Shortly after Olga had been elected Secretary of the Ealing Ladies Hockey Club, in 1935, Italian forces under the command of General Emilio De Bono marched into what is today Ethiopia, marking the start of the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. In the bloody engagements that followed, Italian troops armed with tanks, planes, machine guns and mustard gas attacked Ethiopian troops and civilians, many of them defending themselves with little more than antique rifles or spears. It was brutal and one-sided, at least this was how it seemed to most contemporary observers.
Amazingly, you might think, some people in Britain urged the government to look the other way while Mussolini indulged his imperial ambitions. The loudest of these pro-Italian voices came from Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. The BUF was soon spending more than £3,000 a month on its propaganda in support of Mussolini. It organised meetings in support of the Fascist aggression in Ethiopia and its members chalked slogans onto the streets, such as ‘Mind Britain’s Business’ or ‘Mosley Says Peace’.1 At first this seemed to be part of a BUF strategy to win more votes at the forthcoming General Election. But when it came, the BUF did not field any candidates.
By late 1935 Mosley appears to have accepted that his party was never going to achieve power democratically. As the image of European Fascism continued to sour, and more became known about the behaviour of paramilitary thugs in Germany, the extent of Fascist anti-Semitism or indeed its attitude towards all opposition, the British public turned against the BUF’s militarism as well as Mosley himself. Most voters saw him by late 1935 as conceited, pompous and lacking in self-awareness. P. G. Wodehouse would soon caricature him as Roderick Spode, leader of the Blackshorts, so dim that he was outwitted by Bertie Wooster.
MI5 had a rather different take on this man. Kell’s department had recently established that Sir Oswald Mosley was secretly being paid by Mussolini a monthly subsidy of £3,000. The first of these payments had been made as early as 1933. Since then the Italian dictator had ploughed into the BUF roughly £70,000 a year (equivalent to more than £2.5 million today). The money was brought over by couriers in a variety of currencies, before being deposited in a secret bank account at the Charing Cross branch of Westminster Bank, or it was used as cash in hand to pay off existing debts. Although there were private donors to the BUF in Britain, such as the financier Alex Scrimgeour, who gave money directly to William Joyce, most BUF income came from Benito Mussolini.
This marked a sea change in MI5’s attitude towards British Fascism. From that moment, wrote M, ‘the Fascist party in this country was regarded with very grave suspicion’.2 The political movement that M had once infiltrated, married into and helped to build up was now being talked about in the Office in the same terms used to describe the Communist Party.
Indeed, the Fascists and Communists in Britain had a surprising amount in common. Both political parties now received roughly £3,000 a month from a foreign dictator and had the potential to become instruments of theirs in the event of a war. The one consolation for MI5 was that if there was an international conflict it would only have to deal with one or the other, because the idea of the Fascists and the Communists being on the same side was absurd.
For years MI5 had seen the Soviet Union as the most likely adversary in a future war, which was why M had been told to investigate Communist underground networks. Yet by late 1935, MI5 was beginning to think about homegrown Fascists in similar terms. If the country ever went to war against Italy or Germany, it was possible that Mosley’s BUF might be repurposed to help the enemy. At the heart of this new analysis was the idea that some homegrown Fascists might feel a greater sense of loyalty towards international Fascism than to their own country.
Mosley’s party had appealed to the British people for democratic support, but it had been rejected. Like a spurned lover, the BUF was now becoming angrier and more insular. At a march in London on 24 May, 1936, Empire Day, observers were struck by the similarities between the new uniforms worn by Mosley’s men and Hitler’s SS. Later that year, at the so-called Battle of Cable Street, in the East End of London, some 100,000 protesters gathered to prevent a BUF delegation from completing its march. One eye witness recalled the look of ‘grim determination’ on the faces of the anti-Fascists.3 All over Britain people were waking up to the threat posed by Fascism, both on the Continent and on their own doorstep.
A Special Branch informant described one of Sir Oswald Mosley’s speeches at this time as ‘a genuine statement of intent to undermine the political stability of Britain’.4 William Joyce’s pronouncements were becoming wilder as well, as if such a thing was possible. In one speech he slammed Churchill, then a hawkish backbench MP, as ‘an imitation strategist, the Butcher in Chief to His Majesty the King’; Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, was ‘the steel merchant metamorphosed into a squire by casual experiments in pig breeding’; his predecessor Ramsay MacDonald was dismissed as the ‘Loon from Lossiemouth’; and Lord Willingdon, the Viceroy of India, was a ‘phenomenal freak whom it would be indecent to describe as Viceroy’.5 One man who heard Joyce speak wrote that ‘never before, in any country, had I met a personality so terrifying in its dynamic force, so vituperative, so vitriolic’.6
The evolution of British Fascism into an embittered, radical force was echoed precisely in Joyce’s outlook. Having been part of this movement from the start, in 1923, when he was driven by an intense patriotism and a fear of Communism, Joyce had now embraced the angry, militant and more anti-Semitic message of contemporary European Fascism. Joyce had been radicalised by his encounter with Nazi Germany. He was an extremist with a grievance, one whose marriage was also falling apart. As M pointed out, ‘it is not thought that he has enough stability to make him accept defeat very gracefully’.7 In the face of ridicule or alienation, ‘anything might happen to him’.
M was the author of several detailed reports on Joyce, and the question of whether to have this person more closely monitored would be referred to him. But before he could make a decision on this, M’s life was swallowed up first by personal tragedy and then by scandal.