Philip Coupland

 “Left-Wing Fascism” in Theory and Practice:

The Case of the British Union of Fascists[1]

 

Philip M. Coupland   (drpmc66@ntlworld.com)

 

Labour and Capital under fascism, as seen by the BUF...

 

...and an alternative view from the Communist Daily Worker

 

Abstract

 

In the context of interpretations of fascism as being primarily a reactionary bourgeois movement, the significant working class membership and quasi-socialist elements of the programme and discourse of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) present a puzzle. A detailed examination of the history of the Fascist Union of British Workers (FUBW), the blackshirt career of ex-socialist Alexander Miles and the transformation in the fascist movement’s leadership illustrates the contradiction between ‘left-wing’ fascist rhetoric and actions arising from the politics of class within the BUF. In this way the 1933-34 period saw the liquidation of the FUBW and the fascist movement purged of many ex-socialists in its leadership such that the BUF came firmly under the control of middle class ex-officers. Despite this, ‘left-wing’ aspects of fascism continued to be functional in incorporating a significant working class membership within the BUF as long as its populist rhetoric remained uncontradicted in practice.

 

Although there have been more nuanced interpretations available from the Left,[2] for many, fascism, if understood theoretically at all, was conceptualised in terms which more or less reflected the ‘thirties dogma that it was, or aspired to be: the ‘terrorist dictatorship of capitalism in extreme decay’.[3] In recent years the theorisation of fascism has undergone a significant transformation with Roger Griffin and others arguing that fascist parties cannot be seen simply as the agency of a social class, nor their ideology merely as a front for ‘class interest’.[4] This so-called ‘liberal’ approach has in turn been criticised by Dave Renton who has argued against seeing ‘fascism as being simply a set of ideas, observable in the discussion of intellectuals’, instead stressing that ‘fascism should be understood historically, through an examination of the relationship between its professed ideas and its actual practice, which involves looking at what it did at least as much at what it said.’[5] Although Renton is attacking a straw figure inasmuch that the work that he upbraids does not generally present fascism as a ‘positive movement,’[6] his stress on the need to examine both language and action is a valid one and, given tendencies in contemporary historiography to over-privilege sometimes the power of ‘discourse,’ an emphasis on the realm of ‘practice’ is perhaps timely.

 

Renton’s analysis also took in a number of studies of Britain’s most significant inter-war fascist movement, the British Union of Fascists (BUF), one of which he criticised for asserting that the BUF was ‘left-wing’.[7] The article in question actually sought to suggest that alongside its ‘reactionary’ aspects, the BUF included some blackshirts drawn to fascism for reasons which in other circumstances might have drawn them to socialism and that fascist discourse contained elements in common with left-wing parties.[8] As Renton has written in connection with the BUF: ‘fascism could be a contradictory, even Janus-faced phenomenon, both a class ideology, acting in the strategic interests of at least some members of the capitalist class, and also a mass movement, made up of ordinary people.’[9]

 

As Fascism: Theory and Practice observes, fascist movements of the 1930s could simultaneously seek support with ‘socialist rhetoric’ whilst including ‘social reactionaries’ whose identity as class actors orientated them against the realisation of such rhetoric.[10] This article will argue that an analysis of the evolving relationship between practice and discourse in relation to fascist promises to transcend class conflict sheds light on this apparently incongruous ‘left-wing’ aspect of a ‘reactionary’ movement. Specifically, this article will focus on the relationship between, on the one hand, attempts by the BUF to speak on issues, and to constituencies, associated with the working class movement and, on the other, the fortunes of working class and former socialist activists pursuing that agenda within the fascist movement.

 

In brief summary, ‘socialism’ in Britain in the 1930s might be understood as implying two major projects. Firstly, the betterment of the lives of working people by engendering full employment and through measures later spoken of collectively as a ‘welfare state’; secondly, the fostering of a new relationship between persons by dissolving class conflicts and inequalities. The BUF pledged to achieve these objectives within their utopia, the ‘corporate’ state, promising full employment in a high wage economy and a guarantee of not only the essential means of life but also enhanced facilities for health, education and so forth. Blackshirts also stressed that the ‘Greater Britain’ would be classless, achieved not by socialising private property but via the combination of the mechanism of the corporate state to harmonise contending economic interests and a ‘spiritual revolution’ by which class conflict would be transcended in the creation of a harmonious nation built around people’s common identity as Britons.[11] The practicality of these aims is not at issue here, our interest in them is as a body of rhetoric—the allure of which the Marxist intellectual John Strachey could not deny—uttered to persuade, and persuade the working class.[12]

 

Turning from rhetoric towards action the BUF—via the abortive New Party—emerged, as Rajani Palme Dutt wrote, ‘from the heart of the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party’ (ILP).[13] Mosley had been a member of the ILP, a Labour minister and sat on the party’s National Executive Committee. Aneurin Bevan helped to write the National Policy with which the New Party was launched and Mosley counted the miner’s leader Arthur Cook and John Strachey among his collaborators.[14] H.G. Wells described him as having been ‘a promising new convert to the Labour party, with communist leanings’ and another well placed observer recorded that before his break with the party ‘[n]obody… could have doubted the genuineness of Mosley’s Socialism.’[15] A long time collaborator with Mosley, George Catlin, similarly believed that ‘the objects of Sir Oswald Mosley were—and about this I can venture to speak with some assurance—frankly socialistic.’[16]

 

Although neither Strachey nor Bevan stayed with Mosley, he was followed into the BUF by a host of figures from the left. Ellen Wilkinson and Edward Conze noted in 1934 that ‘many of his followers and a surprising number of headquarters’ staff of the Fascists were members of the Labour Party or the I.L.P.’[17] These included Robert Forgan and John Beckett, both former socialist MPs, George Sutton, previously chair of North St. Pancras Labour Party, Wilfred Risdon, ex-divisional organiser of the ILP in the Midlands, and the socialist and onetime suffragette Mary Richardson.[18] Other ex-ILP and Labour Party activists prominent in the BUF included John Scanlon, Thomas Moran, Marshall Diston, W.J. Leaper, Henry Gibbs, Leslie Cumings, Rex Tremlett and Alexander Miles.[19] Among ex-communists to join were Alexander Raven Thomson, the chief blackshirt ideologue and E.D. Randall, the author of the BUF’s ‘Marching Song.’[20] Many rank and file Blackshirts during this early period were also from the left.[21]

 

In his unpublished contemporary memoir ‘After My Fashion’ John Beckett wrote:

 

My speeches were practically the same as those I had made in the Independent Labour Party, because my change of organisation had no effect upon my Socialist convictions and policy. Indeed I found in the British Union of Fascists far more sincere and earnest Socialist conviction than I had ever seen in the Labour Party … About twenty per cent of the membership were mainly conservative in outlook, but the great majority of the membership were either converted Socialists or young people who, ten years before, would certainly have found their way into the Socialist movement.[22]

 

Commenting on Mosley’s debate against his erstwhile ILP comrade James Maxton at the Friend’s Meeting House in early 1933, The New Clarion wrote that ‘[f]or the first twenty minutes Mosley talked Socialism, except that he referred to a corporate state instead of the co-operative commonwealth.’[23] A supporter of another fascist organisation, the British Fascists, dismissed ‘the propaganda of the British Union of Fascists’ as ‘merely a Socialistic attack on capitalism under the name of Fascism’. Mosley had ‘practically staffed the BUF’ with ex-socialists who had ‘brought their ILP propaganda with them.’[24]

 

 The political background and ideological imperatives of the early BUF were also reflected in the creation of the Fascist Union of British Workers (FUBW).[25] The FUBW was originally formed as a local initiative on the part of the BUF Battersea branch under J.P.D. Paton, in 1934 a Covent Garden porter and formerly a local leader of the National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM), and Michael Goulding.[26] In February 1933 Blackshirt boasted that the FUBW had emerged from ‘one of the staunchest strongholds of the Moscow men’, the one-time constituency of the communist MP Saklatvala.[27] In April that year Charles Bradford, a Welsh ex-communist steel erector, took charge and the FUBW was then integrated into the national organisation, moving to the newly opened ‘Black House’ headquarters in August 1933.[28] While subordinate to its ‘parent body’ the FUBW had a distinct identity with its own leadership structure, membership cards and insignia.[29] An internal BUF document suggested that the FUBW’s role might be ‘compared to that of the TUC in relation to the Labour Party’.[30] Although it recruited from amongst existing members of the BUF it was also possible to join the FUBW exclusively. It was presumably those who were solely members of the latter body who wore the brown shirt which was its official uniform.

 

Under the title ‘What is the FUBW?’ the organisation described itself as the ‘forerunner of the one big administrative union which will represent the workers’ interests under fascism.’[31] The FUBW saw itself as anticipating the ‘Central Trades Union Administration’ which one day would deal with matters like ‘health, unemployment, and death benefits, workmen’s compensation’ for all workers in the corporate state, leaving individual unions to deal with the ‘industrial side’ of trade union work.[32] At the same time, fascists, ‘in readiness for the Occupational Franchise’, were commanded to campaign for single industry unions to replace bodies like the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU).[33] The FUBW, like the projected corporate state, was divided up into ‘a special section for each industry.’[34] Groups mentioned included coach drivers, civil servants, musicians, catering staff, actors, taxi drivers and tourism workers.[35]

 

Regarding the membership of the FUBW, one report in May 1933 described ‘the Brown Shirt Section’ as recruiting ‘unemployed manual workers of the navvy type as distinct from the younger and rather better educated men who make up the Black Shirts.’[36] A communist analysis of the BUF that Autumn admitted that ‘the fascist movement attracts to itself… certain sections of the proletariat. Disappointed by the policy of the Labour Party and its “labour governments” … some sections of the unemployed are caught by the grandiloquent slogans of fascism.’[37] Geographically the FUBW seems to have been strongest in London which was served by ‘Regional Councils’ and where Uxbridge, Edmonton, Islington, Battersea, Streatham, Croydon and Ealing were described as ‘strongholds’. Manchester, Newcastle, Stoke and Birmingham were also centres of activity and Luton, Longton, Oxford, Wolverhampton, and Bath were mentioned as locations of FUBW branches.[38]

 

‘[P]articular attention to the organisation of meetings in working class districts’ was noted. As to the message articulated at these meetings Communist International recorded that recruitment from the working classes was:

 

achieved by putting forward a slogan of struggle against the Means Test, demagogy “against bankers and speculators—for the unemployed,” demands of work for the unemployed, and so on. Against the Means Test the fascists put forward the slogan of a “job test” and of work and decent wages. At the same time fascists are verbally against wage cuts and salary cuts.[39]

 

Running in parallel with these policy pledges was criticism of the performance of the Trades Unions and Labour Party. In a case in Falmouth, recruits were sought with literature attacking both the TGWU and the Seaman’s Union.[40] Typically, trades union officials were portrayed as either cowardly placemen, interested only in lining their own pockets or as communists who put politics and the interests of ‘foreigners’ before British workers’ interests. One circular to ‘all lower trade union organisations’ declared: ‘fascism fights for you while the Labour organisation betrays you.’[41] Concerning the potential of rhetoric of this type Wal Hannington, leader of the NUWM, saw that its danger lay ‘in its deceptiveness, because in the ears of so many workers it rings true.’[42]

 

In addition to street corner rhetoric, ‘Fascist clubs for the unemployed’ were established in, among other places, Hammersmith, London and Manchester where it was reported that unemployed men were offered ‘cigarettes, a plate of soup and sometimes even a few shillings.’[43] The FUBW, perhaps reflecting the ambitions of the ‘Central Trade Unions Administration’ to come, also provided services to unemployed workers, including a licensed employment bureau at Black House and the representation of workers before Public Assistance Committees.[44] The scope of legal interventions conducted under the auspices of the FUBW seems to have been quite wide, also covering interventions in Court of Referees cases and an example where the owner of an ailing shop joined the FUBW and a legal agreement concerning its operation was drawn up by the BUF’s legal advisor, Captain Lewis.[45] The FUBW also advertised its concern for the ‘sweated worker’, citing the case of ‘ten girls (one consumptive) working in a room barely five feet wide without a window, lit continually with gas’ which it discovered and reported.[46]

 

Direct action was taken as well. This included preventing evictions, with, in one case in Battersea, blackshirts defying bailiffs and the police.[47] Blackshirts also attempted to intervene in support of strikers at the Firestone factory in Brentford in 1933. An anti-fascist recorded that ‘a few days after the beginning of the strike, fascists made their appearance and expressed their solidarity with the workers. They also offered their services as pickets, and brought tea and sandwiches for the workers.’ Despite being rebuffed, the blackshirts continued to court the strikers and attend their meetings, and at one such event a busman from the Turnham Green garage spoke in favour of accepting the fascists’ help. No less than three different leaflets under the name of the FUBW were also distributed.[48] In another case in February 1934, under the title ‘Strike Success’, it was claimed that the FUBW had ‘successfully intervened in the case of a recent strike in S.W. London’ by acting as intermediaries in a dispute over a bonus.[49] An unsuccessful attempt to intervene at a dispute at the Avon India Rubber Company at Melksham and a case of fascists persuading members of the TGWU to strike (who later lost their jobs) were also recorded in Spring 1934.[50]

 

 Members of the FUBW were also encouraged to join a wide range of workers’ organisations in a bid to gain influence. An internal BUF circular directed that:

 

Fascists should be elected through the Trade Union Branch Committees … Such Fascist members of the Trade Union committees will be able to stop grants of money which would otherwise go to the Labour Party ... Members of the FUBW should take part in the activities of all unemployed associations, mayors’ funds, even [the] NUWM, pressing forward the policy of the FUBW and making efforts to be elected to committees of such associations.[51]

 

The communist White described the fascists as responsible for ‘great activity among the workers’ and reported that ‘cases of workers coming to work in blackshirts… occur more often.’[52] This was echoed by a confidential intelligence report obtained by the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) in which the FUBW was described as having in ‘three cases… obtained a strong footing in Trade Unions.’ The same report also mentioned a ‘Fascist Club’ set up in a non-unionised firm of 2,000 employees where ‘some of the workers wear blackshirts in the factory.’[53]

 

TUC General Secretary Walter Citrine was clearly aware of these tactics and their intention and named a possible source of inspiration for them:

 

They were using the methods of the Communists. They were using every strike, every grievance, as a means of agitation. Their speakers were to be found outside the works where strikes took place, particularly unofficial strikes, where there was a chance of criticising the union officials or organisers. … They were conducting their agitation among the unemployed. They were posing as representatives before Public Assistance Committees. In short, they were adopting all the means in their power to ingratiate themselves into the lives of the working class in this country. They claimed to be a working class organisation.[54]

 

In view of the numbers of blackshirts who had crossed over from the left these were tactics readily to hand. 

 

Alexander Miles, whose contemporary account of his time in the BUF is in the TUC archives,[55] would have required no instruction on ‘communist’ technique. A seaman by occupation, Miles came from a working class family of strong socialist convictions and joined the ILP in 1919. At one time Secretary of the Gateshead Branch of the National Unemployed Workers Committee, Miles cited the corruption and failure of the Labour councillors of Gateshead as being among his reasons for later joining the BUF. He also served as Honorary Chairman of the Newcastle Branch of the National Boilermen’s and Firemen’s Union and was Tyneside leader of the Seamen’s Minority Movement, in which capacity he took part in the ‘“Unofficial Seaman’s Strike”’ of 1925. The failure of the ‘Tyneside Leadership of the Communist Party, which virtually controlled the SMM’ was cited by Miles as the reason for his abiding distrust of the CPGB. After that he withdrew from active politics until approached in 1933 by ‘an old friend and associate’ from his time in the ILP, Wilfred Risdon, who had become BUF Director of Propaganda.[56]

 

Miles’ assessment of the early BUF matched that of Beckett; he wrote that:

 

Older members of the Socialist Movement, having experienced the fervour of the pioneer days, and others who remember the spirit of the Socialist and Labour Party membership in the years immediately after the war, may find it difficult to believe that in the Fascist Movement in 1933 there was a spirit of comradeship or brotherhood, equal to the best of the early days of the Socialist Crusade’s youth and early maturity.

 

‘[Y]outhful Fascists [who] had no previous political experience’ were drawn in by Mosley’s message of ‘“Patriotism plus Revolution”’ and ‘“Down with the Old Gang”’. Even as a man with political experience to ‘steady’ him, Miles ‘was swept up in this hot flood of feeling that here was a Leader who typified Youth and the revolt of Youth against “things as they are”’.

 

Posted to Liverpool in August 1933, Miles worked on a draft of the BUF’s shipping policy and got ‘some sympathy among seamen and dockers’ in the area.[57] It was at this time that Liverpool, along with London, were recorded by the TGWU as areas where fascist propaganda was ‘particularly prevalent.’[58] To back up these efforts, plans were laid to expand the FUBW such that an Industrial Organiser was required and Miles put forward a Mr Davies, ‘a docker, and civil servant, an ex-communist’ for that role. Miles claimed that the FUBW ‘was growing more rapidly than the parent body’ at this point, but it was then that he ‘ran up against’ what he later would realise was ‘Mosley’s distrust of a working class wing of organised character’ and no finance was forthcoming.

 

The BUF made particular efforts to recruit among transport workers. In London, fascists, including ‘some holding official jobs on the [London Passenger Transport] Board’ (LPTB), distributed a pamphlet promising busmen ‘the moon’ in October 1933.[59] Then, the following month, Bradford of the FUBW wrote to Bert Papworth, a communist and leading member of the London busmen’s Rank and File movement.[60] In a ‘craftily worded’ letter Bradford sought to show that fascist sympathies lay with the militant busmen against the leadership of the TGWU. Papworth wrote: ‘They agree with R and F policy, which is out for better conditions for London Busmen.” They “are not against Trade Unions, but against political graft of such as Peters and Bevin”.[61] Naturally, Papworth made clear that no help was needed from fascists. Nonetheless, blackshirts continued to try to exploit tensions between transport workers and the TGWU leadership. Like Papworth’s movement, the BUF proposed a ‘T.O.T’ (Trains, Omnibuses, Trams) to unite transport workers against the combined employers of the LPTB.[62] Blackshirt also reported the FUBW’s representation at a disciplinary board of a fascist called Hewitt who was also a member of the Rank and File movement.[63] In June 1934 the Labour Party received reports of fascist ‘activities in [the] T & G Workers Union’ in Gateshead and, in Newcastle, the ‘attempt to form a Transport Union’ which had ‘about 50 members including Corporation busmen’.[64]

 

Moving to Sparkbrook in September 1933, Miles ‘discovered that the Birmingham Corporation Municipal Bus Service was seething with discontent over the speeding-up of schedules and what the employees declared to be a secret understanding between the officials of the Corporation and the officials of the Transport and General Workers Union.’ Some time earlier, in disgust at the reaction of a TGWU official to a pay cut, 200 workers at the Acock’s Green bus garage had formed a break-away organisation, the Birmingham Municipal Busworkers Association. Miles, working with one of the drivers, Jesse Hill, set about taking the new union over. The Daily Worker recorded that the fascists were ‘responsible for destroying the unity among the busmen…, taking over 200 of the best fighters out of the T and G.W.U., under the slogan “Your leaders have sold you!” and [had] formed a new union’.[65] Evidence to bring an action against the Corporation for breaches of the Road Traffic Act was gathered but although the FUBW won the case, the drivers were fined as well, meaning that the result was, to say the least, mixed.[66] Despite this, in a leaflet addressed to ‘Fellow Busmen’ later circulated in a TGWU branch in East Ham, the BUF put itself forward as an alternative to both the Union and the Rank and File movement, and pointed to how in Birmingham it had ‘proved… infringements and enforced the law’.[67]

 

In any case, Miles’ plans were much more ambitious. In view of the ‘great discontent’ among bus workers elsewhere, he hoped that a successful action would ‘capture the Municipal Busworkers Association for Mosley’. However, he was again foiled, being sent to Lancashire before the case came to court, leaving matters in less experienced hands so that the opportunity was lost.[68] Mosley, Miles recorded, explained that ‘he did not propose to countenance anything in the way of a Trade Union rivalling the existing Trade Union machine’ and forbade him from ‘setting up Fascist Trade Unions’. Miles’ belief was that ‘the real explanation’ was that Mosley ‘feared the growth of the Fascist Union of British Workers and was determined to put a stop to its progress.’

 

Moving to Manchester in early 1934 Miles described the local branch as being ‘mainly of working class origin’ and as including James Tynan and Joseph Sawlor who were both ex-communists and officers of the FUBW, whose local membership had been recruited from the ‘Municipal Lodging House, and the Labour Exchange queues.’[69] Miles was described as working with ‘dockers and stevedores regarding their conditions of employment’ and three meetings ‘at or near the Labour Exchanges’ were also held. In addition a publication dealing ‘with dock side problems … called the “Siren”’ was published by Miles which was later joined by Voice of the Workless, another local publication.[70] The former was still extant the following year, described in a Home Office report as ‘well established in the works of Mssrs. Ferranti.’[71] Once again, Miles came into conflict with the leadership when he ‘met and crossed swords with Commander Tillotson’ who had been imposed by NHQ ‘over the heads’ of the local leadership. This episode also introduced Miles to ‘Mosley’s fondness for military and naval officers as Administrators’.

 

Recalled to London at the end of February 1934, Miles became embroiled that May in what he called ‘London’s Strangest Strike’ at the Ham River Grit Company depots at Ham and Chiswick. Following a report of discontent among the firms’ drivers and grievances against the TGWU for its performance in negotiations, Miles called a meeting at the BUF’s Hammersmith branch ‘attended by almost the whole of the drivers and several others employed in other capacities about the yard.’ After discussions with Mosley and the BUF’s legal officer, Miles received ‘“carte blanche” to use the whole of the organisation in support of the strikers’ and called the drivers out the following day. During the short strike that followed, fascists used ‘pressure, threats and whatnot’ including adding sugar to the petrol tanks of lorries and boarding moving vehicles to compel ‘blackleg’ drivers to abandon their vehicles.[72] One of the company’s major contracts was to supply material for work on the Bank of England and Miles claimed that he called for volunteers to stop the deliveries. At this point, ‘Sir Oswald got cold feet’ and would not promise to support the men’s dependents if they were imprisoned and so Miles called off what he wrote of as ‘the first, and I believe only Fascist strike England will ever see.’ In a later brush with the TGWU Miles was contacted by G.W Alexander, Chairman of the union at the Viscose Development Company’s works, inviting him to put the BUF’s case at the William Morris Hall in Bromley so that the strikers could decide whether or not to enlist the fascists on their side. In the end Miles wrote that the meeting was cancelled when the TGWU threatened to withdraw its support of the strike.[73]

 

Miles recorded that a worker’s insurance scheme for the membership of the FUBW—which he numbered at 5,000—was also proposed by its Director, J Barney who had been recruited by Robert Forgan, ex-Labour MP and the Deputy Leader of BUF, to act as ‘technical adviser to the Movement in the industrial field.’[74] Miles described Barney as ‘an official in the Trade Union Friendly Society and an active worker in the National Union of Clerks’ and Barney described himself as a Chairman in that union. He was almost certainly the same person who wrote anonymously as ‘A T.U. Branch Chairman’ on ‘Fascism and Trade Unions’ and ‘The Tragedy of the Blackcoats.’[75] Although described by Miles as being of working class background, Barney’s membership of a union which lacked the solid allegiances and working class solidarity of ‘blue collar’ organisations may have made it easier for him to contemplate combining fascism with trades unionism.[76] Certainly the BUF did specifically target such sections of the workforce, also issuing a leaflet addressing workers in the catering trade.[77] Barney laid plans for a ‘national health insurance organisation’ and in April Blackshirt mentioned that ‘an announcement will shortly be made regarding the British Union Approved Society.’[78] But nothing more was heard and Miles believed that the insurance scheme, although popular with the ‘rank and file’ had been ‘wet-blanketed’ by the administrative officers. Once again, his conclusion was that ‘no body having the faintest semblance of working-class character, has a place in Mosley’s scheme of things.’

 

Such was the growth of the FUBW under Barney, Miles wrote, that ‘the ground was being tested for the registration of it under the Friendly Society’s Acts on a national basis’. Instead it was wound up as a separate organisation, being merged into the Industrial Section of the Propaganda Department, and the last mention of the FUBW in the BUF press was at the beginning of June 1934.[79] That summer Barney resigned, declaring to Miles: ‘Our “team” is smashed, as was the FUBW and, working as single units, we are heading for disaster, but our leader must see, ere a year has past, that his Administration is anti-industrialist. … I am certain we are distrusted by those who control the Movement. Time will prove whether we of the working-class are wanted.’

 

The reason that the efforts of Miles and other ‘left-wing’ fascists were frustrated at every turn is primarily traceable to a transformation in the BUF leadership occurring at the same time. The internal ructions of the BUF during this period have received some discussion, being interpreted as ‘centred around the contentious issues of organization and finance and their links to ideological differences.’[80] This explanation is correct as far as it goes but ignores the major part that the politics of class identity played in this episode.

 

A report in The Observer in January 1934, a week into Lord Rothermere’s support for the BUF in The Daily Mail, provides a snap shot of the organisation before this change. The paper noted how subtly Mosley had ‘stolen the thunder both of the Left and the Right’ and that ‘as with the Nazis there is a reactionary wing composed of violent anti-Socialists, and a revolutionary wing, recruited from the I.L.P. and the Communists.’ Indicating a picture similar to that recalled by Beckett and Miles the paper commented:

 

the Left wing is considerably stronger than the Right, for when Mosley founded the movement he took over with him many discontented members of the Labour movement. Tremendous headway too has been made in the big industrial centres of the North, where many of the unemployed have become disillusioned both with the Labour Party and the Communists. This success in the areas that have remained unshakeably loyal to Labour for so many years is the most impressive fact about the Fascist movement. It is not surprising that Mosley should be the uncrowned king of Brighton; it is surprising that he has been able to build up a strong organisation in Manchester and that to-day he should be holding a mass meeting in the Birmingham Bingley Hall, which holds 15,000 people.[81]

 

The BUF’s existing ‘reactionary wing’, drawn most significantly from the ultra-conservative British Fascists, many of whom came together with the rump of the New Party to form the BUF in 1932, was now to be enormously boosted in influence.[82] Miles wrote of an ‘influx of Generals, Admirals, big business men and so forth’. Kay Fredericks, one-time BUF photographer, in another contemporary memoir, blamed ‘Lord Rothermere’s patronage… for the influx of all these ex-officers and titled people’ and alleged that it was at this moment that the BUF ‘rapidly lost all semblance to the true ideas of Fascism.’[83]

 

It is telling that whilst later writing of the absence of class distinction in the movement, Mosley at the same time stressed its military quality, thereby linking the BUF to an institution which, even in perhaps the most class conscious nation in Europe, was almost feudal in the exclusiveness of its officer corps and its division between commissioned and other ranks.[84] Furthermore, as Martin Petter has shown, the ex-officer, or ‘temporary gentleman’ of the Great War was frequently someone whose heightened sense of social status was all the more sensitive because of his often weak hold on the material and cultural resources to maintain that identity.[85]

 

Thus, whereas Mosley and others later spoke of the BUF as ‘classless’, at the time a state mole reported ‘considerable unrest among the rank-and-file…, which takes the form of grumbling about food, class-conscious officers, discipline, and the hours of work.’[86] Fredericks’ account detailed the pervasive class culture amid the putative ‘brotherhood of fascism’. In the Black House the ‘men’s canteen’ catered for the rank and file, while the so-called ‘Mixed-canteen’ was known as the ‘boss-class canteen’. Fredericks wrote that ‘if a Blackshirt who was employed as a cleaner at H.Q. went into the mixed canteen, he would not be turned out, but would certainly be made to feel uncomfortable and ill at ease.’ Those with money wore superior uniform shirts which ‘immediately became known as “boss-class” shirts.’[87] As elsewhere in society, ‘titles, both civil and military’ were ‘a great help in the securing of rapid promotion.’ Although the majority of the ‘rank and file’ were ‘drawn from the working classes’, Fredericks noted that ‘when the Blackshirts throw a ball they do so at places… where these men feel out of place and unwanted.’

 

In this way the BUF brought together ‘ex-Socialists, Conservatives, Liberals, Communists, the officer class, the public school-boy, younger sons of the diplomatic and consular families’. Miles’ judgement was that to ‘control and unify such divergent types, without allowing the social and class prejudices they brought to the movement to disrupt its unity, was a task too big for Mosley’. The ‘Policy and Propaganda side’ which was controlled by Risdon and dominated by ex-socialists like Miles and had ‘some idea of putting reality into the Socialist phrases in the Party’s programmes’ increasingly clashed with the organisational wing dominated by ‘the great influx of the ex-officer caste’ of the Rothermere period, for whom the ‘BUF was an organ to strengthen their social privileges.’ Beckett also wrote that ‘a greater part of national headquarters’ staff were either complete boobies, or unbelievably like the caricatures of Fascists published in the “Daily Worker”’.[88] Miles charted the struggle whereby the ‘Conservative side’ stripped Risdon of authority to enable thereby ‘the Tory side to weed out any and every speaker who showed even the faintest tinge of “Red”.’ In this way, Fredericks believed, the BUF, while previously having a ‘slight division between the “right” and the “left” had been turned ‘into a glorified branch of the Conservative Party.’ Miles concluded that: ‘fascist unity is a farce, that the talk of wiping out class distinctions is on par with it and the Fascist movement is a class-instrument, and not a working class instrument either!’

 

Changes were also afoot at the highest level of the BUF leadership. Often underestimated in accounts of the BUF, Forgan, as Director of Organisation was Mosley’s ‘right hand man’ and was described by Miles as ‘the biggest figure at headquarters at that time.’[89] With Forgan as Deputy and Risdon as Director of Propaganda, the left-wing of the BUF was in a strong position. By September 1934 Forgan, although still nominally Mosley’s deputy, had been sent to inspect the Scottish branches ‘in order to get him away from headquarters,’ leaving the ex-Conservative F.M. Box as ‘the virtual deputy for Sir Oswald Mosley.’ Among the charges against Forgan were that he ‘had shown bad judgement in his choice of subordinate officers.’[90] In the ‘official’ history of the BUF this point has been linked to the recruitment of the feckless and criminally inclined, but it may equally have related to his appointment of working class socialists like Miles.[91]

 

Forgan was, Fredericks suggests, ‘exceedingly popular with all members of the BUF “left” wing’ and his resignation in October 1934, Miles wrote, caused a ‘revolt that nearly split the Party in half.’ Rumours spread through the BUF and there were ‘murmurings of discontent, and the possibility of an outbreak’; ‘almost a revolution in the movement’ as the BUF’s ‘“left-wingers”… plotted to take over the movement by force and oust those officers who had crawled in during the boosting period of the “Mail”.’ At his later ‘“court martial”’ it was alleged that Bradford, once head of the disbanded FUBW and leader of this revolt, had threatened to attack the ‘Deputy Chief of Staff’, Archibald Findlay, and had ‘prepared a plot to seize the building and make demands to Sir Oswald Mosley that certain officers be dismissed.’[92] Mosley ‘called the Headquarters staff together in the Club room’ of Black House and there, protected by ‘a dozen picked men,’ managed to damp down discontent. Being financially dependent on the BUF, the ‘mutineers’ were in a weak position and Mosley managed to convince them that Forgan ‘had not left the ranks for ever but would return when [his] health permitted.’[93] Hence, in the BUF press the following week the notice of Forgan’s resignation was amended to resignation from ‘active participation’ due to ill-health.[94] Bradford’s punishment was to be suspended for three months although it is doubtful that he ever returned. Fredericks recorded that two of the ‘ring-leaders were expelled some few weeks later’. In any case, that December it was ‘decided to purge the movement of undesirable elements’ which consisted ‘to a large extent of ex-members of the Communist Party and National Unemployed Workers Movement’ whose presence, it was reported, hindered ‘the recruiting of the better class of citizen.’[95] This was despite, as a fascist commented earlier that year, former socialists and communists providing the BUF’s ‘most valuable recruits’.[96]

 

At around the same time as this purge, Risdon too was reported to be ‘organising some subversive plot’ and to be nursing a ‘grievance because some of the people who joined the movement after he did have been given prominent positions’ and he was accused of plotting with other disenchanted Lancashire blackshirts to present ‘an ultimatum to Sir Oswald Mosley, demanding… the dismissal of certain officials at King’s Road.’[97] For whatever reason, nothing came of this and, with Forgan’s departure, the national leadership had fundamentally shifted from left to right. The victorious ‘organisational side’ was first headed by Box and then after his departure, by Neil Francis-Hawkins who came to dominate the BUF. Previously of the British Fascists—which Mosley had once alluded to as the ‘white guard of reaction’—and a member of OMS during the General Strike, Francis-Hawkins’ ascendancy eloquently illustrated the direction that the BUF had taken.[98] The background of other leading figures told the same story: Bryan Donovan, ex-Indian Army; General J.F.C. Fuller; Colonels Sharp and Crocker; Major Cleghorn; Captains Atherley, Butler and Gordon-Canning; Eric Hamilton Piercy, who was also an Inspector of Special Constabulary; “Dick” Plathen’, ex-Consular Service and Ian Dundas, a former Royal Navy officer.[99] This domination by the ex-officer class was also apparent at the next level of leadership, the BUF’s District Inspectors.[100] As one anti-fascist commented ‘where we haven’t a rank we have a double-barrelled name, always a good indication that the bearer is a loving friend of the workers.’[101]

 

Privilege was predominant among the blackshirt women too, with Lady Makgill, Lady Mosley and Ann Brock Griggs, an architect’s wife, successively as their leaders. The ‘radical’ wing of the Women’s Section was suppressed around the same time as the men’s with the socialist and feminist Mary Richardson ‘expelled for daring with other women, to put forward demands to the great Mosley, whereby women would receive some measure of fair play.’[102] ‘All the best women’ left at the time of Richardson’s departure, a claim supported by Miles, who explained that her expulsion was due to her ‘refusal to accept the theory of the women as “permanent junior partner”.’ Indicating a parallel mismatch between fascist rhetoric and practice in gender relations, Richardson cited the disparity between the ‘feminist’ pronouncements of the BUF and the reality of its patriarchal internal arrangements.[103]

 

As to the intentions of the BUF towards the working class movement if it came into power, when Forgan met Neville Laski secretly in July 1934, among the reasons for his disenchantment was that he expected that a ‘Fascist state in England… would assume a different form to that adumbrated by Mosley in his speeches.’[104] The BUF always made clear that there would be no place for other political parties in the corporate state but promised that trade unions would be strengthened and that they would have real power to represent labour. One voice from within the BUF was as sceptical as Miles on this point—indeed it may have been Miles.[105] George Chester, General Secretary of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives (NUBSO), recalled a conversation with someone who had recently left the BUF and was now ‘organising meetings in opposition to Fascism.’ Chester reported:

 

I invited his comment upon certain aspects of Fascism, particularly its relationship to the Trade Union Movement and the Labour Party, and he told me as a very definite statement that I could rely upon, that the Fascist Movement had already scheduled all the information they possibly could with relation to the Labour Party and the Trade Union Movement; that they had an organisation on paper which could step into the position of the Trade Union Movement on similar lines to that obtained in Germany at the present time, immediately they are in sufficient power to do so.

       When… I told him who I was… he told me that the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives were pretty high up in the list of Organisations to be dealt with immediately the revolution of the Fascists has taken place.[106]

 

 

The appointment of (‘Major’) ‘P.G. Taylor’—that is James McGuirk Hughes of MI5—as the BUF’s ‘Industrial Advisor’ to take over the role of the disbanded FUBW is eloquent of the fascists’ true attitude to the working class movement and ‘socialism’ national or otherwise.[107] As John Hope has suggested, in the established secret service practice of using radical-right groups as an auxiliary force against the ‘red menace’, at the same time as seeking to convince organised labour of the benign intentions of the blackshirts, Hughes was using ‘the BUF as a cover for MI5’s own covert operations against the left.’[108] That Mosley knew of Hughes’ other employer from the outset and that the BUF paid for the agents he placed in left-wing bodies, including the CPGB, suggests that there was no conflict between the aims of the two organisations in this respect.[109] Mosley had made clear that the blackshirts would act as a counter-revolutionary force if needed and indeed, one ex-blackshirt has speculated that Hughes was placed within the BUF to be ‘in a position which they thought might have been useful in the organisation of BU’s well known fighting qualities should a ‘Red Revolution’ erupt and threaten a take-over of the State.’[110]

 

Hughes’ interests were also much wider than the CPGB. Years earlier he had worked to infiltrate and undermine socialist and trades union activity in Liverpool and Charles Dolan, another former communist who passed through the BUF, indicated the presence of agents provocateurs under Hughes’ control within trades unions and other bodies.[111] Miles commented that ‘if to be an Industrial advisor means that one controls a number of people who burrow into organisations such as Trade Unions… so that the controller of these ferrets may “advise” his employers of their intentions and actions, then, of course Mr. Taylor was rightly described.’ Given that ‘Taylor’ oversaw the shift in BUF policy from the creation of a separate body of fascist workers to the ‘permeation’ of the unions by blackshirts he was well positioned to so ‘burrow.’[112]

 

Miles provides a telling comment on fascist rhetoric. Regarding a visit to the shipping magnate ‘Sir Shadford Watts’ [sic] to discuss BUF policy, he recorded that although Watts found reasons for rejecting anything ‘favourable to seamen against owners’ Miles left him feeling that he had managed to keep his side of the argument up.[113] Only later did it dawn on him that ‘all this stuff on paper doesn’t really matter’. Mosley was, he felt, ‘too sensible… to attempt to put anything into practice that will destroy the possibility of shipping profits and again, one can always have a word with him in private.’

 

Nonetheless, despite the rightward-swing at the level of the national leadership, ‘left-wing’ fascism remained a prominent part of the BUF’s propaganda. Indeed, the movement made an increased use of quasi-socialist and anti-capitalist rhetoric. Blackshirts called themselves ‘National Socialists’, explaining that if ‘you love your country you are national, if you love its people you are socialist’. The by-line of Blackshirt became ‘the patriotic workers’ paper’ and the BUF targeted campaigns at, among other groups, workers in mines, mills and transport.[114] Rather than seek to distance itself from socialism, the BUF sought to present itself as the inheritor of a specifically British socialist tradition represented in fascist eyes by figures including William Morris and Robert Owen.[115]

 

Furthermore, although the right-wing of the BUF had triumphed at national leadership level this did not necessarily mean that an alliance of social fractions could not be sustained when rhetoric was not obviously contradicted by practice. Thus, in 1936 Charles Wegg-Prosser was able to write that the BUF could ‘proudly claim to be a Revolutionary Worker’s Movement, seeking to set up the only genuine Workers’ State, which is the Corporate State.’[116] It was only when he moved from the isolation of the BUF’s Hertford branch to take part in the East End campaign and come face to face with an organisation led by ‘a small narrow-minded group of ex-Army officers’ that this illusion was shattered.[117]

 

Consequently, while there were no further attempts to build up specific working class bodies like the FUBW, the BUF continued to have a heterogeneous membership, but crucially like wider society, it was a stratified one. The best available studies of BUF membership reflect this. Mandle’s survey of the BUF’s national leadership finds it safely in the hands of the middle, if not upper classes.[118] In contrast, Cullen’s sample of grass roots fascists were predominantly of the ‘respectable’ working class/lower middle class and among those who joined after 1934 the proportion of those from a family background on the ‘left’ actually increased.[119] In the fascist stronghold in the East End, Fenner Brockway noted that ‘Mosley had succeeded in securing the support of a considerable number of Irish and British workers,’ an evaluation supported by Linehan’s impressive empirical evidence that ‘local fascism did not conform to the classic petit-bourgeois or bourgeois stereotype.’[120] An indication of the occupational backgrounds of blackshirts in this later period was the presence at the BUF’s mass rally at Earls Court in 1939 of banners representing trade union groups in transport, mining, clerical, textile, iron and steel, and agricultural sectors.[121]

 

The example of Northampton BUF illustrates this socio-cultural divide in microcosm.[122] The ‘reactionary’ credentials of the first prominent local fascist, Harry Frisby, were impeccable. Previously of the Junior Imperial League and the son of the owner of a substantial local factory, Frisby joined the BUF during the Rothermere period. Writing to the local press he contrasted Lord Carson’s defence of empire and ‘time honoured institutions’ with the activities of the ‘so-called conservatives’ of the National Government.[123] Reflecting his social status he became County Propaganda Officer and parliamentary candidate for Harrow. However, it was not Frisby who was the driving force of fascism in Northampton, but the District Leader, George C., who was on the local committee of the National Union of Railwaymen. GC wrote of it being ‘well known’ at the NUR District Executive Committee that he was a blackshirt and of how his workmates, knowing of his politics, had still elected him as their delegate.[124] For GC, blackshirt rhetoric was able to create and sustain a populist identity which synthesised socialism and fascism. Replying to one critic he wrote: ‘I love my county and people; in fact I am a National Socialist.’[125]

 

The background of the local activists over the time of GC’s leadership (1936-1939) matched the pattern found by Cullen and Lineham. A contemporary letter described the BUF as a ‘British worker’s movement’[126] and the activists of the branch included workers at a local engineering concern, Express Lifts, railwaymen, meter readers and black coated workers. PW, who worked as a clerk in the Public Assistance department, saw his BUF membership as an expression of left wing inclinations, remembering the BUF as akin to the ILP in its mission.[127] WW, an engineer, looked back on fascism as promising a ‘right-wing workers revolution.’[128]

 

The activities of the BUF in the town also suggest an ambition to fill the political space occupied by Labour and letters stressing the benefits for workers of the corporate state were a regular feature of the local press. In the local elections it was ‘Northampton’s strongest Labour ward’ that GC chose to fight and his election address argued for a ‘Britain first’ policy to protect the town’s vital local boot and shoe industry.[129] His policies for Castle Ward—where he lived—also included calls for slum clearance, a not inappropriate message in an area described as ‘the oldest and most slummy district’ of the town.[130] The Blackshirts moved their headquarters to the ward and continued to seek to court its predominantly working class inhabitants with activities including a ‘New Year’s party’ and ‘a day’s outing’ for the ‘less fortunate children of Castle Ward’.[131]

 

The Northampton blackshirts are an example of how, as long as ‘theory’ remained unchallenged by ‘practice’, quasi-socialist rhetoric could be effective in building a fascist movement around a shared populist identity. This is one reason why a sufficient understanding of a fascist movement cannot avoid considering the functioning of its own discourse. At the same time, this does not preclude a ‘critical’ approach to the subject.[132] Populist identities forged in fascist political language were not spoken into a vacuum but uttered in the face of the pre-existing premises and agendas of class and gender. Whilst Mosley spoke of the classless nation to come, identities formed in the class-ridden, patriarchal present pushed the movement which claimed to anticipate the ‘Greater Britain’ in a quite different direction.[133]

 

Notes