightly more successful. In 1936, Lonsdale began a gunrunning partnership with Victor Hervey. Lonsdale later boasted that he had once been a member of Franco’s Spanish Foreign Legion and that leftists had jailed him during the Asturias revolt. If it is hard to believe his story that he had been sentenced to death by Spanish communists, but by some miracle had escaped, it is quite clear that he and Hervey did seek to profit from the arms trade. A newspaper reporter recalled that Lonsdale was fairly candid that if the price were right he would willingly transport any product. “Guns or oranges,” he used to say, “it’s all the same money to me.”45 The Honorable Victor Hervey was equally indifferent as to the means or morals required to obtain money.46
Their plan was to set up front companies to ship arms from Finland to Spain. Finland had not signed on to the international blockade of Spain and had accordingly become a center of the illegal armaments trade. The Englishmen established their first firm in October 1936. The weapons were to be paid for by the Republicans, but Lonsdale and Hervey intended to double-cross their customers by informing Franco, the Falangist leader, how he might intercept the deliveries.47 All going well, Lonsdale and Hervey would be paid twice for the same munitions. The problem was that initially a large amount of money was required to launch the operation. In January 1937, Lonsdale was so desperate for funds that he and Hervey borrowed £100 at the astonishing interest rate of 90 percent per annum.48 The rate was so high because both were considered bad risks. Hervey, having liabilities of £5,692 and no assets, was threatened with bankruptcy.49
To finalize their scheme Lonsdale and Hervey made a flying visit to Helsingfors, Finland’s main port.50 There they assembled a vast collection of arms, including 455 Russian machine guns; 35,000 rifles from Belgium, Norway, and Finland; and 130,000 hand grenades from Hull. They allowed the Marquess of Donegall (Edward Arthur Chichester), a pro-Franco columnist for the Sunday Dispatch, to accompany them.51 This was a mistake. In an article published April 18, 1937, Donegal exposed Lonsdale and Hervey’s double-dealing and their intention to each make $250,000 from the sale of $10 million worth of munitions.52 Suddenly the two men, identified as “Victor Hervey, 21 year-old son of Lord Herbert Hervey, former British Minister in Peru, and John Christopher Lonsdale, of Wimborn, known in the West-End as a man about town,” found their profiles on the front pages of the world’s newspapers and their elaborate scheme destroyed.
A Finnish newspaper published in Canada provided a detailed account of the adventure’s ignominious ending.
Helsinki—In late March two young businessmen from England arrived here and signed into a first-class hotel. The young men immediately started looking for connection with potential weapons sellers, and managed to contact two majors, Mikael Gripenber and Spare, Spare being a representative of the Pihkakoski arms factory. After negotiations the weapon buyers, John Lonsdale and Victor Hervey, who was found out to be the son of Lord Hervey, had sought entertainment by partying in large groups, with no lack of liquor. The buyers were not paying anything towards their upkeep, and after the hotel bill had been growing for days, the hotel started demanding payment. By then, April 8th, the bill had reached 15,000 Finnish marks. The men had promised to pay the bill on the Wednesday of next week, but had left the hotel covertly before that and boarded a ship towards Hull. The authorities returned the men to Finland. A social democrat Member of Parliament has raised a question about the men in Parliament. On Tuesday, Helsinki announced that the Finnish government will be conducting an investigation into the matter, especially as the Marquess of Donegall in London has claimed that Finland is being used as a storage location for a weapons cache worth 10,000,000 dollars, destined for a delivery into Spain.53
The question of the British government’s view of the matter was raised in the House of Commons. Captain Victor Cazalet asked if attempts had been made to breach the Non-intervention Agreement. Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, replied:
I understand that Mr. Hervey visited Finland with two other British subjects, the Marquess of Donegall and Mr. John Lonsdale, at the beginning of March, and that they established connections with certain officers of the Finnish army and with officials of the Finnish arms and munitions factories, declaring that they were buying arms for Brazil. I am glad to have the opportunity of saying that I am satisfied, as a result of inquiries which I have made; that, contrary to reports which have appeared in the Press, there is no evidence that Finnish officers gave any assistance to these gentlemen in obtaining arms for Spain under false pretences. When they were unable to produce any authorisation from the Brazilian Government for the purchase of arms in Finland, all negotiations with them were broken off. I regret that allegations against Finnish officials should have received publicity in this country.54
As if to underline the ending of Finland’s role as a weapons entrepôt, an enormous explosion in July 1938 flattened the island arsenal of Sveborg, near Helsingfors, killing eight and wounding over a hundred.55
Given the broader political context, Waugh appears to have too quickly dismissed the notion that the robbers could be described as fascists. Lonsdale, Hervey, and Jenkins all intended to deliver arms to the conservative forces in Spain. Lonsdale and Hervey planned on swindling the republican buyers by giving Franco the identity of blockade-running ships, and they both claimed to have actually been in the Iberian peninsula fighting alongside the Falangists. How much of this was true is difficult to determine, but these men clearly presented themselves as supporters of the rebel forces. They acted like fascists, they backed a fascist regime, and they sought to defraud the enemies of fascism. For Waugh nevertheless to have insisted that it would be “stultifying” to describe these men as having a fascist mentality was clearly a case of special pleading.
The “petition” to which Waugh referred was a questionnaire entitled “Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War” (1936), which Nancy Cunard, heiress and political activist, distributed with the assistance of the poets W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender. The organizers of the survey made their sympathies clear, asking respondents if they were for the “legal government” of Spain or for fascism. The starkness of the question provided a reason for Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce not to reply. Nor did the cranky George Orwell, who wailed: “Will you please stop sending me this bloody rubbish. This is the second or third time I have had it. I am not one of your fashionable pansies like Auden or Spender. I was six months in Spain, most of the time fighting. I have a bullet hole in me at present and I am not going to write blah about defending democracy or gallant little anybody.”56 Two hundred questionnaires were sent out. Of the 147 who answered, 126—including W. H. Auden, Samuel Becket, Fenner Brockway, Margaret Cole, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Calder-Marshall, Cecil Day-Lewis, Havelock Ellis, Ford Maddox Ford, David Garnett, Douglas Goldring, Victor Gollancz, Geoffrey Gorer, Tom Harrison, Lancelot Hogben, Laurence Housman, Brian Howard, Aldous Huxley, C. L. R. James, Arthur Koestler, Harold J. Laski, Ethel Mannin, and Rebecca West—were for the government. Sixteen—including H. G. Wells, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Vera Brittain—were neutral. Five—Waugh, Edmund Blunden, Arthur Machen, Geoffrey Moss, Eleanor Smith—were against.
For the left, Republican Spain represented everything that Mayfair was not; a place where there were no smart clothes, tipping, private automobiles, servility, or polite modes of address.57 It was something worth fighting for. Waugh took the opposite position. “If I were a Spaniard,” he declared, “I would be fighting for General Franco. As an Englishman I am not in the predicament of choosing between two evils. I am not a Fascist nor shall I become one unless it were the only alternative to Marxism.”58 It was the church’s hostile response to the emergence of the Spanish democratic republic that led some right-wing Catholics to embrace pro-fascist positions. Echoing Waugh’s satiric approach, Douglas Jerrold claimed that the leftist view was that “anyone going near a church is a Fascist today, unless, of course, he is going there quite innocently, in order to burn it.”59 As editor of the English Review and director of the publishing firm Eyre and Spottiswoode, Jerrold was among the most active of the pro-Franco English Catholics. Arguing that Spanish republicans had used fraudulent means to take power, Jerrold undertook to provide Franco’s forces with money, machine guns, and ammunition.60
According to Paul Mitchell, some Mayfair playboys recognized the financial possibilities of offering well-off Catholic women a way to both aid Franco and improve their social status. Accordingly, these young men set up false pro-Falangist charities to bilk the naïve. “Many a wealthy lady on the fringe of society felt that here was the chance that she had prayed for to attain that social distinction which had so far eluded her grasp.”61 When the frauds were finally revealed, the victims were too embarrassed to protest.
Most Conservative politicians in Britain were not passionate about Spain, but a group of right-wing MPs including Captain Victor Cazalet, Henry Page Croft, and Alan Lennox-Boyd were vocal supporters of the nationalists. Some hankered after Spain’s return to the old regime; others looked for a modernized state.62 Lord Phillimore (Godfrey Walter Phillimore of Coppid Hall, Henley-on-Thames) headed the pro-Catholic Friends of National Spain.63 Convinced that Spanish Christians were being martyred, the society resolved to help crush “the forces of anarchy, tyranny and Communism.” In 1939, with Hilaire Belloc, the uncompromising Catholic apologist in attendance, it gave thanks for the triumph of “Christian civilization in Spain.”64
British fascists were divided in their response to the man-about-town. One faction presented itself as the deadly opponent of such loafers and idlers. The traitor William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) took this approach. “Joyce, if nothing else, was an indomitable champion of the working class,” states his biographer Michael Walsh, “for whom all his efforts were directed. It was hardly surprising that he was as consistently scathing of capitalists and communists; not to mention the decadent English bootlickers, whom he described as ‘the parasites of Mayfair.’ ”65 Nevertheless, Joyce was a member of the Right Club, a largely upper-class association united by its anti-Semitism and opposition to a war against Germany.66 The membership included Prince Yurka Galitzine and his half-sister Pauline Daubeny, who, as noted in chapter 8, moved in the same social circles as Victor Hervey.67 Her home was the first that he looted.68
Curiously enough, a fascist police informant claimed that Victor Hervey was also involved in the attack on Etienne Bellenger. A police inspector reported on January 4, 1938, that he had had a discussion with Philip John Ridout of the Imperial Fascist League (IFL), a “fanatically anti-Jewish organization.” Ridout said that a third person told him that the Honorable Victor Hervey was the brains behind the Hyde Park Hotel robbery and that the stolen rings had been flown to Holland.69 None of this was ever confirmed. The IFL, founded in 1929, had only had a few hundred members. Arnold Leese, its leader, and a rival of Oswald Mosley, shifted its focus from Italian corporatism to German anti-Semitism.70 Ridout, who was also in the tiny Nordic League, popularized the slogan “Perish Judah.” The authorities prosecuted him several times for giving inflammatory speeches that violated section 5 of the Public Order Act of 1936. One magistrate upbraided Ridout that in abusing Jews he acted “like an unutterable cad” and warned that if “this nonsense” continued he would be sent to prison.71
On April 4, 1938, veiled anti-Semitic slurs surfaced in the course of a chaotic debate in the Commons. The issue at hand was the government’s acceptance of the presence of General Franco’s agent in London. In practice if not in theory, this amounted to Britain’s according of diplomatic status to the regime backed by the rebellious Spanish military. The opposition, led by Emanuel Shinwell, taunted the Conservatives with not having the courage to acknowledge their change in policy. The pugnacious Shinwell, born in Spitalfields, London, and raised in Glasgow’s Gorbals, had a reputation as a firebrand. Elected in 1922 as the first Jewish Labour MP, he had in the general election of 1935 roundly defeated Ramsay MacDonald, prime minister of the National Government from 1931 to 1935.72 As a supporter of the democratically elected government in Madrid, Shinwell accused the Conservatives of employing half-truths and hypocrisy to justify their Spanish policy. The Speaker of the House was about to reprimand Shinwell for his unparliamentary language when Commander Robert Tatton Bower entered the fray. Considered by even some of his Conservative colleagues as “a pompous ass, self-opinionated, and narrow,” Bower could think of nothing better than to shout at Shinwell, “Go back to Poland!”73 Stunned by this crude anti-Semitic insult, Shinwell crossed the floor, struck Bower “a resounding blow on the left cheek,” and gestured for him to step outside. A general uproar ensued, but as both men apologized to the Speaker, no disciplinary action was taken against either. The press reported that the MPs had exchanged an interesting variety of epithets. In the midst of the confrontation one Labour MP unimaginatively yelled across the aisle, “You are an old dog,” while a colleague, in gesturing toward Bower, sneered, “That is an English gentleman, a playboy of Mayfair.”74 Sparked by Bower’s anti-Semitic outburst, the episode reflected the turn to gutter politics led by Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.
In the years immediately following World War I, Mosley successfully exploited his glamour, good looks, and youthful vigor to win accolades as the embodiment of the modern British politician. His detractors would eventually highlight these traits in portraying him as a playboy who was bound to fail. Mosley’s career was mercurial.75 On the strength of being a decorated war hero, he was, in 1918, at the age of twenty-one, elected as Conservative MP for Harrow. In 1920 he married Cynthia, daughter of Earl Curzon, viceroy of India (1899–1905) and foreign secretary (1919–1924), confirming his position in high society. In the Commons, Mosley proved to be a spellbinding speaker, though it was difficult to determine what, beyond wishing to prevent another war, he hoped to achieve. Ever restless, he left the Conservative Party to sit first as an independent and then, in 1924, as a Labour MP. When Labour won the 1929 election he put forward an ambitious plan to counter the slump with high tariffs, nationalizations of key industries, and extensive public works. Despite the support of young backbench MPs from all parties, the government cautiously rejected his plan. Embittered, he left Labour to launch the “New Party.” Many were attracted by its corporatist economic policies, but it failed to win any seats in the 1931 election.76 Mosley’s response was to move even further to the right, abandon the orthodoxies of democratic politics, and create the British Union of Fascists (BUF), a paramilitary organization. Modeled on Mussolini’s success, the BUF particularly appealed to young, lower-middle-class males, offering them the excitement of participating in a radical political experiment.77 As far as foreign affairs were concerned, the BUF was not especially interested in the Spanish Civil War. Mosley’s goal was an alliance of Italy, Germany, France, and Britain, which could counter the mythical, Russian-controlled Jewish Bolshevik League.78 At home he called for the shielding of industry and the disciplining of labor. Though Mosley claimed to have never attacked Jews “as a people,” he voiced the old anti-Semitic slur that the country’s economic malaise was somehow caused by a conspiracy of Jewish bankers and communists. The world he hoped to create was one in which elitists like himself would hold sway. In the Second Year (1936), Storm Jameson’s depiction of a future dystopia, has a character sketch out a view of the society Mosley supposedly sought. “He began describing the England he would create when he and his friends were in charge. It made me wince. It was like nothing more than a fearful sort of public school, with willing fags, a glorious hierarchy of heroes in the persons of himself and his Volunteers, and floggings for the unwilling or rebellious. For the rest, all stout and jolly together, and daring the other nations to come on and be licked.”79
“The playboy of the summer became the dedicated soldier of autumn.”80 This was the way Mosley portrayed himself as rushing to enlist in 1914. He thus tried to put that youthful image behind him, but hostile commentators continued to represent Mosley as an irresponsible dandy. Their attacks clearly had a role in undercutting his successes.81 The playboy was the indolent dilettante; Mosley seemed to enjoy effortless success. Before he was thirty he had everything—a supportive family, a glowing war record, intelligence, money, and a striking resemblance to a Hollywood movie star. Such good fortune raised suspicions. Beatrice Webb said he was the most effective speaker in the Commons, that he had “birth, wealth, and a beautiful aristocratic wife,” but concluded that “so much perfection argues rottenness somewhere.”82 Many of his colleagues regarded him as a playboy. “Rich and ambitious son of a Tory baronet, with white teeth, metallic charm and a Douglas Fairbanks smile,” was Raymond Postgate’s succinct summing-up.83 “Mosley was,” a historian has pointed out, “among the very few interwar politicians whose sexual energy and kinetic and physical qualities fostered a celebrity and a body cult.”84 The tabloid press was, of course, central in the presentation of him as a matinee idol. They reported excited girls exclaiming “Oh! Valentino!” at the sight of “Mr. Mosley caressing his miniature moustache with one hand and gaily slapping his razor-like trouser-edge with the other.”85 Such accounts impressed some while leading others to view Mosley as not really a gentleman.
These concerns were picked up in The Autobiography of a Cad (1938), in which A. G. MacDonell used the purported memoirs of one Edward Percival Fox-Ingleby to trace the career of a young Mayfair flaneur on the make. He is completely self-centered. His Eton and Oxford education neither impedes his exploitation of chorus girls nor hinders his expulsion of cottagers from his estate. Having become an MP and profited from the war, he nevertheless is still worried by the threat of the masses. He prays that the country will develop a sort of Italian fascism that looks like democracy but really is not.86
Leftist writers attributed to Mosley many of the same traits associated with the playboy. He was a dandy who took pains to dress well and was concerned that his Blackshirts be stylishly turned out.87 He was known to share the obsession with motorcars and airplanes. When a group of Blackshirts decided to honor Mosley, they thoughtfully presented him with an MG Midget.88 His well-known addiction to speed was easy to spoof. In Point Counter Point (1928) Aldous Huxley portrayed the passion of the Mosley-like character’s driving. He loves the “power and sense of superiority” given by the car. “It was a powerful machine (for Everard was a lover of furious driving) … he shot off with violent impetuosity.” Similarly, Patrick Hamilton in Hangover Square (1941) presented the mercenary Netta of Earl’s Court favoring a vicious fascist because of his criminal past and “for killing a pedestrian with his car while drunk, and this she liked, this stimulated her.”89
Many members of elite social circles also knew that Mosley followed what was now the classic playboy script of exploiting women. F. E. Smith, who first brought up the idea of Mosley going into politics, finally turned on the man he called “the perfumed popinjay of scented boudoirs.”90 To Ellen Wilkinson, he was the Sheikh, not “the nice kind hero who rescues the girl at the point of torture, but the one who hisses: ‘At last—we meet.’ ”91 And takes advantage of her. He was a notorious womanizer. A friend left an account that gave a sense of Mosley’s ruthless pursuit of bed partners. He informed a shocked Bob Boothby that he had told his wife, Cynthia Mosley, of all the other women he had slept with. Mosley went on to correct himself, “Except, of course, for her sister and stepmother.”92 After Cynthia died, he married his long-term lover Diana Guinness (née Mitford). They celebrated their 1936 wedding in the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels with Adolf Hitler as guest of honor.
The BUF’s popularity peaked in 1934, the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror initially supporting its protectionist and anticommunist policies. Mosley’s use of paramilitary Blackshirts and their well-publicized assaults on opponents at a 1934 rally at the Olympia exhibition center and at a 1936 march down Cable Street in the East End of London confirmed the leftist view that Mosley was aping the thuggish tactics of continental fascists. Once this was publicized, his popularity ebbed away. The violence of the Blackshirts goaded the government into passing the Public Order Act of 1936, banning political uniforms and quasi-military organizations. When the war broke out some of his colleagues came to regard him as a traitor. In May 1940 the government banned the BUF and finally interned Mosley and several other active fascists under Defence Regulation 18B. How many supported fascism in Britain? In 1940 the left-wing journalist Douglas Goldring pessimistically estimated that they “who, like the flogged ‘Mayfair men,’ specialize in violence—must be almost as large as the percentage of Germans who believed in Hitler seven years ago.” Goldring included “Mayfair girls” who like Unity Mitford “rush across Germany heiling Hitler.”93
Sir Oswald Mosley. Daily Mirror, Oct. 5, 1936. © The British Library Board
Observers had for years characterized Mosley as a restless, energetic, if misguided, dilettante. His reputation as a pleasure-seeking playboy countered his message that he was a serious politician who had the answer to the nation’s economic and political ills. A. J. P. Taylor later concluded: “Mosley was, in fact, a highly gifted playboy. From the moment he modeled himself on Mussolini he resembled nothing so much as an actor touring the provinces in a play which someone else had made a success in London. Watching newsreels of Mosley on the march through the East End recalls the memory of another Londoner. Oswald Mosley aspired to be the great dictator. Sir Charles Chaplin played the role better.”94 This is not to say that fascism’s inability to take root in 1930s Britain was simply due to leftists using such terms as “playboy” and “Mayfair man” to attack right wingers.95 The political and economic conditions that gave rise to fascism on the continent were simply not present in Britain. No political leader, no matter how gifted, could have imposed the BUF on the country.
Mosley’s career appeared to provide some support for commentators’ belief that personal lifestyle choices often predicted a person’s politics. Much like Edward VIII, Mosley took up one of the key roles created by a celebrity culture, that of the young, good-looking, wealthy, athletic, good-natured populist determined to rebel against the constraints of an older generation.96 If Mosley the playboy had become an ascetic would he have had greater success? It is highly unlikely. A self-denying Mosley would not have been Mosley. Whatever charisma he enjoyed was fueled by the same passions that would eventually bring him down. In any event, with the outbreak of the Second World War the press declared there was no place in Britain for fascists. References to the playboy also seemed to disappear. The journalist Hannan Swaffer’s description of the BUF members as “men too silly to work with their heads and too ‘proud’ to work with their hands” mirrored the tabloid’s view of the playboy.97 In the 1930s the playboy served as a symbol of divisive class and gender relationships. During the early war years patriotic newspapers—viewing such a character as an embarrassment to a nation under siege—no longer considered ferreting out reports of his misdeeds as serving the public good.
The press could not, however, ignore John Amery, profligate son and traitor to his country. Indeed, John Amery, the scapegrace offspring of a distinguished political family, underlined in the public’s mind the linkages of playboy and fascist. His indulgent father, Leo Amery, was a friend of Churchill and a long-serving Conservative cabinet minister. John, a classic wastrel who enjoyed every social advantage, repeatedly disappointed his doting parents. He left Harrow, his father’s school, with the reputation of being a liar and thief. While still in his teens he frequented London nightclubs like Mrs. Meyrick’s and began his life as a binge drinker.98
John’s career had all the hallmarks of the interwar playboy. Like other crass young men he regarded involvement in the film industry as a way of meeting attractive women and conning gullible investors. He set up his own shady film company in 1934, when he was only twenty-two, and was bankrupt by 1936. Like other playboys he loved fast cars, and before being banned from driving in 1932 he had collected over eighty traffic tickets. It was telling that after his capture by Italian partisans in 1945 his chief concern was for the return of his Lancia Aprilia. He was on occasion a small-time thief, accused of blackmail and embezzlement, but he was never convicted. The French police did arrest him in 1933 for having used a dud check to purchase diamonds in Greece. His father paid off the jeweler.99
Amery did differ from his peers in having a marked penchant for prostitutes, a weakness that resulted in his contracting syphilis at an early age.100 Even streetwalkers regarded his exhibitionism as perverse. The tabloids first brought him to the public’s attention in 1932 when, as a minor, he sought to defy his family by marrying the “actress” Una Wing.101 They soon separated. His second partner, also a prostitute, drank as heavily as he and died a sordid death, choking on her own vomit. As long as John was in Britain or France he could rely on his father using his money and influence to bail him out of such minor difficulties. Parental assistance was not possible once he plunged into the world of fascist politics.
Like John Lonsdale and Victor Hervey, Amery supported General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. He claimed not only to have run guns to Spain but also to have held a commission in the Spanish army. As he was a congenital liar, his account is open to question. It is clear that he remained in France after the 1940 German occupation and, despite his mother’s conviction that he was a “prisoner,” freely agreed to do propaganda work for the Nazis.102 In November 1942, he launched a series of pro-fascist broadcasts from Berlin. These consisted of praise for Hitler and unoriginal anti-Semitic scare stories focused on “the menace of Jewish Communism.” He made these treasonous diatribes apparently unaware that his father’s mother was Jewish.103 He further compromised himself in April 1943 by attempting to recruit British prisoners of war into a “Legion of St. George,” which would fight for Germany against the Soviet Union on the Eastern Front. As the war wound down he moved to Italy to make propaganda speeches for Benito Mussolini. Italian partisans captured Amery in Milan in April 1945 and handed him over to the British. Leonard Burt, the same Scotland Yard officer who interrogated the Hyde Park Hotel robbers seven years earlier, and who was now seconded to MI5, brought him back to London. The gravity of his offense clearly escaping him, Amery told the detective: “I don’t suppose for a moment they’ll bring a charge against me, but if they did, of course, my father would see to it.”104
The newspapers played up the notion of a deranged prodigal son breaking the hearts of his loving parents. What the press failed to note was that if John had not been born into an upper-class family his youthful escapades would have soon resulted in a magistrate’s court labeling him a juvenile delinquent and having him treated or incarcerated. Having the power to protect their son, the Amerys continually intervened to spare him from accepting responsibility for his actions. One unintended consequence was that as a thirty-year-old, he manifested a complete absence of moral sense, guilt, or remorse.
Once back in Britain, for reasons he never fully explained, Amery countered his family’s campaign to support him, pleaded guilty to the charge of high treason, and was sentenced to death by hanging. His parents still had hopes of a last-minute commutation, but Sir Frank Newsam, permanent undersecretary at the Home Office, insisted that despite the pressure of such a famous and well-connected family, Amery had to die. If a self-professed traitor were spared, Newsam warned the government, “[i]t would be difficult to convince the ordinary man that Amery had not received exceptional and privileged treatment.”105
In covering his trial the popular press labeled Amery a “West End playboy.”106 Rebecca West followed this line of argument in The Meaning of Treason (1947), her classic account of English traitors. The idiot son, according to her, never grew up. “John Amery continued, into his twenties and thirties, to like glossy, costly automobiles as an adolescent likes them, and as an adolescent he liked glossy, costly women, disregarding the plainest whorishness. And in such automobiles and with such women he delighted to visit those grandiose hotels which delight the immature and revolt the mature as the very antithesis of home.”107 Even John’s father employed the playboy metaphor to make sense of his son’s brief life, cut short by his hanging in Wandsworth Prison on December 19, 1945. Leo Amery pathetically reported that in the last few days of John’s incarceration he “was ‘no longer a playboy’ but had grown into a ‘real man.’ ”108