The Rest Is History - 372. The Birth of British Fascism

Episode Date: September 24, 2023

The cultural roots of fascism swirled around Britain at the turn of the 20th century, as medieval nostalgia, an obsession with hygiene, anti-semitism, and concern for the environment grew in the wake of modern development. In the 1920s, Britain faced similarly tough conditions to the European countries where fascism did take hold; major economic difficulties, unpopular governments, and intense fears of Bolshevism. But did fascism ever really find an audience in Britain? Listen to the first episode of our series on British fascism, as Tom and Dominic discuss fascism in Britain before the emergence of Oswald Mosley… *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to ther seat and beyond it. Rich and poor, young and old, sat shoulder to shoulder, awaiting the message of this new gospel. Some were there from curiosity, some from interest, some from fear. But around and about were thousands, young, eager, and virile, who were there from devotion to their leader, his policy, and the movement. Pride of race, love of country, loyalty, hope,

all these and more were reflected in their ardent faces and shining eyes. For the first time, I realized this was no passing whim no temporary excitement what then was it what was it dominic that was lieutenant colonel sir thomas moore who was the conservative mp for air and he had been in the albert hall in april 19, watching the rally of the British Union of Fascists. Yes. So Tom, our sister podcast, The Rest is Politics, often plays at the Albert Hall, doesn't it? They're very similar enterprises, actually. And you'd enjoy that. Well, yes, but before we get on to kind of venue-based jokes, we should probably wait to see whether the British Union of Fascists ever appeared in venues that we have appeared in. That's true. So Sir Thomas More, I'll tell you

this, he was the MP for Air. Having written that, he was the MP for Air until 1964. So he was the MP for Air when the Beatles were visiting the United States. Yeah, but what's even more extraordinary, so the leader of the British Union of Fascists, spoiler alert, was Sir Oswald Mosley. And he was popping up on British chat shows in the 70s. And his wife, Lady Mosley, former Diana Mitford, she was popping up on interviews as well. And as late as 1989, she was the guest on Desert Island Discs, where one of her eight discs was a whiter shade of pale. Oh, no. Do you think she did that deliberately?

It's a jaw dropping. One of the most shocking radio. I listened to it last night because we will be coming to the Mitford's in due course. We certainly will. Because we're going to be doing four episodes on British fascism. Yeah. So, Dominic, very much your choice. It was my choice.

Yeah. Thanks for that. So people can interpret that. You love a, very much your choice. It was my choice. It was my choice. Yeah. Thanks for that. So people can interpret that. You love a British fascist. Anyway, they want. But it's such an interesting topic, isn't it? It is an interesting topic. I mean, we will be talking about the whole sweep of British fascism through to the end

of the Second World War and with the, in the persona of, you know, Diana Mosley, who you were listening to on Desert Island Dicks, beyond. I mean, she is still saying some quite disturbing things in the 1980s. Hitler was so charming. Oh, God. He had such beautiful hands. She doesn't say that Hitler had beautiful hands, does she? Beautiful hands, the most charming manners.

Oh, no. Oh, God. Right. Well, you've got that to look forward to, Tom's enormous repertoire of Mitford impersonations. Do you know what her luxury item was? Her luxury item? A soft pillow.

A soft pillow, was that? A soft pillow. It wasn't like a mouser or something. No, it wasn't. It was a soft pillow. That's good. Okay. I mean, that's actually a pretty, that's not a fascist luxury necessarily, I wouldn't have

said. Very useful for killing princes at the tower. Oh, very good. Right. Now, some listeners may think British fascism, oxymoron, because fascism could never have worked in Britain. And I think people who believe that would say, oh, British people have an inherent love of liberty, a reverence of parliamentary democracy. They have a distrust of uniforms, going back to the long standing distrust of standing armies in Britain. And of course, the famous sense of humor, which means that we would always laugh at paramilitaries and authoritarian groups. And I think, I'm sure you'd agree with me, Tom, that that's rubbish, don't you? Do you think that's rubbish? So the definitive book on this is Harar for the Black Shirts by Martin Pugh.

And Harar for the Black Shirts was obviously a notorious headline in the Daily Mail, which did back the black shirts for what, a six month period, a year? I can't remember. Yeah. And he makes the case that fascism was much more of a threat to Britain than most people have thought. I wasn't entirely convinced by it, I have to say. I do think that British parliamentary democracy, it may not be that

people in Britain have a kind of inherent devotion to parliamentary democracy, but I think the frameworks of it, the way that it is very hard for people in the first past the post system for kind of radical fringes to seize control of the commanding heights. I do think that it made it exceedingly unlikely that fascists would ever come to power in Britain. I think it's unlikely that it would come to power, but I don't think fascism is inherently un-British. Because actually, some of the roots of fascism that we talked about, for example, in our podcast about the rise of the Nazis, were British. I mean, one of the authors that Hitler most admired, Houston Stuart Chamberlain, was British and was writing in part,

his anti-Semitism was driven in part by his hatred of Benjamin Disraeli and the liberals. And the fact that Disraeli was Jewish? Of course. A rootless cosmopolitan? Was that the kind of part of the vibe? Exactly. Exactly. I think that is part of the vibe, as you put it.

But also, I think a lot of those ingredients that we talked about in the Nazis episode one that we did earlier in the year, they were there in Britain in the late Victorian Edwardian period in just as pronounced, although slightly different ways, to how they were in Germany. I mean, so many of the elements of fascism in Germany and Italy are present in Britain. So fascism as a generational revolt against the old, fascism as an expression of contempt for the failures of parliamentary democracy, fascism as a reaction to the First World War. There are a couple of elements in Britain that I think are distinctive.

So one is that British fascism very, very strongly emphasises women. And that's something that we'll come to when we do the podcast about the Mitfords, because of course they're so prominent in the movement and in the popular memory of the movement. I think the other fascinating thing about Britain specifically is the way in which British fascism could have been perceived at various points as being, this will sound so weird to many listeners, as being progressive, as being anti-capitalist, as appealing to people who

would otherwise have voted Labour. Of course, Oswald Mosley comes to fascism from the Labour Party. Yes. I mean, you slightly see that in the way that the far right in Europe at the moment, so Marine Le Pen I guess would be the obvious example, who has... I know that she has repudiated much that her father represented, but obviously comes from that French fascist tradition. Those are the wellsprings of her party, but at the same time is clearly appealing to people on the left. So there is absolutely that strand. But another strand

within British fascism, and it's definitely there in German fascism as well, but I think it's particularly strong in British fascism, is environmentalism. A concern with, I suppose, the blood, but also the soil of Britain. It's wildlife, it's trees, a sense that there should properly be a communion with the very essence of the natural world. And that's also, I think, a bit unsettling. You were reminding me that that much-loved children's book, Tarka the Otter, one of those classic sort of fictions of the English countryside for children, the author of that, Henry Williamson,

who had fought in the First World War, he, of course, flirted with fascism, didn't he? He did. Yes, absolutely. He did. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about what I mean about the roots of fascism. So as you say, Martin Pugh in his book, Hurrah for the Black Shirts, he lists a whole series of things that have analogues in Germany that in Germany look like really important ingredients of the rise

of Nazism. Of course, in Britain, they don't lead quite to the same place, so we don't notice them so much. So we've forgotten about them. So we forget, for example, that Britain before the First World War was in many ways not a very democratic country, that only six out of 10 men could vote and no women at all could vote. So in other words, the idea that there's this inbuilt reverence for democracy, I don't think quite stands up. That Britain, like Germany, has this deep sense of kind of medieval nostalgia. This looking back to the vanished past, particularly the Middle Ages, Arthurian fantasies, all of those things that were floating around in Hitler's imagination, they are floating around in

the imagination of loads of people in Britain. The most obvious example who we've done a podcast about who is not by any means a fascist and hates fascism is J.R.R. Tolkien. So in his backward lookingness, he's actually anti-capitalist, isn't he? He doesn't like development. He loves the countryside. He hates the modern world. He's not an enormous fan of modern mass democracy. So this is one of the things that also, it does seem to me, a fascist dog that doesn't bark in the night is that Tolkien is very into the idea of sacred monarchy, swords, holy swords, all this kind of thing, that with just a nudge of the gearstick could come to seem fascist because Himmler, of course, is obsessed with all this stuff, all this Arthurian mythology, the Wagnerian things. But Britain, which is the home of

King Arthur, actually never really seems to have taken a fascist form, that obsession with Arthurian myth. But there were good reasons for that, Tom. I mean, I don't want to jump ahead too much, but I think there are two very obvious reasons why that dog doesn't bark. And they are contingent. They are that Britain doesn't lose the First World War. Of course, we'll be coming to that. And that the Great Depression is nowhere near as intense in Britain as it is in most other Western countries. And perhaps that it already has a monarchy as well. Maybe. So there's something we talked about with the rise of the Nazis was the fascination with hygiene or with race. I mean, that is absolutely present in Britain. If you look at periodicals

and books from the 1890s and 1900s, they're full of stuff about racial rejuvenation, degeneracy. We've lost a sense of organic national unity, cosmopolitan liberalism has undermined the virility of the race. I mean, that guy used the word virility, didn't he, describing the meeting in the Albert Hall, absolute obsession with that. And that links to the other element, which is antisemitism. There was quite a lot of antisemitism in Britain before the First World War. We'll come onto this later when we talk about the Battle of Cable Street in the East End, the confrontation between fascists and anti-fascists in the 1930s. But if you open a book by Hilaire Belloc or G.K. Chesterton, written in the 1900s, there's loads of stuff there about the cosmopolitan Jews, about Jews in Russia.

So Chesterton, a Catholicolic apologist is i think strikingly anti-semitic but at the same time he is very strong against eugenics which yeah most people in britain are george bernard shaw famously obsessed by yes and so mary stopes who becomes uh one of the kind of the groundbreaking leading figures in favor of that i mean she becomes a big fan of Hitler. She's sending him volumes of terrible poetry and all kinds of things. Well, maybe you should read out some of, when you do the Mitfords, you could read out some of Mary Stokes' poetry. We love a bad poem on the rest of history.

We do, we do. So there's a general culture of all this kind of stuff. Actually, John Carey, great literary critic in his book, The Intellectuals and the Matters, which was basically a massive dissection of the Bloomsbury group and their kind of predecessors. The most Sandbrook book not written by Dominic Sandbrook ever written. He's very good on the ways in which their kind of cultural imagination feels very proto-fascist. I mean, that doesn't necessarily, of course, mean they are fascists, but it just means that fascism, the ideas of fascism are not as alien and unfamiliar and unsettling as people might think. Well, the cooking ingredients are

there, but you still need people to make the meal. You do, exactly. Well, you need the right circumstances. And actually all of this is turbocharged by war, not the Great War actually, but the Boer War. So this is the really interesting thing, that actually all of these things get a massive boost from Britain's poor performance at the beginning of the Boer War, 1890-1902. There's a particular week where the British lose three battles to the Boers called the Black Week. And after that, there's this massive upsurge of columns and sort of self-flagellating diatribes about national degeneracy. That basically, we have become an industrialized urban people, and we have lost our national

spirit, our virility, and we need this new spirit. And there's this huge cult in the early 1900s of what's called national efficiency. So basically, loads of politicians sign up to it. There's a National Service League set up under Lord Roberts, sponsored by Roger Kipling, that has 100,000 members that are calling for national service, compulsory national service, so that young men, all these deracinated, pallid young men of the cities, will be turned into fighting men for Britain. And obviously, the most famous example, Tom, is the Boy Scouts. So the Boy Scouts

set up 1908. It's inspired by the Mafeking Cadet Corps that Sir Robert Baden-Powell had seen in the Boer War. And so this, I think that, oh,

British people don't like people marching around in uniforms. I mean, it's nonsense. There are lots of people marching around in uniforms in the 1900s.

We talked about this in our episodes on the build-up to the First World War in the context of our Irish episodes. Yes, exactly. Kind of paramilitary bodies in Ireland and starting to cross to Great Britain. Yeah, they were absolutely. The rifle clubs, the Ulster volunteers, as Dan Jackson was telling us

in one of our Irish episodes, there are volunteers in places like Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle, and so on, who say that if home rule is forced upon the counties of Ulster, then they will be justified in taking up arms against what they see as an illegitimate liberal government. And Dominic, what is the role of sport in this, the cult of manliness, boxing? It's absolutely part of it, that um to me british fascism given the abysmal electoral performance of british fascists it's fascinating how much this subject has opened up this window into early 20th century britain but it's also that there are so many links with other subjects that we've covered on the rest is history so i was thinking about king solomon's minds h rider

haggard and the fiction of empire and this obsession with manliness, with proving yourself. And obviously, sports completely reflects that, doesn't it? The idea that, I mean, sport is conceived, organized sport is conceived to get the workers of the factories and the cities out and breathing the fresh air and being virile young men again, all that sort of stuff. I mean, that's not necessarily sinister. I mean, people are still arguing for that today. The idea that participation in sport is necessarily going to lead to fascism.

Agreed. Just like, Tom, I completely agree with you. Just like loving the countryside, disliking cities, being a Boy Scout, all of these other things, none of them are in themselves at all sinister i mean they're perfectly reasonable you know you might not agree with them necessarily you might not want to be a boy scout you might love cities but to have those views is not a sign that you are you know you're not on the road that leads to auschwitz or something but as you said there are lots of interesting ingredients around so the idea that your enemies, your political opponents are illegitimate, are subversive, are part of an enemy within. Just to remind people who listen to the Ireland episodes, in 1912, the leader of the Conservatives,

Andrew Bonallor, described the Liberal government as a revolutionary committee which is seized by fraud upon despotic power. And he says, in giving home rule to Ireland, they are destroying the British constitution. People will be justified in doing home rule to Ireland, they are destroying the British constitution. People will be justified in doing anything to resist them, including force. So in other words, that could be, in different circumstances, the beginning of a story that would have very bloody consequences in the interwar years. Of course, it doesn't, or not as bloody as it could have been, because Britain wins the First World War. But in different circumstances, I think there would have been a very different kind of outcome. Don't you think the ingredients are there?

I do. We've absolutely agreed that it's defeat in the First World War that is the precondition for what happens in Germany. And so conversely, you could argue the fact that Britain isn't defeated in the First World War mean that these ingredients, by large just remain the ingredients. Just before we come to the First World War and its aftermath, a question about British attitudes to foreigners. So obviously, Britain is ruling an enormous empire, and the justification for British rule, particularly of non-white populations, is often couched in overtly racist terms. So that presumably is a part of the mix. And also when people talk about degeneracy, in the 30s, what they're talking about there are Jews. It's Jews by and large who are being accused of a degenerate element within the fabric. They're

seen as bacilli, as noxious microbes within the body politic of Germany. Is there anything of that going on in Britain beforehand? Yes. I mean, we'll come to this later on in episode three when we talk about Battle of Cable Street in the East End. But yes, you're absolutely right. There is an Aliens Act passed in, I think, 1904, 1905. I can't remember the exact date, to try and limit the immigration of Eastern European Jews who are fleeing the pogroms in the Russian Empire. It's very localized. So in London, particularly in Leeds, in Manchester,

the places where large numbers of Eastern European Jews settle, refugees where they settle, there are people trying to stir it up. There are people complaining. You know, all the language that is so familiar, people talking about mobs and swarms and using, as you say, all that medicalized language about Basile and all that stuff. So that is so familiar. People talking about mobs and swarms and using, as you say, all that medicalized language about bacilli and all that stuff. So that is all there. It's not nationwide because most places are untouched by this debate, but it is absolutely there in the

kind of national conversation. So yes. There's also, in the buildup to the First World War, there's an anxiety about foreign spies, isn't there? So there's a very funny line in Martin Pugh's Hurrah for the Black Shirts, again, actually about the Daily Mail. The press magnate Alfred Harmsworth invited readers of the Daily Mail to report sightings of suspicious foreigners

and advertised likely invasion routes, which invariably passed through towns where the mail circulation required a boost. Well, I mean, we've talked about that before. So that's about, I can't remember how he pronounced his name. I think it's William Le Quex. He was this guy who specialized in invasion literature. And his books, as you say, were serialized in the mail and they were predicting German

invasions and stuff. It was being stopped at Dorking. Exactly. Of course, you you know to increase circulation to get people excited the places that were german battles and things were places where there'd be lots of readers because obviously they would they would you know surbiton is under attack from german forces but yes there's this sort of i think there's the fear of enemies without and enemies within and the enemies within fear you're absolutely right that this is a dog that doesn't bark.

And I think largely because Britain wins the First World War. But I think it's remarkable how even though Britain wins the First World War, the dog doesn't go away. So during the First World War, there was loads of stuff about enemies within. But now it's chiefly Germans, isn't it? This is why the House of Saxe-Coburg changes its name to the House of Windsor, for instance. But it's not just Germans. It's German, especially towards the end of the war, it becomes what people see as this unholy nexus of Germans, Jews, Bolsheviks, obviously after the Russian Revolution, and sort of fellow travellers.

I don't necessarily want to say the British left, because that makes it sound like you're talking about people within the Labour Party. there's a famous thing called the black book that is compiled by a guy called harold spencer who's an anti-semite who's been thrown out of army intelligence and he compiles this book in 1917 which is a list of 47 000 people that's a lot of including cabinet ministers cabinet ministers wives senior liberal politicians and so on. And it says these people are all, and this is the word they use, these people are all perverts and they have been blackmailed by the Germans or they're working with the Germans.

And there's this huge conspiracy. Germans are in it. The worldwide jury is in it. The Bolsheviks are in it. So after 1917, that anxiety must get turbocharged. Absolutely turbocharged. It's often blamed on the Jews, isn't it? Oh, yes.

The Russian Revolution by conservatives in Britain. Absolutely, it is. Yeah, so I think a fascinating thing is how in the early 1920s, by the way, so much of this story is going to be about the 20s. If you've got an idea in your head about the roaring 20s, cocktail bars, Great Gatsby, all that stuff, put it aside, that is not Great Gatsby, all that stuff, put it aside. That is not the case in Britain at all. Britain is a very, very divided, unhappy,

war-scarred place in the 20s, very high unemployment, the economy miserable, politics in a complete and utter mess. The middle classes are very upset about taxes. So you mentioned Alfred Harmsworth earlier on. So his brother, Lord Rothermere, he sets up the Anti-Waste League in the 1920s, which is a really good example of how a lot of people on the right of British politics think that the Conservatives have sold out by getting into bed with Lloyd George. They're all part of this kind of parliamentary conspiracy to debauch the currency and fleece the middle classes. Just to explain that for people, Lloyd George, liberal war prime minister,

and then after the war, basically gets into bed with the conservatives as a way of keeping himself in power. Yes, and selling peerages. So that's another thing that inflames people. They say, these people are actually, these crooks are basically flogging off peerages, places in the House of Lords, to their rich friends, while we are crippled with the burden of taxes. Strikes have gone through the roof, which they have. So a massive increase in strikes in 1919, 1920, which of course further fuels middle class, sort of small C conservative fears of Bolshevism. And all of this becomes embedded in the British imagination and focused on the idea of a Jewish

conspiracy. So in 1920, 1921, the pages of newspapers like the Times are full of reports, particularly about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which, as you will know, Tom, is a kind of a racist, anti-Semitic fantasy that has been floating around for 15, 20 years or so. I mean, people were swapping copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion at their Versailles Peace Conference. But which is broadly accepted to be a fake by the 20s? It is accepted to be a fake. So in 1921, the Times runs three articles to say the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fake. But by giving it so much airtime, they fuel this idea that there is this sort of conspiracy that takes in American financiers.

Communists. Communists, sort of liberal politicians, trade union militants, Jews in grimy boarding houses. I'll tell you who's all over this. Yeah. It's John Buckham. I was about to say John Buckham. Author of The 39 Steps and Green Mantle and, you know, thrilling spy stories. But this idea that there are kind of Jewish financiers behind everything evil that's happening and that simultaneously American plutocrats and Soviet Bolsheviks are in cahoots against

the British Empire. I mean, it's the motivating idea that powers his thrillers. It is. And not just John Buck and Tom, Agatha Christie. Read an Agatha Christie from the 1920s. And there's lots of references to Jewish financiers, to the sort of puppet masters who are controlling strikes in Stockport, but also stuff going on in the newly established Soviet Union, that there's links to Wall Street. I mean, all of this sort of, all these paranoid fantasies. So while that's happening, there is one other factor that you list in the notes that

you sent me for this. Fears of women voters, flappers, lesbians. And Martin Pugh lists some excellent headlines from the mail in the 20s. Men outnumbered everywhere. Why socialists want votes for flappers. Stop the flapper vote folly. Yes. So that's another part as well, I guess. It's absolutely part. And by the way, you quoted in the Daily Mail, I mean, you could have quoted any number of newspapers from the early 1920s. So the Daily Express. The Daily Express says, Britain is full of women with short hair,

skirts no longer than kilts, narrow hips and insignificant breasts. This change to a more neutral type can only be accomplished at the expense of the integrity of a woman's sexual organs. So this sort of weird thing where there's a link in people's minds between women having been given the vote

and the advent of flappers, flapper kind of fashion, and that there's this sort of tide of lesbianism that is sweeping through Britain that is somehow, at the back of all these kind of conspiracy theorist minds, they think this is somehow connected with the great Bolshevik Jewish conspiracy and with the high taxes, the strikes and things that are afflicting British politics in the 1920s. Go on, Tom. Yeah. One thinks of F.A. Mackiston MP and his view on lesbians, they are an evil which is capable of sapping the highest and the best in civilization. So he wouldn't be welcome on Pride March.

He certainly wouldn't. You quoted Lieutenant Colonel Sir Thomas Moore. There's another Tory MP who's a Lieutenant Colonel called Moore Brabazon. there and the final one is the death sentence well so there's a lot of very pungent views floating around in the 1920s okay then in 1922 as people look abroad they suddenly see the emergence of a character who will be i would argue the single greatest inspiration to the british fascist movement and we'll find out who that is, Tom, after the break. See you then. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello, welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are looking at British fascism and trying to explore the question of whether britain might ever have turned fascist and dominic we were talking about the idea that the ingredients are there but of course you you know you need an oven and you need a recipe and

you need someone to make the meal i feel this this metaphor is spiraling this metaphor was very earlier hold with me so in the early 1920s looking abroad the british see a master chef emerge in italy don't they they do so that's mussolini so 1922 is when mussolini he famously he doesn't march on rome he lets his supporters march on rome for him while he stays behind but it's already been agreed hadn't it it had been agreed exactly so essentially it's it's about showboating it's about control of the narrative, all that kind of thing. I mean, Italy, of course, is another democracy. With a king. With a king. And there are lots of people in Britain who, when Mussolini comes to power... So first of all, it's really important to emphasise with all of this. They

don't know what we know. They don't know where the story will lead. And of course, Mussolini is violent. They know that Mussolini is violent. They know that Mussolini is violent. But I mean, there are loads of people who admire the communists in the Soviet Union, and they're very violent. I mean, there are millions of people dying in the Russian Civil War. So when people, I think, read the stories about Mussolini's violence, about trade unionists being forced to drink castor oil or being beaten up or indeed killed, they may well think, oh gosh, shocking. But I don't think they think this is barbarism

beyond the scope of the human imagination. Also, there is a war going on in Ireland. And there have been paramilitary organisations in Ulster and in the rest of Ireland that have made the running and have torn a chunk out of the United Kingdom. So it's not like the idea of political violence is something alien to the British way of life. No, no, no. Of course, that's a very good point, actually. One thing we haven't really talked about is how a key part of fascism is paramilitary politics, but there's been lots of paramilitary politics in Britain in the last 20 years or so. The Ulster Volunteers, the paramilitary groups before the First World War, the Black and Tan, the use of the Black and Tan auxiliaries in Ireland. There are hundreds of thousands of demobilized officers, soldiers who miss the First World

War, who feel bored, listless in the climate of the 1920s. This is the plot of the Bulldog Drum and Thrillers that I used to love when I was a boy, which are very, very anti-Semitic, very anti-Bolshevik, very paranoid. And they're about Bulldog Drummond as a guy who is drifting around, looking for a purpose. I mean, obviously this is Mussolini's appeal in Italy.

I think there are lots of people in Britain who think Mussolini is a tremendously impressive man who has actually given Italy a direction. He's anti-communist, all this stuff. So Sir Douglas Haig- The commander in the First World War. Commander in the First World War. Great celebrity in Britain. Much loved celebrity in Britain in the 1920s. He said of Mussolini, what a man. He really is exceptional. And that's actually typical. Go on, Tom. You're itching to say something. Well, I just wanted to put the counterpoint though,

that the British regard the Italians as being somewhat comical and hysterical and prone to jumping up and down and waving their arms about. And in that sense, Mussolini does conform to that very negative stereotype. And fascism, the name that he gives to his movement, is a foreign movement. So is there also a sense that one of the reasons why fascism perhaps doesn't take off in Britain is that it's not a British invention? And the British are reluctant to adopt something that has been taken up by a comical people like the Italians as they see them. I think that's actually a very astute point. And it's one reason why Oswald Mosley in the 1930s was actually quite keen to downplay in public the associations with italian so they initially when he set up his movements in the

1930s they use the fasces as a symbol and they ditch it for the kind of lightning bolt and he's always saying actually there's nothing alien about our ideas our ideas are true british political values so the emphasis on the king, which obviously is, I mean, there's a king in Italy, but they never talk about scrapping the monarchy. They always say the king will actually have more power in a fascist Britain because they want to reassure people. It's very Aragorn. Very Aragorn. Yes, very Aragorn. Of course, it's really important, two things. One,

Mussolini comes to power at the point when conservative unease about lloyd george is at its height so lloyd george is presiding over this coalition with a lot of the tory bigwigs and lots of grassroots tories think this is a massive stitch up by corrupt politicians which is obviously the idea that parliament has become corrupted and corroded and and all of you know it's just a talking shop of people feathering their own nest i I mean, you hear that all the time now, don't you? You do. And you hear conservatives now say, we've had a conservative government for however many years,

but it's not real conservatism. Which is exactly, exactly, Tom. I was thinking that a lot, actually, when I was reading about this, that there are parallels for now. There are lots of conservatives in the early 1920s who say, we've been in power for yonks, but actually Lloyd George obviously isn't a conservative. And our corrupt leaders colluding with his selling appearances.

Giving the vote to all these flappers. Yeah, giving the vote to all these flappers to keep themselves in office. Whereas the true voice of the British patriot is being silenced. So there's that. And there's also the idea that Mussolini is a bulwark against communism. You cannot overstate the anxiety on the British right about Bolshevism in the 1920s. So you quoted from the Mail earlier on. The Mail is typical of lots of papers in Britain in the 1920s that look at Mussolini and they say, you know, a hard man, no doubt,

but a really important shield against the advance of Bolshism. I mean, Winston Churchill famously, Churchill goes to Rome in 1927 and he says, I could not help being charmed by Signor Mussolini's gentle and simple bearing and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers. And then he says to Mussolini, if I'd been an Italian, I'm sure that I should have been wholeheartedly with you from start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and perversions of Leninism. And there are loads of people who you can sort of see why Churchill would say that, Tom, because if you have that late Victorian imperial mindset, you quite like fighting. You like virility and all that stuff. Just to absolutely emphasise throughout this series that people did not know where it was

going to go. Today, fascism is an absolute bogey word because it is freighted with the blood of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust and countless million others killed in war and persecution. But at this point in the 1920s, that is all well in the future. It's really difficult, I think, when you have to try and think back into the shoes of people who don't know what's happening. I think, actually, this is really, really difficult because the very word fascism just seemed, you know, it smoulders with sulphur. I agree. But presumably, it doesn't have that inherent

sulfurous quality. Well, remember that Mussolini at that point is not actually especially antisemitic. He's certainly no more antisemitic than many of the British people who admire him. And of course, he is violent. And of course, we look at Mussolini now and we say, what a disgusting man he was. Violent, rapacious, sexually predatory, bombastic, all these kinds of things. In the 1920s, the world has a lot of dictators. And if you'd said to people in Britain, where is the evil located? Which is the most blood-soaked, most frightening, threatening regime? I think a large proportion of them, not all of them, of course, but a large proportion would have said, unerringly, it's in Moscow.

And anything that's fighting that, maybe by quite dirty methods, but anything that's fighting that, we should stand with them. I mean, there would have been a load of people who would have said that about Mussolini. Loads of the conservative middle classes, obviously lots of people in the aristocracy and so on. And so you start to get people who want to emulate Mussolini, and that's when you start to get the first British, genuine British fascists. Right. So you mentioned the aristocracy, and we talked about the Mitfords right at the start of the show. Notoriously, Jessica Mitford becomes a Stalinist and Unity Mitford becomes a Nazi. There is a sense in which there is an appeal on the extremes,

isn't there? Yet in Britain, the centre does hold. It does hold. Obviously, there are communists in Britain. There's an emergent fascist movement in Britain as well. The 20s are a terrible decade marked by strikes and poverty and all kinds of things. But it doesn't go fascist. It doesn't go communist. Parliamentary democracy does hold. I think always the risk with doing an episode focused on fascism is that too big a concentration on it might lead us to over-egg it. Don't you think? I do think so.

You could say, Tom, and lots of people have been calling for this podcast for a long time, so you could say that actually this whole series on British fascism is actually a disguised series about Stanley Baldwin. Yeah. So Stanley Baldwin, who becomes Conservative leader, who's the Prime Minister three times in the interwar years, who is the man who brings down Lloyd George in 1922. He makes a speech at the Carlton Club to the Tories and says, Lloyd George is corrupt.

He's a dynamic force who will crush us, who will destroy us if we don't get rid of him. Baldwin, who sort of presents himself as the soul of the British middle classes and of kind of middle England, he actually, his emollient political persona, the way in which he's prepared actually to make space for the newly emerging Labour Party and then actually to work with people from the Labour Party in the 1930s. You could argue that the defeat of fascism is a victory for a very unglamorous, mundane, suburban Baldwinism. And to some extent, Ramsay MacDonald, the leader of the Labour Party. So the centre does hold, as you say, and it holds in part because Britain actually has some, I think, contrary to the stereotype of the interwar years, Britain actually has some quite good politicians

who know what the public want, who are building houses, who are doing their best to keep the economy on track, even though the economy is a complete and utter mess. And of course, Britain hasn't been humiliated in the First World War. It's come out of the First World War financially much weaker, but it actually has more colonies than it started with. So people don't feel the burning resentment and victimhood that they did in Germany. Having said all that, on the fringes, fascism is taking hold in Britain. I mean, it's absolutely a minority pursuit, right? But it is taking root. So to go back to what you were saying about how hard it is to think ourselves back into this

moment, when you read about the very first fascist groups, it's actually very difficult to see them as terribly sinister because they're just absolutely comical and eccentric. So the very first one, the British Fascisti, was founded in May 1923 by somebody who, in such a 1920s way, she was called the Man Woman. Her name was Rota Lintorn Orman. So many of the people in this story, by the way, have military connections. So she's the granddaughter of Field Marshal Sir John Linton Simmons. Before the First World War, Rota Lintorn Orman had been absolutely passionate about the Scouts she'd joined

the Girl Scouts in 1909 very early and she'd founded and led her own troop in Bournemouth come on girls yeah

South Coast by the way she liked that I don't imagine her having that deeper voice to be honest like Mrs Trunchbull but she was born in 1895 Tom

so she was a teenager at this point so she wouldn't have spoken like that. I think she's posh. Come on, girls. Yes, I think she's posher. Then in the First World War, she serves a tremendous distinction.

She works in Serbia with the Scottish Women's Hospital Corps. She's a commandant in the British Red Cross Motor School. There are lots of women, by the way, who love the First World War, who really get stuck in. It gives them opportunities, a chance to do things that in normal life they wouldn't be able to do. She loves wearing military dress. She loves just hanging around with women, doing stuff, not being high bound by the Edwardian conventions. She comes back from the war. Like so many people, she thinks nothing is going to be as good again. She goes off to a dairy farm in

Somerset. This is an amazing story. One day, she's weeding her garden when she has a revelation, Tom, like a divine revelation. I know you love a divine revelation. I don't think this is divine, but she has a revelation about the terrible threat being posed to Britain by Bolsheviks, socialists, and foreigners. How does this revelation come? I think she's just weeding. Weeding is quite boring. Well, but a weeding is you're cleaning your garden. You're getting rid of- There's a metaphor there, isn't there? Yeah, there is a metaphor there.

So she thinks, and she's obviously read about Masui, and she thinks, do you know what? I'll do it. No one else has done it. I'll do it. And so she sets up this movement, the British Fashisti. She gets another ex-military person who's a man, Brigadier General Robert Blakeney. He'd been the general manager of the Egyptian State Railway. And he comes in, he says, I'll run the organization for you, Mr. Linda Norman. He says, this is basically the grown-up version of the Boy Scout movement. He says, like the Scouts, we uphold the same lofty ideals

of brotherhood, service, and duty. And the people that pile in, I say pile in, both of the people that pile in, all 10 of them, you know, both of the people that pile in. All 10 of them. They are military people or landed gentry or aristocracy. So they are Brigadier General Sir Ormond Winter, Brigadier General Erskine Tulloch, Colonel Sir Charles Byrne MP, Admiral John Armstrong. Is there a sense that often these are people who've come back from lengthy service, maybe in the war, or maybe in the colonies, and they come back to Britain and they find that it's full of flappers and lesbians.

Yes, there is absolutely that sense, Tom. That, again, you mentioned John Buchan. Country's going to the dogs. How often does that happen at the beginning of a John Buchan book in the 1920s? Yes, coming back from Natal. Yeah. I've been out on the veldt. I sat there in London.

Big game hunting. I'm feeling very seedy i looked at the young men walking none of them had shot a you know an elephant into the eye yeah yeah they're all communists and jews yeah that is exactly limp-wristed exactly that is floating around in the popular culture of the 20s and all these people i mean the earl of glasgow some of these people you just think they've been made up. Earl Temple of Stowe, the Marquess of Aylesbury, Lord de Clifford. So a lot of aristocrats. A lot of aristocrats. And I suppose the other thing, Dominic, that's happening with the aristocracy

is that with Lloyd George, who has famously, what was it, dukes cost more than dreadnoughts, that the primordial hold on the land and power that the hereditary aristocracy had always had is now under attack. Absolutely right. If you're a duke, your life as you see it, perceive it, is in ruins. You can't get good servants anymore. Your house is crippled by taxes. Papa died five years ago and the death duties are unbelievable. You're paying high income tax. You don't even believe in income tax at all. You've lost your house in Ireland where you used to go fishing. Your daughter has become a lesbian flapper.

All of this kind of stuff. It's all very familiar. Yeah, and these people just think we've lost our political power forever because the Tory party, which is meant to be our party, is led by this bloody awful middle-class Baldwin. yeah baldwin who's practically a socialist so all these people are drawn to the to the british fascisti there's also people who just like fighting so the most famous example of that is a man who we would definitely be talking about a fair bit who is a man called william joyce so he will be best known to people as lord horhor so lord horhor was this guy who was broadcasting

german propaganda to britain during the second world war and ended up spoiler alert being executed for it he was nicknamed lord horhor because of the sort of strangulated faux contrived aristocratic way that he spoke but william Joyce was actually born in Ireland to a kind of a unionist, loyalist family. He moved to England with his family after Britain got out of what becomes ultimately the Republic of Ireland. He had been associated with the Black and Tans. He comes to Dulwich in South London. He feels that he's been cheated. Well, Dulwich, notorious breeding ground of very right-wing people. Nigel Farage went to school.

Nigel Farage. As did P.G. Woodhouse, Tom. And P.G. Woodhouse, of course. And Raymond Chandler. Really? Did Raymond Chandler go to Dulwich? Or did he teach at Dulwich? He went to Dulwich College.

Did he? He was there with P.G. Woodhouse, yeah. Do you know, I didn't know that. Yeah. An amazing Dulwich College fact. That is a very good fact. I love a public school fact, Tom, as you know. I know you do so uh william joyce he joins the british fascisti and he likes going

and fighting communists in the streets so breaking up communist meetings and all this kind of thing and the british fascisti they end up calling themselves the british fascists because they realize they call themselves the fascist foreign doesn't it does sound a little bit foreign yeah they hold meetings in in birmingham in hy Park, and they will draw up to 5,000 people. So not huge, but not nothing. What's interesting is that even at this point, they're a particular stronghold. So it won't surprise anybody given how many retired colonels we've been impersonating. And the South Coast, South Coast Resorts is a good place. The cities, London, Birmingham, and so on. What's also interesting is there's a big overlap.

Glasgow as well, I gather. Glasgow, yeah. Glasgow has this sectarian politics, doesn't it? It also has a sizable professional middle class who might vote conservative. There is a big overlap between British fascists, actually not just the British fascisti, but also going right into the 1930s, there is an absolute overlap with the conservatives. So a lot of these people would also be members of the Conservative Party. Indeed, the British fascisti tell their members at elections, they don't stand for election. They say at elections, you should vote conservative and you should always be loyal to king and country.

And there are Tory MPs like this guy, a Birmingham MP. Another MP, he's an MP until 1950 called Patrick Hannan. He is on the fascist grand council. He hosts British fascist dinners in Birmingham. He books House of Commons rooms for fascist meetings. And he sees no conflict between being a regular conservative MP and being a member of the British fascists. So it's a bit like being a Freemason or something. Yeah, I think that's pretty much right. Now we're going to run out of time. So just on these very early fascists, what's really interesting is that it was set up by a woman. And I think women are, from the very beginning, very prominent in the fascist movement. So like all sort of fringe

extremist movements, it splits quite quickly. So by 1924, we're saying it'll be going a year, by 1924, there's another group called the National Fascisti. They are more militant. They think of the British Fascist sellouts. Maybe they're part of the conspiracy. The National Fascisti only have 60 members, but one of them, Tom, is somebody I know you're very keen to talk about on the podcast. You're very keen to come back to her, so we won't give away all her story.

She is a woman called Valerie Arkell-Smith, who at various points trades as Sir Victor Barker, Colonel Barker, and Captain Barker. A great enthusiast for boxing. Yeah. And she likes the name Barker, I think it's fair to say. So she is a character, it's fair to say. She's from the Channel Islands. She ends up marrying a woman called Elfrida, who believes that she's a man. Valerie Arkel-Smith tells her, my name is Victor Barker, and I've been very badly injured in the Great War. War wound. Very like Downton Abbey. So if you spot any unexpected physical characteristics, this is because of my injuries in the First World War. They get married and they live in Brighton. And at some point in 1926, Valerie Arkell Smith, aka Sir Victor Barker, she sees a letter addressed to somebody called Barker.

And it's actually not to her. And it's from the National Fascisti. Thank you for inquiring about membership. You are member 6423 or whatever. And she thinks, oh, I'll join. So she ends up joining the National Fashisti. So Dominic, I think that that is an amazing teaser for an episode because, spoiler alert, Colonel Barker ends up as a fairground attraction in Blackpool alongside the vicar of Stuky

who ends up being eaten by a lion. So we're going to do an episode on Britain's two top fairground attractions. So he, she will be part of that. All right, Tom. so we're going to do an episode on Britain's two top fairground attractions so he she will be part of that alright Tom you're fascinated by this story but also

because we're running out of time I want you to give a chance to talk about this guy who has something to do with camels you put down camels

so one mother Spencer group that is formed is called the Imperial Fascist League that was founded in 1928 are you familiar

with them Tom Tom? No. Great. So there's a guy called Arnold Spencer Lease. He's a vet. He's an experienced vet. He's an expert on camels. He'd been investigating camel diseases before the First World War. He is the world expert on the health of camels. His book, his masterwork was published the same year he set up the Imperial Fascist League. And his masterwork, it's a better read, I think it's fair to say, than Mein Kampf. It's called A Treatise on the One-Humped Camel in Health and Disease. Oh, is it still used?

I mean, he was absolutely the top man in the world on one-humped camels. Oh, but he was also a fascist. But he was also a fascist. He had been reading all of this anti-Semitic stuff in the 1910s, 1920s. He believed that British aristocracy was being corrupted by Jews because they'd married Jewish heiresses. I'll give you an example of that. And this also is relating back to some episodes that we've just been doing, namely the Oscar Wilde trial, in which the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery, appeared. And he had married Hannah Rothschild, a fabulously wealthy heiress and of course Jewish. And their son, Lord Dalmany, when he was born, Rosebery apparently said,

oh, he looks Jewish and hated him from that point on. But this didn't stop Lord Dalmany from becoming both an MP and captain of Surrey County Cricket Club and leading them to victory in the championship. And it was Lord Dalmany who got the Prince of Wales to agree that they could have the ostrich feathers, which were the symbol of the Prince of Wales, which we talked about in our Hundred Years War episode. So everything connects to serve as the emblem for Surrey County Cricket Club. But I mentioned that because this was an example of the kind of the paranoia around the aristocracy. Yeah. That ancient British titles,

that they were marrying Jewish heiresses and therefore the aristocracy was being corrupted was the point of view of the... Arnold Lees would not have enjoyed watching Surrey Cricket Club then, Tom. It's fair to say. No. Buried himself in his book on the cameras.

But if you were a Surrey fan, absolutely you would, as I am. So, Rafa Lord Dalmany. So the imperial fasc fascists they dress in very extravagant uniforms they have a black shirt black shirt tom that's going to anticipate something to come they have khaki breeches and they wear putties they wear a beret and a cummerbund which i think is i think no movement would ever come to power in britain wearing berets and cummerbunds personally well they see you have your PG Woodhouse, their comic. Yes, I do. I mean, they're sinister because they're very anti-Semitic,

the imperial fascist elite, but there are not many of them. And I think it's fair to say, you get to the end of the 1920s, the general strike has happened, all kinds of kind of political and economic turbulence, but they have got absolutely nowhere. The system is too resilient. And also they lack what all successful fascist movements have, which is a really convincing, charismatic, articulate, plausible front man. So the camel vet is not going to cut it. Nor is Sir Victor Barker with his war wound or her war wound. But then, Tom, at the beginning of the 1930s, they find an extremely plausible front man. In some degree, you might say the perfect front man with a war record, with aristocratic links, a brilliant speaker, a man who comes, would you believe, from the Labour Party.

And that is Sir Oswald Mosley. And we'll tell that story next time. Well, that's brilliant, Dominic. What a cliffhanger. And if you simply can't bear to wait for that and the other two episodes that we'll be recording after that, so Mitford's, Cable Street, all kinds of things to come, then you can listen to them straight away by joining the Rest Is History Club. But if you don't want to do that then that's fine they will be coming out on thursday and then next week so we will see you either immediately if you're a member of the rest is history club or on thursday thank you dominic and thank you all for listening bye-bye

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