British ex-servicemen fight against Fascism - at home!

In this blog I have discussed the Fascists’ activities in Britain in the 1930s, in particular their infamous battle against London’s East Enders in Cable St in 1936. And I would have expected that Fascism could not continue at home, once Britain, France and their allies declared war against Germany. Indeed most Fascist and pro-Nazi parties in Britain voluntarily closed down immediately at the outbreak of hostilities. But the government was taking no risk. Defence Regulation 18B, dated September 1939, allowed the authorities to detain without trial those believed to be working against the nation!

Yet for some reason, the Home Secretary seemed unprepared to gaol every active Fascist in the country. So Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists continued its so-called Peace Campaign activities, organising mass meetings throughout the Phoney War from Sep 1939 to Ap 1940. And Mrs Diana Mitford Mosley (and her sister Unity) met Hitler as often as possible, soon adopting the policies of the Nazi Party with warm enthusiasm.

enormous Fascist rally at Earl's Court, London 16th July 1939.

War against Germany was declared on 3rd September 1939

It was the collapse of Norway, France and the Low Countries in May 1940 that changed Britain's kid-glove handling of home-grown Fascists overnight. The Home Secretary became particularly concerned over the activities of the rabid Right Club. So in May 1940, Mosley and 747 other BU members were arrested and interned without charge. A number of Fascists were eventually moved to camps on the Isle of Man where they were housed in segregated camps, but Mosley and wife remained in Brixton prison.

Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley were released in November 1943, and spent the rest of the war under house arrest.

Graham Macklin* wanted to know what happened after Oswald Mosley was int­erned in 1940. Did his devoted followers keep the Sacred Flame of British fascism alight? Did his arrest kill off the movement? Was Mosley so humiliated after his Fascist friends in Germany lost WW2 that he never showed his face again? Yes, no and no. There was such a strong spiritual link between Mosley and his followers that gaol during the war years only made them more loyal.

Just after WW2 ended, Victoria and Alexandra Park in London and many other sites across the country were still POW camps for German soldiers. British soldiers and military nurses were flooding home, working class soldiers to bombed-out East London, Coventry, Liverpool, Bradford and Birmingham etc. Many of them had seen the horrors of Fascist regimes in Europe first hand and prayed they would never see Fascism again.

Yet Mosley had no trouble at all reforming his old party into the newly-named Union Movement. As in the 1930s, Mosley and his men whipped up a frenzy of race hatred, aimed at first against the local Jewish population and then against the local black popul­ation.

But this time there really was organised opposition to the British Fascists. Ex-servicemen, who had fought Fascism in Europe and survived, were being demobilised back in Britain by late 1945. They who had sacrificed so much were horrified to see the Fascist movement at home regrow in strength. Worse still, the police seemed to step aside and let the Fascists terrorise ordinary British citizens.

Morris Beckman's book The 43 Group: Untold Story of Their Fight Against Fascism.
first published in 1993.

In early 1946, 38 recently demobilised men and 5 women met at Maccabi House in Hampstead and founded The 43 Group. These people tracked the activities of the Fascist groups and turned up at every anti-Semitic mass rally, defended families against attacks on Jewish homes & shops, infiltrated Fascist groups and attacked the Fascists in street fighting. The 43 Group had no weapons other than knives.

Soon hundreds of non-Jewish soldiers, who had fought to bravely against the Fascist powers during the war, joined The 43 Group to fight Fascism at home. At first just in London, by 1947 they had a thousand members and opened branches in Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham. Vidal Sassoon (1928–2012), not yet famous for his hairdressing, was active in The 43 Group in his local East End of London. Working against the blackshirt thugs who marched through his neighbourhood, Sassoon was still a teenager when was stomped on in pitched battles.

Morris Beckman (born 1921) told how they would attend a Fascist rally and wait for a signal to storm the speaker’s platform. They were, after all, ex-soldiers and were used to tight discipline. Beckman estimated that two thirds of Britain's post-war Fascist rallies were closed down in chaos.

Despite being occasionally successful, especially in Dalston Hackney in 1947, Mosley’s Union Movement no longer had carte blanche to do wherever they wanted. Their defeat at the hands of The 43 Group taught Mosley that there was little prospect of success in Britain. British Fascism might not have to disappear, but it would have to change.

Macklin showed how the old nationalism of the British Union of Fascists gave way to the concept of a European Fascist super-state, a global force connecting right wing Europe and the USA. The work was based on racial values drawn from Europe’s vast, white-ruled, colonial empires. The sacred flame of the new Fascism, explained in Mosley's 1947 book The Alternative, became more involved in stopping black immigration from the old British Empire countries.

So Mosley took his message to Europe. German POWs in Britain were invited to attend British Fascist meetings; on their return to Germany, they agreed to promote Mosley’s books in translation. In June 1949, Mosley went to Spain, where his sponsor was General Franco‘s brother-in-law. Mosley’s books were then translated into Spanish. By 1950, Mosley was in Italy, as a guest of the Fascist Party there. Mosley’s endless funds and personal support were given to bolster Fascist groups in many countries. Germany, Spain and Italy!

Once the Mosley Fascists disbanded in Britain in 1950, The 43 Group disbanded as well. The soldiers were tired - years of fighting against Fascism in Europe and then 5 long years of fighting against Fascism in Britain.

Oswald Mosley decided in 1951 to leave England forever, so he moved first to Ireland and then later to France. He was very busy writing his biographical books until he died December 1980 in France aged 84. His papers are housed at the University of Birmingham Special Collections.

Why did the British government not protect its own citizens from the Fascist thugs from 1946 on? Why do we know far more about Mosley’s values than The 43 Group’s values? Have the opponents to British Fascism been air-brushed out of history? I have cited the following books in this debate and recommend reading them:

Beckman Morris The 43 Group: Untold Story of Their Fight Against Fascism, Centerprise Publications, 1993.

*Macklin, G Very Deeply Dyed in Black: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Resurrection of British Fascism After 1945, International Library of Political Studies, 2007.

"The 43 Group" in The History Girls