Dan Snow's History Hit - The Gay Men Who Took on Hitler

Episode Date: November 29, 2020

Chris Bryant joined me on the podcast to tell the story of the gay British politicians who were among the very first to warn Britain about the danger of Hitler’s rise to power and the most vocal in demanding an end to the government’s policy of appeasement.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I've got an elected official on the podcast, an elected politician. Yes, Chris Bryant, Member of Parliament for Rwanda. He's a passionate advocate for gay rights, both in the modern world and in the past. He made a barnstorming speech in 2016 calling for a group of gay MPs from the 1930s to be granted pardons for now overturned sexual offence charges. And he was the first gay MP to celebrate his civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster. A trailblazer and a historian too, because he's now written the book of said group of MPs, The Glamour Boys. He's talking about the Glamour Boys. These are the homosexual men who would go to Germany because it was the best place in the world

to be gay in the 1920s and early 1930s. A pretty short list of places where it was good to be gay, but Berlin and Germany was on it. And as a result, they were kind of an early warning system. They got to know their friends, their colleagues in Germany. They saw how they were suffering under early Nazi rule. These MPs played a crucial part in stiffening the sinews, speaking with Winston Churchill against appeasement in the 1930s and preparing Britain to take on Hitler and the fascist menace. This story's been suppressed. It's been intentionally suppressed. Chris Bryant has unearthed it. It was great talking to him. He's an absolute ledge.

If you want to watch TV shows, documentaries about the rise of Hitler, you can head over to historyhit.tv. We just produced a new one actually interviewing some of the world's best scholars of nazi germany about the rise of hitler you go over there because it's black friday weekend everybody you get the astonishing discount get a historyhit.tv use the code black friday all lowercase all one word and you get a month for free and then you get 80% off your first four months ridiculous Ridiculous. Completely mad. That means you're going to get something five months of History Hit TV for less than the cost of a pint of beer. But in the meantime everyone before you do any of that here is Chris Bryant.

Enjoy. Chris thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me. This is a wonderful story in the build-up to the Second World War. What alerted you to this story? So a few years ago, I was writing a history of Parliament called Parliament, the Biography, rather grand. And I came across this chap called Jack McNamara. He was the MP for Chelmsford 1935 to 1944 when he died.

And it was said that he was a Nazi supporter. His researcher was Guy Burgess, who subsequently, of course, was revealed to be a Soviet spy. He went to Dachau to celebrate the remilitarisation of the Rhine with his lover, the Anglican-married Archdeacon Herbert Sharp. And they went on sex tours in Paris and Berlin. Now, that just seemed fundamentally fascinating. I didn't think there'd be enough facts. You know what it's like as a historian, you're looking for actual facts, things written down on a piece of paper or,

you know, in newspapers or whatever, that you'd be able to tie it down on. And I thought I wouldn't find enough because obviously being homosexual in the 1930s was very strictly prohibited by law. You could be sent to prison for two years with whipping and hard labour. And people were, including Nancy Astor's son, Bobby Gould Shaw, very handsome man, incidentally. And I just worried that there wouldn't be enough fact out there. So I'd have to write a fictional version of it. But I slowly discovered more people and more information. Ronnie Cartland, Barbara Cartland's younger brother,

who thought that Barbara Cartland had a younger brother who was, you know, a sitting member of parliament and that she was actually a really fascinating figure in the 1930s. And slowly I came across more and more information and I realised this is a story that has to be told because we've just missed a key strand in how it was that we came to go to war in 1939. Well, I'm surprised you started with the pro-Nazi homosexuals because I was expecting you to tell me a great heroic list of anti-Nazi homosexuals. This is the thing about Jack McNamara. He was

never pro-Nazi. And in fact, lots of historians have got this wrong because they said that he was a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship, which was a pro-Nazi organisation launched with Hitler's specific support. But he was never a member of it. I've been through the membership list. Oddly enough, Guy Burgess and Kim Philby both were, but Jack McNamara wasn't. So I hope I'm restoring his reputation. But the truth was lots of wealthy men in the 1930s in the UK at the beginning of the 1930s liked to go to Germany because, frankly, you could have sex with impunity because the law, theoretically, paragraph 175 of the German Penal Code said homosexuality was wrong. But the Prussian government, which was led by the Social Democrats, refused to implement it. So you had a disflourishing of gay bars, venues and culture. And so lots of men, you know, Noel Coward, Ivan Avello, Bob Boothby, Philip Sassoon, and the people that I've written about in this book went to Germany because it was fun. But then

by 1934, Hitler killed all the gay Nazis in the Night of the Long Knives, Ernst Röhm and Edmund Heinz and people like that. And this bunch of people then became the most ferocious opponents of Hitler in the UK because they had friends who'd been arrested, who'd been shot at, who'd been sent off to concentration camps. They kept on campaigning against appeasement in the UK. Neville Chamberlain hated them because he believed that by his own personal charm he could somehow persuade Hitler to restrain himself.

Chamberlain set up this black ops organisation under a shady figure called Sir Joseph Ball and had their phones tapped, had them followed, spied on their private meetings that they held in each other's houses and at various dinner venues. And then when it came to the war, these young men were threatened with deselection. They were called warmongers, but they signed up, enlisted in the war, and several of them were then killed in action, including Jack McNamara. So these gay men had their finger on the pulse for what was going on in Germany more than most because the atmosphere there was so progressive

in the late 20s and early 30s. Yes, they loved going there, and they were intrigued by early Nazism because there were senior gay figures in the Nazi movement, despite the Nazi Party's ostensible campaign against homosexuality because it was a stain on the Aryan race and all of that kind of stuff. But some of these people then knew, you know, they'd met, they'd sat down at a table with either Hitler or Edmund Heinz and others,

and they knew the reality of the situation when it came. And interestingly for me, quite a few of them were very closely aligned Edmund Hines and others, and they knew the reality of the situation when it came. And interestingly for me, quite a few of them were very closely aligned with Jewish MPs in the UK as well. Robert Bernays, who was actually a national liberal MP, but on the government side of the House, where Neville Chamberlain had a majority of 225, Robert Bernays was accused by Hitler's kind of sidekick of being a Jewish swine, and they refused to do any business with him. Victor Cazalet was a big campaigner for a Jewish homeland. One beautiful story I came across, which other historians should have found before, to be honest,

there are three letters in Eton College Library to Victor Cazalet from a guy called Gottfried von Cram, who was a famous world superstar tennis player from Germany, who refused to join the Nazi party. Gottfried, as it happens, was married but gay, and his lover was Jewish. And in 1937, he was arrested and sent to prison for nine months. And the letters show that Victor Casazalet helped get his lover out of Germany to Portugal initially and then to Palestine. These letters have been there for ages and they've actually been referred to by other people, but the whole sexuality side of the story completely left to one side. So it's like pulling on a thread. You were discovering

more and more homosexual links the more you were looking into these characters? Absolutely. Barbara Cartland wrote a really sort of sweet biography of her brother, Ronnie Cartland, after he died. And it's intriguing that she included a lot of the tributes that were made to him after he died by other politicians. But there's one tribute which she carries every single sentence from, apart from one, which is where the other member of parliament refers to Ronnie as being flamboyant. And that's because it was a code word for homosexual in those days, just as glamour attributed to a man was a kind of insinuendo, not quite an insinuation, not quite an innuendo, but an insinuendo, and why it was so effective as an attack by Neville Chamberlain. But I went to Companies House and I found Robert Bernays' sons

because they were both directors of companies and they gave me all his papers to have a look through, including a handwritten diary from 1930, personal accounts of all the debates in the House of Commons which had never been used before and add new colour to those stories that we've heard many times. Through Ancestry.co.uk, I managed to track down Jack McNamara's lover, Herbert Sharpe's great-grandchildren, and they showed me his family album,

including photos of them on the beach at Vannsee, visiting Germany in the 1930s, and so on and so on. You argue in the book that these guys actually helped to shape Britain's opinions of Germany. They helped to prepare the way to make it easier for Chamberlain eventually to declare war. Each of them had their own personal journey. I mean, Rob Bernays and Bob Boothby, right back in 1932, were already warning about Hitler very, very early on. I mean, quite striking how early, much earlier than Churchill, really. Jack McNamara, it wasn't until 1936 when he visited Dachau and saw the violence in the prison there. By this stage, there were homosexuals in there,

as well as political prisoners and Jews. It was not until that moment that he changed. For Victor Caslet, it was even later still, it was going to Austria and having Jews in Austria begging him to take them back to the UK, even if it was to work as his gardener, even if they were really wealthy. So each of them had their own course. But the truth was that a group started to coalesce in Parliament around Anthony Eden and Winston Churchill. And the numbers varied. It's not that it was a fixed membership list or anything like that, but it's somewhere between 17 that were called insurgents at one point or 40, 45 MPs, all on the government side. And a significant proportion of them were gay.

And the gay Glamour Boys were the most coherent in the group because they met for dinner two or three times a week. They went off to little house parties at the weekend. They loved Boulesin, a great restaurant in Mayfair, because it was run by a gay couple as well. It's sad, in a way, that Eden and Churchill get kind of all the credit, whereas I think that without this bunch of people, you wouldn't have had the driving force to get to that moment,

first of all, where it was inevitable that we would go to war. And secondly, it was inevitable that Churchill should become prime minister. What really shocked me was, you know, you think of Anthony Eden, very meticulous, very well dressed, all of that kind of stuff. There were some doubts people expressed, and perhaps completely erroneously, about his sexuality. But more importantly, when he resigned as Foreign Secretary in 1938, everybody he turned to for support was gay or bisexual. Everybody. Gay, of course, is not a word that would have meant anything to any of these people. They wouldn't have called themselves homosexual, though the word was around. Queer sometimes was used, and it's interesting that

sometimes newspapers, if they wanted to insinuateuate something would refer to the queer antics of the Tory campaign for instance which was said about Jack McNamara and when Jack died the Chelmsford Chronicle his local newspaper the headline of a tribute by the local vicar was he he loved men. There was this terribly careful line you had to draw because I tell the story of Colonel Daly. He was not only cashiered out of the army, he was given seven years in prison with hard labour. In the end, that was reduced to five years. But the social ostracism that came with it was phenomenal.

Bobby Gould Shaw, Nancy Astor's son, when he was arrested, he was given an ultimatum, leave the country or face prosecution and he decided on this occasion to face prosecution and he went to prison for two years. It was like a house of correction, it was very unpleasant and the number of cases went up and up every year during the 1930s and reached a peak in the 1950s, of course. Lastly, can I ask about your career? You're a politician now, even though you're very young,

you've been there for quite a long time. You started as a very young man. How have you noticed the attitude in the chamber, in society, change over your career towards your homosexuality? It's undoubtedly changed, of course. I mean, in my lifetime, when I was born, it was illegal to engage in any kind of homosexual acts, even in private. It was only 1967 that there was partial decriminalisation. Part of the reason that I feel so passionately about this story is because these men would never have been able to enjoy the freedom that I enjoy today. freedom that I enjoy today. And it's awfully easy for people to think, oh, well, once you've gained those freedoms, you can never have them taken away. But you just look at Germany in 1930. You know, you could go to the sodomites ball on New Year's Eve and be kissed by everybody under the sun. You know, you could go to bars where you weren't sure whether the woman who was serving you was a Nazi officer or in drag or a woman.

Everything was possible. And six years later, they were all being carted off to prisons and concentration camps. And I remember once going to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. And at the end, of course, there's a big chart. And in the the formal words it says so many people were killed in the holocaust as jews so many roma so many communists and then somebody's handwritten and some so many homosexual men and we still don't even know a number for the number of homosexual men who were killed in the concentration camps so i just want to say to anybody who think that thinks that we've won these things forever we haven haven't. We really, really haven't. So we have to constantly retell our own history again and again and again. There's a lovely story about

a young lad from the Rhondda, my constituency, called Thomas, which is in the acknowledgements at the end of the book. He was arrested in London and sent to prison for six months. The only evidence they had was that he was carrying a powder puff in his pocket, which he said was his mother's, but he was given six months. And amazingly to me, the Member of Parliament for the Rwanda, the Labour Member of Parliament for the Rwanda then, was asked to give character witness for him. And despite being a Baptist deacon in the church, he did. He stood by the young lad. And even more beautifully,

about six months after he comes out of prison, his mother is reported in the local papers as saying he's been given his job back on the railways, and everybody is really happy with the way he's doing. So the shame seemed to dissipate. And I just love that. Interesting stuff. Well, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast talking about all this. What is the book called? Tell everyone. It's called The Glamour Boys, the secret story of the rebels who fought for Britain to defeat Hitler. Well, from one of Parliament's current glamour boys. Thank you very much indeed for coming on. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks, Dan. I hope you enjoyed the podcast.

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