Philip Coupland

 

The Blackshirts in Northampton, 1933 -1940[1]

 

Philip M. Coupland  (drpmc66@ntlworld.com)

 

 

 

Although Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) has been the subject of significant research, historians have tended to concentrate on the national leadership of the BUF or their activities in major cities. In contrast, the part that the Blackshirts played in the life of towns like Northampton has been more or less ignored or accorded only passing reference.[2] What follows is an account of the creation and struggle of a Blackshirt branch and its relations to a local body politic which it tried, and failed, to penetrate.

 

Of the three county towns to host a BUF branch, Northampton was, at least initially, the least enthusiastic. Wellingborough had its blackshirts a month after Mosley had launched the movement in London in October 1932 and in Peterborough a short lived BUF branch was established in June the following year.[3] Travelling speaker Brown held the first fascist meeting in Northampton’s Market square that Autumn and a local branch was established.[4] But then, silence. A letter to the Chronicle and Echo noted the contradiction between the ‘lethargy of local Fascists’ and their ‘Market Square eloquence’ which claimed that ‘“Fascism has come to stay in Northampton”.[5] This letter evoked no response and the highest estimate of BUF membership for the town was four in 1934, indicating that fascism had failed to take root. While elsewhere, the support given by Lord Rothermere’s press was sending people flocking to the BUF such that the movement reached its numerical high-point in the region of 50,000 in the first half of 1934, Northampton merely looked on.[6]

 

Nonetheless, it was during this period that the Blackshirts made a significant local recruit when 22 year old Harry Frisby defected from the Conservative’s Junior Imperial League. By class and politics Frisby was typical of the so-called ‘Rothermere’ fascists for whom the BUF represented a more ‘virile’ form of Conservatism. The son of the owner of the Brook Manufacturing Company in the town and an old boy of Northampton Town and County School, Frisby was on the fringe of the town elite. At the time of his selection as a BUF prospective parliamentary candidate for Watford and Harrow the Northampton Independent described him as a ‘young and energetic Northamptonian’ with ‘many qualifications’ for that post.[7]

 

Blackshirts in outside a meeting hosting Alexander  Raven Thomson in 1936

With Frisby announced as local Branch Organiser and a meeting at The School, Weedon in early 1935 came a renewed assault on local indifference.[8] Meetings were held on the Market Square and Blackshirt claimed that the branch was ‘growing steadily’. A sign that a toehold in the town had been gained was the small headquarters opened in Hunter Street near the town centre.[9] Then, indicating that the BUF were serious in their efforts to bring fascism to the town, Mosley came to speak at the Guildhall in July.

‘Mosley Speaks’

‘Despite the fine weather and the demand of 2s. 6d. for the front seats’, 500 people attended the meeting. With Blackshirts as sentinels down the sides of the hall Mosley marched to the dais to the strains of amplified ‘martial music’ to stand alone with ‘a silver buckle the only relief to his all black uniform, at the foot of a gigantic Union Jack which stretched from the platform almost to the lofty roof. … On each side of the platform were the fasces—the Fascist symbols’.

 

Mosley’s address showed that the BUF was by no means oblivious to the place of the boot and shoe industry in the town’s fortunes. Speaking on the ‘great Northampton industry’, Mosley pointed out that the export trade for footwear had ‘practically vanished’ and promised ‘a home market as a substitute for foreign trade’ via empire autarchy.[10] These were themes that fascist speakers would return to in the coming years and, in the event of the establishment of the fascist corporate state, the BUF expected that the ‘administrative centre’ for the ‘Leather Trades Corporation’ would be in Northampton.[11] After L’Estrange Malone, the Labour PPC for Northampton, drew for his Labour audience ‘a picture of the shoe union officers of Northampton shot or in prison, with Fascist officials issuing orders from the office of No.1 and No.2 Branches’ ‘Local Fascist’ suggested that he was ‘undoubtedly correct in his assumption that Sir Oswald Mosley’s stalwarts will eventually relieve the Boot and Shoe Union official of the duties of leading, or misleading the workers.’[12]

 

Apart from Mosley’s reply to a question on BUF policy regarding the Jews—probably asked on the initiative of the Liberal Councillor Saul Doffman who had written to the Board of Deputies for advice[13]—which caused a ‘brief outburst from the back of the hall’, the press recorded that Mosley enjoyed ‘an enthusiastic reception’ and ‘seemed to make a most favourable impression’. ‘At the close of his hour’s address there was loud and prolonged applause.’[14] Underlining this success, the counter meeting organised by the Trades Council, although ‘well attended’, attracted ‘fewer than at the Mosley meeting.’[15]

 

In view of this positive reception, it is not surprising that the local branch grew. ‘Northampton has benefited considerably from the Leader’s recent visit, and excellent progress has been made. Membership has increased by nearly 50 per cent. Open-air meetings are now being held regularly, and future prospects are bright’ it was claimed.[16] Meetings continued on the Market Square, particularly stressing the BUF’s message of ‘minding Britain’s business’ in the matter of Italian ambitions in Abyssina.[17] At the end of the year things were lively enough to justify advertising a district dance at the Village Hall at Yardley Hastings in the fascist press. This trend carried on to make 1936 a year in which, the Northampton Labour Party reported, ‘Fascist activity increased considerably.’[18]

 

As has been noted elsewhere, the quality of leadership of provincial BUF branches was at the centre of their fortunes.[19] In this respect, it was during the first half of 1936 that Northampton BUF made perhaps its most important recruit in George Callow., who soon became District Leader and the driving force of local fascism. Describing his ‘conversion’, Callow recorded that ‘“keenly interested in political subjects’ he had often ‘spent a pleasant half-hour… standing on the Market Square… listening to the doctrines expounded by the various speakers’. Although sometimes heckling blackshirt speakers he was also ‘struck by their patriotic outlook’, ‘greatly impressed by their policy of ‘Britain First’ and the way in which they championed the small trader’ and ‘impressed, as a soldier, by the way in which the National Anthem was sung after each meeting.”’ Although describing himself as ‘brought up in Conservatism’ Callow was in all other respects quite different to Frisby. Born and bred a cockney, Callow had served as a private soldier in the Northamptonshire Regiment in the Twenties and then stayed in Northampton to work in the goods section at the town’s Castle railway station. He was also, and continued to be, a member of the National Union of Railwayman who sat on its local committee.[20]

 

An energetic force for fascism, another blackshirt wrote of Callow that ‘it’s no good seeking him at the H.Q at the week-ends, you will find him on the main street selling literature.’ By the Summer the district was appearing regularly as second in the country in the BUF paper sales league. ‘It’s all up with Northampton - Sales up - recruits up - and the Red Front with the wind up’ Blackshirt claimed.[21]

The ‘Battle of Cable Street’: A Provincial Echo

This last comment suggests that, as was happening in the East End of London—the so-called ‘Battle of Cable Street’ occurred at the same time—fascism aroused anti-fascism and brought violence from both sides. If anything, arrangements in the Market Square tended to encourage things to move in that direction, as the established orator’s platform—the steps of the Square’s ornate cast iron fountain—allowed fascist and anti-fascist speakers to address simultaneous meetings. On several consecutive Sunday evenings in September and October the throwing of fruit and insults and the jostling of the departing blackshirts was only prevented from becoming more serious by Chief Constable Williamson’s officers. Meetings were then banned until Williamson called together representatives of the BUF, Labour, the Communist Party and the National Unemployed Workers Movement to make them agree to use the square on a rota basis.[22]

 

Following these incidents, the local press expressed what it no doubt believed should be the opinion of right-thinking Northamptonians on the BUF. On the one hand, it noted that ‘there have been doctrines preached on the Market Square… far more challenging to popular opinion than anything heard from Northampton Fascists’ and yet during the ‘most stormy political episodes of the past, the rights of assembly and free speech have been protected’. However, on the other, while defending the core liberal value of free speech for the fascists, the Chronicle and Echo’s sympathies were with the forces of law and order: ‘Blackshirts or red shirts, there is still a very real respect in Northampton for the men in blue’ the paper concluded.[23] A cartoon which appeared shortly before the municipal elections made clear where these angry voices from the fountain steps stood in relation to the dominant ideal of shared prosperity and gradual progress.

Vote Fascist?

Despite anti-fascist opposition in Northampton and elsewhere, Mosley was back in the Guildhall again that November to hold another successful and well attended meeting; the local Labour Party reported that ‘Mosley packed the Town Hall’.[24] At the end of his address—this time principally on BUF foreign policy—the fascist leader announced that Northampton was one of the hundred constituencies that the movement planned to contest in a general election.

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Had an election been called in 1939 or 1940 the BUF candidate would have been Mrs Nora Elam whose appointment caused the local press to comment that while ‘Northampton’s Parliamentary elections in the past have been repeatedly distinguished by strange candidatures’, ‘few have occasioned more initial surprise’ than this one.[25] One of several former suffragettes who joined the BUF, Elam stated that ‘she wanted to understand the Northampton people’ and that ‘she was sincere in her desires that… conditions should be bettered in this great industrial town of Britain.’ If Northamptonians should elect her, Elam promised a ‘great national resurgence of our race’ which would save the town’s ‘staple industry.’ Referring to the town’s famous ‘free thinker’ and MP, Elam suggested that ‘this revolution in political thought’ was, ‘most specially suited’ to Northampton, for——‘from the time of Bradlaugh… , it has shown a spirit of sturdy independence in keeping with British Union principles.’[26] Although the BUF’s claim that ‘the people had taken her to their hearts’ was dubious, the press discussed the possibility of a BUF candidate splitting the Conservative vote should an election be called following the coronation of King George VI.[27]

 

A more reliable indicator of likely fascist electoral fortunes was provided the following year by Georg Callow’s candidature in Castle ward. In the leading story on the front page of the Chronicle and Echo Frisby suggested that meetings on The Mayorhold in the ward—where Callow lived—had shown the ‘people who assembled there to be the most sympathetic’. At one of GC’s campaign meetings, where the local press recorded an attendance of over 500 people, fascist speakers ‘expressed the need for action with regard to slum clearance’, a not inappropriate message in an area described as ‘the oldest and most slummy district’ of the town.[28] The Chronicle and Echo commented that the performance of the town’s first fascist candidate would ‘be followed with close interests.’[29]

Despite the BUF’s ability to draw an audience to its meetings, Callow achieved only a ‘humble 27 votes’ in a three way contest.[30] Despite this, the BUF continued to concentrate on Castle Ward and, in 1938, moved its headquarters and book shop to The Mayorhold, close to Callow’s home.[31] That year he again decided to fight ‘Northampton’s strongest Labour ward’ and his election address argued for a ‘Britain first’ policy and the protection of the boot and shoe industry.[32] However, even in a straight fight between the BUF and the Labour party little more support was forthcoming and, with Labour’s vote identical to that of the previous year, his share only climbed to 59 votes.[33] Mrs Adams’ victory speech made clear that ‘Labour has shown Fascism where it gets off.’[34]

Outsiders

Unlike at Eye in Suffolk where the local squire was elected as a BUF councillor in 1938, in Northampton the blackshirts were outside the local structure of status and authority.[35] Not only were the BUF attempting to introduce a foreign form of politics into a community with a strong culture of local patriotism and identity and a corresponding distrust of ‘outsiders’, but also they had little to offer.[36] Unlike in similarly run-down working class areas in the East End of London where the BUF had managed to secure as much as 23 per cent of the vote in local elections in 1937, Castle ward had no tradition of anti-Semitism to exploit. Whereas the decline of the textile industries in the North provided a limited platform for the Blackshirts, in Northampton the interests of the boot and shoe industry in relation to, for example, the threat posed by Bata, were already articulated at local level. Finally, as Marie Dickie has also shown, Northampton already its own local version of the ‘corporate state’.[37]

 

However, despite not having achieved anything approaching a mass base in Northampton, the town nonetheless hosted a viable and active fascist outpost in the later 1930s. Apart from the effect of Mosley’s meetings, Callow was assisted in the building of the branch by Tommy Moran, a powerful mob orator and—on account of his fighting prowess at the ‘Battle of Cable Street’—a blackshirt hero, who was posted to Northampton in 1937.[38] Through these efforts the BUF in the latter part of the decade built-up a subscribing membership in the region of seventy persons, of whom ten or so formed the vital activist core of the branch.[39]

 

Given the unpromising political terrain, the question should perhaps not be ‘why did the blackshirts not gain more support?’ but rather ‘how could they gain any following at all?’ Some clues are offered by the nature of the activist core of the branch. They were all young people in their twenties—Callow, twenty-nine when he joined, was the oldest. In terms of their socio-economic background, unlike Frisby, they came from the lower middle and the skilled working classes. George Sanders was a painter who, like Callow, worked on the railways; FS and Harold Osborn were both shop keepers, the latter running a cycle shop on the Kettering road; Len Manning was employed as an electrician by the local electricity company; PW was  a clerk in the Public Assistance department; his brother WW, and Ron Huff were, like a number of local members, engineering workers at the Express Lifts Company; Harry Loasby worked for the Brook Manufacturing Company. From these details it is clear that the BUF, for all its attempts to address the concerns of boot and shoe workers, failed to recruit from the predominant section of the town’s working class. Also of significance is the degree to which the Northampton blackshirts were more or less recent migrants to the town. Apart from Callow, Deputy District Leader Ron Huff and his brother Frank and sister Violet—both also activists—hailed originally from Limehouse in the East End. The parents of District Treasurer, PW and his brother W also hailed from London where PW was born.[40] Young enough not to have deeply ingrained political allegiances, occupationally and often geographically outside the cultural and corporate arrangements of the local polity, they were a narrow section of the local population to whom the BUF could appeal.

Fascist Activism

Something else shared by a number of the blackshirts was that they were also leading members of the Invicta Road [cycle] Club in Northampton. Among the promises of the fascist utopia were abundant facilities for sport and recreation and the BUF’s Action was recruited to the club’s campaign to interest the Borough Council in the provision of a cycle track. Castigating ‘Northampton’s Armchair Administrators’ for their decision to spend £11,000 on a new crematorium rather than £3,000 on sports facilities, the fascists noted Northampton’s ‘tremendous new fire station’ and ‘remarkable new indoor swimming baths’ and urged the ‘young and energetic [Tory] councillor named Harrison’ to raise the matter again.[41]

 

However, Northampton BUF’s campaigns over the remaining years of the decade were rarely so uncontroversial. To the fore in their efforts was the BUF’s call to the Government to ‘Mind Britain’s Business’ rather than oppose the aggression of the fascist states. This did not displace other aspects of BUF propaganda—its corporate state and anti-Semitism—rather all these areas of fascist ideology were interrelated.

‘Mind Britain’s Business’

Norah Elam, speaking to the League of Nations Union in Northampton in 1937 condemned ‘collective security’ as meaning ‘collective war’ and instead stressed fascist isolationism.[42] The next year when Nazi ambitions concerning Czechoslovakia were becoming apparent, the same policy caused ‘a number of young fascists’ to disrupt a Northampton LNU meeting where Eleanor Rathbone MP was speaking. A ‘stink bomb’ saturated the venue with a ‘disgusting odour’ and, reflecting the BUF’s nationalism and isolationist stance, calls of ‘“Britons fight for Britons only”’ and ‘“Why look abroad so much when we have one and half millions unemployed at home?”’ were heard in the hall.[43] Later that year, after the occupation of the Sudentenland, the British Union Book Club—presumably a local fascist alternative to the town’s Left Book Club—issued a resolution to Labour PPC Reginald Paget calling on him to ‘oppose vigorously any attempt to send funds abroad to the poor Czechs, or Spaniards, until every man and woman in Great Britain is removed from poverty.’[44]

 

The report on the Rathbone meeting also noted that ‘“Britain First” was the burden of the heckling as it is of their wall slogans’, a reference to local manifestations of a nation-wide campaign of ‘fascist graffiti’. Reports at the time included cases of slogans on the walls of the churchyard of St. Andrews church and another Northamptonian took offence at seeing the inscription “Hail Mosley!” on The Mounts. A letter to Northampton Trades Council complained of ‘the amount of Fascist propaganda that is being chalked in all parts of the town’. Neither was this an exclusively urban activity. One correspondent railed against those who encouraged ‘youths to creep about in the night and spoil the natural beauty of our countryside’, and another complained of ‘“Britain First”’ inscribed on ‘railway bridges and canal bridges’.[45]

 

During one such nocturnal expedition Callow and Len Manning were caught by a passing policeman at the moment of adding the final touches to the slogan ‘Mosley Says Britain First’ painted in six foot high letters on the wall of Towcester racecourse—the property of Lord Hesketh. After a struggle in which Manning was injured, the two managed to reach Frisby’s waiting car and escape. But, the vehicle’s registration number having been taken, they were later arrested. While their ‘previous good character’ was taken into account both received heavy fines and were bound-over.[46]

 

Mosley speaks at the GuildHall, April 1939 

Mosley with DL George Callow and DDL Ronald  Huff, April 1939

 

BUF activity continued into 1939 with a call to arms for a ‘Spring Campaign’ in February and Mosley’s third and final visit to the town hall in April.[47] Despite Hitler having violated the Munich agreement and the increasing likelihood of war the fascist leader again drew ‘a big audience’ to hear his arguments against British involvement in a European conflict. Standing alone on the dais with the BUF circle-flash emblem in front of him and behind what the Chronicle and Echo’s reporter described as ‘the biggest Union jack I have ever seen’, Mosley ‘exuded virility from his whole six feet’. ‘By rhetoric rather that logic… he held his audience for ninety minutes’, the report continued.[48]

‘an occurrence of perverted originality’

As part of his address, Mosley condemned ‘attempts… to poison the minds of the British people in order to build up a war spirit, which would eventually lead to a world conflict for the benefit of international finance’.[49] In fascist thinking ‘international finance’ was synonymous with Jewry and fascist anti-Semitism remorselessly attacked the Jews on this account. With one of the smallest Jewish communities in the country—less than a hundred persons whose synagogue on Overstone Road had been established in 1890—and experiencing, as was noted a few years later, ‘little if any, active anti-Semitism’, Northampton was an unlikely target for such propaganda.[50] Nonetheless, East-end tactics were to be inflicted on Northampton.

 

Back in 1937, Moran, writing under the title ‘Wake Up, Northampton’, noted that although the ‘only’ Jews Northamptonians came across were ‘the usual Jewish nomads who monopolise nearly every stall on the open market’, he sought to link  Jewry to the town’s economic anxieties, writing that ‘the housewife of Northampton… buys foreign shoes in the Jewish chain stores, and so keeps her husband out of employment.’ ‘Once again’, Moran argued, ‘the Jew grows fat upon exploitation of our people’s poverty.’ From the fountain steps only yards from Saul Doffman’s shop on the corner, a visiting speaker pursued a similar theme, declaring that ‘thanks to international finance, Northampton’s boot and shoe operatives were now at the mercy of the huge Bata concern.’ Writing under the title ‘Jews in Northampton’, Moran found an example of Jewish ‘bitterness’ in the experience of a local woman blackshirt  forced to wait half-an-hour in a Jewish owned hairdressers only to be refused service. Reflecting yet another dimension of anti-Semitism, GC denounced the effects of the ‘cheap-jack sordid methods of “slick” aliens’ on British ‘culture’ and blamed the Jews for ‘the white slave traffic, dope peddling, filthy literature and undesirable establishments’. The intention of the BUF was to ‘destroy these bad influences’ he wrote.[51] 

 

As war came closer Northampton BUF found grounds for complaint in the treatment of Jewish refugees, a number of whom had been received by the town.[52] One letter in early 1939 showed the way in which the branch’s efforts to cultivate Castle ward could intersect with anti-Semitism. The correspondent, having thanked ‘the Blackshirts for their kindness in organising the New Year’s party for the poorer children of Castle Ward’ commented that it was ‘about time someone thought about the local girls and boys instead of the foreign refugees’. In another letter, Ron Huff condemned the ‘enormous amounts… being found for the benefit of the alien refugee’. The fascist principle was that ‘Charity starts at home”’ and Huff announced that the fascists were arranging ‘a day’s outing’ for the ‘less fortunate children of Castle Ward’.[53]

 

The following month anti-Semitic words were matched by action. The Northampton Independent reported ‘an occurrence of perverted originality… unprecedented locally’ and asked ‘who is the perverted fanatic who in outrageous mockery hung a pig’s head dripping with blood, above the door of the Northampton Synagogue in Overstone Road’.[54] Although there is no direct link between the BUF and this act, similar occurrences were taking place all over the East End at the same time, which Linehan has interpreted as evidence of the increasing ferocity of the BUF anti-Jewish campaign as war came closer.[55] Reflecting this linkage of Jewry to the slide to war, letters from local fascists claimed that a war against Germany would serve the ‘vendetta of the Chosen Race’ and that press ‘war mongering’ was the responsibility of ‘World Jewry’. Reports also appeared in the same month of ‘numerous walls… smeared with marks representing the letters “P” and “J”’ (‘Perish Judah’) and ‘“Mosley is winning”’ around the nearby village of Sywell .[56]

The Link

A further expression of the local fascists’ opposition to a war against Germany was their involvement with the Anglo-German Link, an ostensibly non-political organisation established by Admiral Sir Barry Domville, whose real purpose was to foster positive opinion about Nazi Germany. Blackshirts, possibly including Frisby who had belonged to town’s Anglo-German circle and had enthused about Germany in the local press, were among the audience of over fifty at the local branch’s inaugural meeting at the Wedgewood Cafe in Abington Street in May 1939.[57] A base was established at the office of Maurice Smith, a local travel agent, who acted as branch secretary. Outside his office, in Mercers Row, a poster with Domville’s portrait advertised the objects of the organisation to passers-by. Progress was made with membership rising to fifty, and a further meeting was held at which ‘a German count’ spoke.[58]

 

However, the Link was not a fascist initiative but rather an episode where, for once, the purposes of the BUF and the local elites overlapped. At the end of the preceding year canvassing gathered together around thirty persons who shared, for various reasons, an interest in improved Anglo-German relations. Prominent among them were the manufacturer and Labour councillor Wenman J. Bassett-Lowke and Captain George Drummond. Chairman of the London branch of the Royal Bank of Scotland—Drummond’s Bank—and host to both the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York at Pitsford Hall, his county home, a former High Sheriff of Northamptonshire, twice president of Northampton Agricultural Society and president of Northamptonshire Cricket Club for five years, the Captain was in the top rank of the county elite.[59] Bassett-Lowke—who was also on the Link’s National Council—became the chairman of the local branch and Drummond its president.

 

In August, with war every day becoming more likely, the Home Secretary identified the Link as a Nazi propaganda organisation in the House of Commons. Among the repercussions of this were that St. George’s ward Labour Party decided not to accept Bassett-Lowke for the forthcoming local government elections because they feared that he ‘was pro-Nazi’. Bassett-Lowke resigned from his position in the Link and what had been developing into a acrimonious row was patched up.[60] Assessing Bassett-Lowke’s political sympathies I think it is probable that his business links and general intellectual sympathies predisposed him to be pro-German but not pro-Nazi. Even so, his attendance at a meeting organised by Mosley at the Criterion restaurant in London in March 1940—where the fascist leader denounced the conflict as a “Jews’ War”—suggests, at best, a dangerous level of political naiveté.[61]

 

Regarding Drummond’s motivations there are no such ambiguities. Domville described Drummond as ‘madly pro-German and anti-Jew’ and although there is no evidence of any connection between Drummond and the BUF locally he was a sympathiser and minor financial supporter of the BUF nationally and attended Mosley’s 1939 rally at Earls Court. He was also a member of the tiny anti-Semitic National Workers’ Party of Colonel Graham Seaton Hutchinson and locally sought to found his own fascistic organisation, ‘The British Movement’ and was active in the ‘All-British Association’.[62]

 

The Northampton Independent commented of Captain Drummond that his ‘patriotic record’ was ‘abundantly sufficient to absolve him from knowingly participating in any movement of pro-Nazi character’.[63] As Richard Griffiths has shown, patriotism in the 1939-40 period could have unexpected outcomes, including agitation which was ultimately in the favour of Nazi Germany. In this respect the Northampton blackshirts were no doubt as patriotic as Drummond.

War

Although the Link was wound up at the outbreak of hostilities, anti-war agitation continued. Drummond was active in The Right Club of Captain Ramsey, MP which, was devoted to opposing what it saw as a ‘Jewish’ war and was involved with Mosley’s anti-war activities in 1940. Home Intelligence also recorded Drummond’s involvement with a group of prominent anti-Semites which included General JFC Fuller, at one time a leading member of the BUF, and Philip Farrer, a friend of Mosley.[64]

 

Changing their slogan from ‘Mind Britain’s Business’ to ‘Stop the War’ the BUF also continued to campaign nationally. However, Northampton branch received a body blow when Callow was recalled to the Northamptonshire regiment. His deputy, Ron Huff—also a member of the Regiment—almost certainly left the scene at the same time. After Huff and Callow’s departure a Londoner, Peter Farmer, took over.[65] It is possible that some disillusionment may have also set in at this time among blackshirts. WW, who also served in the forces, wrote to me: ‘Youthful, naïve and ignorant, I anticipated none of this. I imagined Hitler to be idealistic and beneficent. … I began to have doubts when Prague went under. As German troops poured into Poland, the scales fell from my eyes.’[66] Nonetheless, there were still recruits to be made and, in a letter to Action, a Northampton woman who had recently joined, wrote of having lost a husband and brother in the Great War and of her fears for her ‘young (and only) son’.[67]

 

Thus, although much weakened the blackshirts continued to operate until the war situation radically altered with the Nazi blitzkrieg in the West. Reflecting a country gripped by the fear of being undermined from within, under the title ‘Out with the Quislings’, Northampton Independent warned its readers of ‘peculiar people whose perverted instincts turn them against their own country’, who ‘when the time comes to garner the fruits of intrigue and espionage’ would ‘become the tools of invaders’.[68]

 

In the midst of this heated atmosphere the Government acted. Under regulation 18b of the Defence (General) Regulations persons adjudged to be a threat to security could be detained without trial and it was at this time that Drummond announced that, as he was unable to ‘fit’ himself ‘in any longer with life as it is lived in the average English community’, he was moving to the Isle of Man. The local press cryptically suggested that his ‘extreme views upon many aspects of modern British political, economic and industrial organisation’ lay behind this. Leslie Hamson, an associate and fellow member of the Link, recalled calling at Pitsford Hall and finding Drummond under interrogation by detectives. Things were serious enough for the Captain to take Hamson on one side to give him a thousand pounds in cash with the instruction to look after his family ‘if I go inside’.[69] Possibly Drummond’s self-exile may have been pressed on him as an alternative to internment.

 

However, despite news of the arrest between 23-27 May of many leading fascists including Mosley and Norah Elam, in Northampton Peter Farmer continued to be active.[70] He recalled that on 29 May a man visited District HQ and showed him a leaflet promoting the ‘peace views’ of Alexander Hancock, a shoe manufacturer who lived in Great Billing near Northampton. A pacifist after serving in the navy during the war, Hancock, although not holding with all aspects of BUF thinking, took its paper.[71] His leaflet called for those of a like mind to assemble in the ‘Market Square for a quarter of an hour and then walk away quietly’ as a protest.

 

Farmer agreed to help and that night leaflets were distributed to local factories. Some leaflets were also thrown at an army sentry who followed Farmer and his accomplice and, either that night or the following morning, the police raided the fascist HQ and made arrests. Also around this time police swooped on local members and questioned them and searched their homes for suspicious material, although no one was detained.[72] Initially released, Hancock and Farmer were re-arrested on instruction from the Director of Public Prosecutions in London and found guilty and sentenced to three months imprisonment for ‘endeavouring to cause a person in his Majesty’s service disaffection likely to lead to a breach of his duty’.[73] Like Drummond, Farmer spent much of the war on the Isle of Man, although in his case interned behind barbed wire.[74]

 

In this way the fascist struggle in Northampton came to an end. Despite all their efforts the BUF made little impact and left little trace. While never finding the conditions to prosper, GC and his fellow activists never rested in their attempts to press their cause, always hoping to emulate the success of the fascist movements on the Continent. Although equipped with a policy for Northampton, they never managed to penetrate a local body politic which rejected, indeed could scarcely understand, revolutionary politics of either left or right.

This article originally appeared in: Northamptonshire Past and Present, 53 (2000), 71-82.

The right of Philip M. Coupland to be identified as the author of this article has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

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Notes