MOSLEY RETURNED FROM the Posillipo holiday to a BUF with a steadily declining membership and finances dwindling even faster. With a subscription of only one shilling a month – dropping to 4d for the unemployed – little money was coming in and, after the initial enthusiasm, funds from rich supporters had ceased to appear. At the same time, the costs of the Black House, the salaries of officials and the general running expenses remained the same. The previous year, these had been estimated at between £60,000 and £80,000.
Some of this money came from Mosley. He was a rich man in his own right and thanks to his children’s inheritance from Cimmie the upkeep of his home cost him nothing. Even so, the BUF needed more than he could provide.
Where the rest of the money had come from was more of a mystery. Mosley himself was deliberately vague about the sources of BUF funds, often declaring that he had ‘no knowledge of the financial side’ of the movement. There were persistent rumours – vigorously denied by Mosley – that the BUF was largely funded by Mussolini; and Special Branch, during one of its investigations, discovered that sizeable payments from abroad were made into BUF accounts. Most of these came from a Swiss bank in a monthly package made up of £5,000-worth of notes of different currencies and denominations, and were paid to Bill Allen, an old friend of Mosley’s and a BUF member whose agency, with its European links, could have produced a valid reason for such payments. Special Branch therefore came to believe that the BUF was largely funded from Italy, concluding from this and the steadily decreasing membership that fascism in Britain was no threat. Sixty years later, documents discovered in the Italian archives proved that Il Duce was indeed subsidising British fascism from 1933 to 1935.
On 25 August 1933, a letter headed ‘Secret Mission’ was sent in the diplomatic bag to the Italian Ambassador in London, Count Dino Grandi. It informed him that ‘by courier leaving Rome on Saturday 26th inst the second instalment of £5,000 is being transmitted for Sir Oswald Mosley’. This money, in five packages, was made up of mixed currencies – pound notes, dollar bills, Reichsmarks, Swiss and French francs – and, continued the letter, ‘the packets containing the aforesaid currency notes are without any identification and are secured by seals of no significance’. The clandestine nature of these donations was made clear in Grandi’s instructions from Rome: the monies must be delivered into Mosley’s hands ‘in whatever form Your Excellency considers best and in such a way that the consignment is made secretly’. They were slipped to Mosley secretly by a Dr Enderle, a specialist in such tasks. The second ‘drop’, of the same value, made up in the same way, was performed by Enderle’s nephew, who had left Rome for the purpose on 29 August, in case anyone might have been watching the first. A third payment was made in October.
After Mosley had visited Mussolini on 9 January 1934, the payments increased dramatically. On 24 January a courier left Rome carrying £20,000. ‘Mosley asked me to express to you his gratitude for sending the conspicuous sum which I have arranged this day to pay over,’ wrote Count Grandi to Mussolini. ‘Not long after his return from Rome he came to see me . . . he told me that the talk with you had “enriched” and illuminated him.’ The donations stopped abruptly in 1935.
One reason may have been the hostile influence of Grandi, who had realised that the BUF would never be a force to reckon with in British politics (not a single candidate gained a seat in the general election of 1935). He advised Mussolini that ‘with a tenth of what you give Mosley, I feel I could produce a result ten times better’.
Mosley’s immediate reaction to the cessation of the Italian funds was to give up Black House, with its complex of training facilities, and move the BUF headquarters to more modest premises in Great Smith Street. Joyce and Beckett, considered key men, were given more prominent positions. At the same time, there was a drive to halt falling membership.
So strong had become the feeling against Mosley’s political stance that Princess Alice, approached to open the day nursery built in Kennington in memory of Cimmie, said she would accept only on condition that Mosley was not present. Irene rejected these terms saying that Cimmie had loved Mosley all her life, and the Princess relented.
Mosley had always declared that when he came to power he could cure unemployment, so the BUF concentrated its recruitment drive on the north of England and the Midlands, where unemployment was highest. He was also becoming increasingly outspoken in his anti-semitism. When in Germany for his meeting with Hitler in April, he had been interviewed for the Frankische Tageszeitung, which declared (on 24 June), ‘Mosley very soon recognised that the Jewish danger may well work its way from country to country, but fundamentally it poses a danger to all the peoples of the world.’
In Germany, anti-semitism was becoming steadily more brutal. When the Nuremberg Laws were enacted in September 1935 the gates on the long avenue that would lead inexorably to the Final Solution swung wide open.
The Nuremberg Laws gave constitutional authority to the repression already being practised. It became a crime to marry anyone with Jewish blood, Jewish names were erased from war memorials and most basic rights were removed from Jews. The fact that Trotsky and Karl Marx were Jewish was constantly brought up, to reinforce Hitler’s often-stated claim that Germany had a ‘right’ to the lands of the east and that the Slav peoples were born to be slaves. Elsewhere fear of Germany grew when German troops, in breach of the Treaty of Versailles, reoccupied the demilitarised west bank of the Rhine in March 1936, to be greeted by cheering crowds. Diana, who had just spent a week with Unity in Munich, now travelled with her to Cologne to greet Hitler and applaud this ‘victory’. Hitler asked them both to join him for the Bayreuth Festival and the Olympic Games later in the summer.
Few missed the chance to draw a parallel between the attitude of the BUF and that of German National Socialists towards both communists and Jews – especially when the BUF changed its name early in 1936 to the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists, known for short as BU (as it will henceforth be referred to). In fact, Nazi anti-semitism and the Mosley version were not quite the same: where the Nazis preached racial purity, Mosley’s emphasis was economic. The country’s economic ills, said Mosley, were due to the financial machinations of international Jewry. But to the furious crowds, whether left wing or Jewish, which increasingly surrounded a Mosley march or attended a Mosley meeting, this was a distinction without a difference.
Their opposition came to a head in the two famous ‘battles’ of 1936: the meeting at the Carfax Assembly Rooms in Oxford on 14 May and the street riots known as the Battle of Cable Street five months later.
The Carfax meeting was an opportunity for the academic intelligentsia to make their feelings known: Mosley, by carrying his views into the heartland of liberal thought, had even seemed to invite protest. The presence of tough trade unionists from the Cowley motor works, along with Mosley’s own enjoyment of a rough house, ensured that the protest would take a physical form.
Diana, who knew where Mosley was speaking, stopped at the Assembly Rooms on her way from Swinbrook to London. Aware that there might be violence, she sat to one side. The front rows were occupied by dons, their wives and some undergraduates. Frank and Elizabeth Pakenham sat in the fourth row; also present were Richard Crossman, Philip Toynbee and his uncle Basil Murray (the son of Professor Gilbert Murray).
The meeting began quietly. Mosley strode up to the platform alone, dramatic in his black sweater, trousers, leather belt and (according to Elizabeth Pakenham) ‘expression of haughty challenge’. His young blackshirted stewards, rubber truncheons at their sides, were ranged along the walls. As Mosley began to declaim the fascist message, the Oxford contingent in the front rows shuffled their feet, opened newspapers and ostentatiously rattled the pages. Mosley, quick-witted as usual, promptly remarked, ‘I’m so glad to see the young gentlemen catching up on their lessons because I hear they’re rather behind this year.’
There were a few shouts. Mosley, who was clearly out to needle the socialists, raised his voice and shouted to the workers from the Cowley factories sitting at the back of the hall, ‘I know you Ruskin fellows, with your sham guardee accents!’ There was a roar of rage and someone called out, ‘Red Front!’, a popular communist slogan at the time. ‘Be quiet!’ shouted Mosley, as the audience applauded and the stewards banded together and moved towards the platform. ‘Red Front!’ yelled several voices and Mosley shouted, ‘If anyone says that again I’ll have him thrown out forthwith!’
There was a brief pause. Then Basil Murray stood up. He was the mildest of men, but to fascist eyes his appearance was against him. Bespectacled and bearded, in rather shabby clothes, he looked the picture of a communist agitator. In a high-pitched academic voice he cried, ‘Red Front!’
‘Out with him!’ said Mosley and the stewards moved forward, grabbed Murray and threw him out.
As pandemonium broke loose, Diana pressed herself against the wall. Several dons, among them Crossman, leapt on to the platform and the Cowley busmen charged forward, picking up whatever chairs were not screwed to the floor to use their iron legs as weapons. As the Blackshirts and the busmen battled with chairs and rubber truncheons, clouds of dust arose. The violence had erupted so suddenly that many people thought a fire had broken out and mistook the dust for smoke, so that cries of ‘Women on to the platform!’ added to the confusion.
After the melée had died down, Mosley spoke for an hour and took questions for a further hour.
Despite the anticipation of trouble, the police were nowhere visible: all the arrangements for the meeting had been left to Mosley. The next day, Basil Murray was charged before magistrates with a breach of the peace and fined £2. Frank Pakenham wound up with bruises over his kidneys where one of the stewards had stamped on him, a cut on the head and a headache that after five days was diagnosed as concussion.
As the summer wore on, the marches and tussles grew more violent and the BU ever more militaristic on the Nazi pattern. The appearance of the Leader at meetings was heralded by a stirring fanfare of bugles and drums, then came Mosley escorted by his guard of honour of picked men, then the women’s group (none of whom, following the Nazi pattern, was allowed cosmetics), then the largest body of men marching three deep.
Attitudes, often largely motivated by fear – of communism, of fascism – were polarised still further with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War on 14 July. Friendships ruptured; and fringe politics became more extreme. After one large BU meeting at Hulme Town Hall, bricks and stones were thrown at the new fascist headquarters nearby, breaking every window, and telephone wires were cut so that the local police could not call for reinforcements.
Some families were politically divided, among them the Mitfords. Nancy and her husband Peter Rodd, who had moved steadily leftwards after their earlier brush with fascism, supported the Republican Spanish government (later Nancy went to Perpignan to help the refugees fleeing from Franco). Tom Mitford, whose education had been completed in Germany and who loved its music, culture and philosophy, now began to view German fascism as the only shield against communism. This change of attitude heralded the beginnings of a rapprochement with Mosley, of whom hitherto he had violently disapproved: as he saw it, Mosley had persuaded Diana to leave her husband and family life for the ambiguous situation of a known but unacknowledged mistress.
Most affected of all was Jessica. With a clutch of older sisters, Jessica had sharpened her wits since childhood by listening to the opinions of older people and by reading everything she could lay her hands on. Sydney and David never tried to censor their children’s reading and Jessica devoured everything from weeklies such as the New Statesman to the influential younger left-wing writers such as Stephen Spender, W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood and John Strachey. The childish conflict with Unity, both of them taking opposite sides as a matter of course, had now become real. Too young to have been a butt of Nancy’s hurtful teasing, Jessica adored her eldest sister for her wit and intelligence; when Nancy took the side of the Spanish communists and later announced her decision to leave for Perpignan it was exactly what Jessica, the convinced communist, longed to do.
Instead, she was brought up to London for her season, and the nearest she could get to leaving the nest and rebelling was sneaking off on her Sunday walk to listen to the communist speakers at Hyde Park Corner. When left-wing stalwarts sang, ‘Class conscious we are and class conscious we’ll be/And we’ll tread on the neck of the Bourgeoisie!’ on their way to the Hyde Park Labour Festival, the eighteen-year-old Jessica marched with them.
Chants, slogans and songs were an integral part of all the fascist demonstrations. Their primary use was to keep the marchers in step and thus present a more disciplined and therefore awesome aspect. They also served to keep up spirits and weld disparate individuals into a group; but most of all they were employed to provoke. Songs such as ‘Crush the tyranny of traitors/Vested power and Marxian lie/Moscow-rented agitators/Strife and chaos we defy,’ chanted by tough young Blackshirts could be guaranteed to bring forth a hail of bricks, as could the East End marches, with their even more offensive marching chant, ‘The Yids! The Yids! we’ve got to get rid of the Yids!’
Mosley’s increasing anti-semitism (‘this alien force that rises to rob us of our heritage’) was in part a deliberate recruiting ploy. He realised that a political creed which preached constant action needed an easily targeted enemy if it were to keep up its momentum. ‘One must have a scapegoat,’ he told his sister-in-law Irene. To Jewish friends he would say disingenuously that his speech next day would contain phrases they ‘would not like’.
His tactic was highly successful. The fall in bu membership had been arrested and had even begun to rise again (by November it would be over 15,000). The new recruits, largely young men who liked nothing better than marching, chanting and the chance to use muscle, were exactly the sort he liked, presenting an appearance of well-drilled toughness while enhancing the image of potent, virile sexuality that was so essential to his political as well as his private persona.
Words, of course, were not enough. To give his followers the action they craved, Mosley led them to where they were sure of finding it – the East End of London with its sizeable Jewish population. His pretext was that Jewish slum landlords were exploiting Jewish and other tenants. To his audiences he appeared simply to be preaching anti-semitism, with the result that virtually every meeting ended in a riot.
Matters came to a head in what became known as the Battle of Cable Street, on 4 October 1936. That Sunday, a fascist anniversary was to be celebrated by a number of meetings in different parts of the East End. Simultaneously, there would be a grand parade in Royal Mint Street, where BU members were to assemble for inspection by Mosley at three-thirty, followed by a march down Cable Street through the East End, picking up supporters from the various meetings in Stepney, Bow, Bethnal Green and Shoreditch.
Down one side of Royal Mint Street was a huge hoarding; the other was lined with houses and shops, many owned by Jews. The police, who knew there would be trouble, had put men at the various places where the fascist meetings were to be held, with the largest number in Royal Mint Street. In all, nearly 2,000 policemen were on duty.
When the first fascists began to arrive at the ‘parade ground’, in twos and threes, from about one p.m. onwards, they found a bunch of angry young men and women shouting and jeering. Soon Royal Mint Street was seething. The police kept order as the growing crowd became more hostile, throwing small missiles and the marbles that caused police horses such difficulty as their hooves slipped on them. Mounted police charged with raised batons again and again. By three o’clock about 1,900 fascists, most in the Blackshirt uniform, had arrived. Weapons had grown uglier, from lumps of scrap iron to chair legs wrapped in barbed wire, which were used vigorously as the occasional demonstrator managed to break through the police cordon.
Meanwhile in Cable Street preparations to stop the march were going on. A builder’s yard in nearby Wellclose Square was broken into and a lorry loaded with bricks driven into Cable Street, where it was overturned as a barricade. In a moment ladders, cardboard boxes, old pieces of furniture and rubbish of all descriptions were thrown on to and round it, rendering the street almost impassable. Paving stones were torn up and piled in a heap, windows smashed and the fragments scattered over the ground to prevent police horses charging.
When Mosley arrived at three-thirty to inspect his men, the booing and catcalls changed into an eruption of fury. By now there was a crowd of thousands in and around Royal Mint Street and Cable Street. The streets crackled with broken glass; the demonstrators, howling with anger, hurled bricks, milk bottles and anything else they could lay their hands on at the police, who stood in their way. Adding to the din were fireworks, let off to sound like pistol shots, and the clanging bells of ambulances, racing to pick up the injured.
Almost at once, Mosley was sent for by the Commissioner of Police, Sir Philip Game, who was standing at the rear of the parade. ‘I am convinced that if you carry out your march and hold your meetings, serious disorder is certain,’ said Sir Philip. ‘I have therefore decided that neither the march nor the meetings can be allowed.’
Mosley, who always complied with police requests, agreed immediately. Sir Philip said that he wanted the fascists moved within five minutes. At three-forty the fascists set off, accompanied by 400 police, via Cannon Street and Queen Victoria Street. At four-thirty they halted on the Embankment and were dismissed. About 1,000 walked off to the Black House (their headquarters in the King’s Road), where Mosley addressed them.
There was similar but milder trouble at the other fascist meetings. Altogether, there were 85 arrests – 6 fascists and 79 anti-fascists – 30 civilians were taken to hospital and 40 police were injured, of whom 2 were taken to hospital. Mosley issued a statement castigating ‘the corruption and decadence’ of a government which could not manage to secure free and uninterrupted speech for his movement wherever it chose to hold its meetings. ‘I take the view that the fascist doctrine is as un-English and unwanted as the communist doctrine,’ commented Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary. ‘But the duty of the authorities is to do all they can with complete impartiality to retain freedom of meeting and speech.’ The direct result of that Sunday afternoon of provocation and violence was the Public Order Act.