Today, Oswald Mosley is at best a forgotten figure. But in the 1920s and 1930s he was considered the most promising politician in Britain. At the age of twenty-two, he was elected to the House of Commons as the youngest MP in the Conservative ranks. He married the daughter of the then Foreign Secretary and became part of the British establishment. The guest of honour at his wedding was George V, King of England. Shortly afterwards, he defected to Labour and was re-elected to Parliament. It was not long before he fell out with them and left the party. He was still one of the most recognisable faces in the country, but he never again crossed the threshold of Parliament, having become too enthusiastic about Mussolini’s Italian experiment.
He founded the British Union of Fascists and ended up on the political periphery. His second wedding took place in secret, at Joseph Goebbels’ Berlin residence, with Adolf Hitler as guest of honour. In just a few years, Oswald Mosley had transformed himself from a popular politician into an extremist whom Britons today prefer not to remember.
Sickle Cellar from the Lost World
Oswald Ernald Mosley was born on 16 November 1896 in the prestigious Mayfair neighbourhood, not far from London’s famous Hyde Park. The Mosleys were noblemen and landed gentry, representatives of an old England that was by then already losing pace with modern, bourgeois England. He spent his childhood on a vast family estate in the West Midlands, where feudal relations were virtually the rule among the people and farming was the only economic activity.
Tom, as Oswald was affectionately called by his family, wrote in his old age that he grew up in a “lost world” where time stood still. As the Mosley family was one of the wealthiest in that part of the country, this “lost world” was also a world of privilege and comfort.
He has visited the best schools and shared desks with future ministers, businessmen and scientists. More than his academic achievements, he was remembered by his classmates for his rebellious attitude. He had no friends and kept mostly to himself. He was considered a freak who dared not be bullied by older pupils because he was an excellent boxer, always ready for a fight. At the age of seventeen he enrolled at the military academy in Sandhurst, but was soon expelled for indiscipline.
Just a few months later, World War I broke out and Mosley was conscripted into the army. He served in the cavalry, far away from the bloody battlefields of Ireland. Eager to try his hand at combat, he volunteered for the Royal Flying Corps, the brainchild of the British Army Air Corps, from which the famous RAF emerged in 1918.
He wanted to become a pilot, but it was not for him. His career was over after just a few months when he crashed during a daring manoeuvre in training and suffered an ankle injury that left him with a lifelong limp. A close brush with death did not dispel his romantic notions of war, however, and he subsequently spent several months on the Western Front, where the British were saving Europe from the marching Germans.
The experience changed him forever, as he felt the tragedy of war first-hand. He also realised that in the trenches, all people are the same. When bullets are whizzing overhead, noble titles, past merit or social status no longer matter. Those few months were enough for him to abandon his adolescent militarism and decide to dedicate his life to ensuring that the massacre would never happen again. He saw his mission in politics.
Two loves
He spent the rest of the war at his desk in various ministries, where he had time to catch up on what he had missed. Young Tom had no interest in politics before that. He read biographies of famous Britons and learned how the country worked. Coming from an aristocratic family, he was able to move in the upper echelons of British society and slowly began to make the friendships that would later open the door to politics. A charismatic young man with a wartime background and a pompous tongue, he was soon invited by all the political parties to join their ranks. He decided to join the Conservatives.
His chance to prove himself came in December 1918, just a month after the end of the First World War, when Britain held a general election. At the age of twenty-two, he was elected to the House of Commons as the youngest MP of that convocation, and the Conservatives who formed the government were convinced that they had lured a future political star into their midst.
Oswald soon made a name for himself on the benches. His speeches were energetic, persuasive and articulate. Even Labour’s opponents recognised that he was a master of the spoken word and a born politician. “Listening to Mosley’s speeches is like an English lesson. His rejoinders – subtle but venomous – are an art form of their own”, the Westminster Gazette wrote of him.
He also stood out in Parliament because of his appearance, as a young man among a group of mostly grey old men. Tall and handsome, with dark hair and neatly groomed moustaches, he looked more like a theatre actor than a Member of Parliament. All these qualities came in handy in his private life, where he devoted most of his time to his other great love – women.
He was considered an irredeemable seducer, unstoppable even by a wedding ring on the hand of a potential bride. Despite the fact that his romantic adventures were no secret and his political career did not suffer for it, he decided in 1920 to stop chasing women. Or so he said. That was when he married Cynthia Curzon, daughter of the British Foreign Secretary and an Indian Viceroy.
Curzon senior was at first not enthusiastic about the marriage, knowing his son-in-law’s reputation, and only softened when he was assured that Mosley would now only be involved in politics and that he was financially secure. Mosley had more than enough pounds in his account, but the monogamous life was not for him. Oswald and Cynthia’s wedding was the social event of the year and took place at St James’s Palace, the residence of the English royal couple, who even honoured the newlyweds with their presence. Oswald Mosley had a bright future ahead of him.
Left turn
Among his colleagues in Parliament, he had a reputation for being a principled but stubborn and arrogant man. His political convictions lay well to the left of centre and, apart from his origins and his party book, he had little in common with his Conservative colleagues. His disagreement with the government’s aggressive policy towards Ireland, where a civil war was raging, led him to defect to the opposition and become an independent before the end of his term of office.
Such transfers were not unheard of, but Mosley still took a big risk with his decision. He sacrificed a comfortable seat in Parliament for the sake of principle. At the next elections, in 1922 and 1923, which were again won by the Tories, he stood as an independent candidate and got into Parliament. In British politics, dominated by the three traditional parties – Tory, Labour and Liberal – this was a very good success.
Mosley clearly enjoyed some support among the electorate, but he was aware that as an independent politician he had no chance of coming to power. So he decided to join the more ideologically aligned Labour Party, which in January 1924 defeated the hitherto untouchable Tories and formed a left-wing government for the first time in British history.
The former Tory with left-wing leanings has been accused from both sides of the political spectrum. New party comrades resented his aristocratic origins and fat wallet, while old colleagues saw him as an opportunist and a traitor. His father, with whom he had broken off all contact at an early age, accused him of preaching socialism while living like a lord.
He was right. Mosley lived in a luxury flat in central London, always dressed in the latest fashions, but also fought for workers’ rights.
By the late 1920s, he was already a well-known and established politician, a member of the Labour Executive and a personal friend of Ramsey Macdonald, the party’s chairman. Some journalists believed that he might one day even lead the country. Mosley himself, an extremely ambitious man, had no doubt that one day he would cross the threshold of Buckingham Palace and receive a mandate from the King to form a government. But the 1929 election showed that he had vastly overestimated his political weight.
Labour won, and Mosley won his way into Parliament, but instead of a serious ministerial seat, the party leadership gave him the peripheral post of administrator of the Duchy of Lancaster, the royal landed estate.
Mosley felt cheated. He was a very charismatic politician, but he had a big flaw. One party comrade described him as “an immensely arrogant man with a firm belief that he was born to lead the country”. Clement Attlee, the post-war British Labour Prime Minister, said that he behaved towards his colleagues “like a feudal lord who takes the piss out of his subjects who have failed to pass the floor”.
On your
The final break with Labour came in 1930, when the party clashed over how to pull the country out of the Depression.Britain was in dire economic straits after the Wall Street crash. Millions of people were out of work and the future of a once mighty empire was uncertain.
Mosley proposed an ambitious reform programme to the party leadership, known as the Mosley Memorandum, which he saw as the solution to protectionism and a greater role for the state in the economy. He proposed investing heavily in public works programmes, stimulating domestic consumption and imposing higher import duties. He wanted to ring-fence the British economy from the global market. He believed that the country could become economically self-sufficient.
Just a few years later, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt successfully used some similar approaches to combat the economic crisis, but in a British empire built on international trade and economic expansion, such thinking was blasphemous.
The Memorandum was soundly rejected and Mosley resigned from the Labour Party in May 1930. His decision was greeted with unconcealed enthusiasm by most of his party comrades. He was accused of being arrogant and of being unwilling to submit to common goals, but many were in fact relieved to be rid of a rival whose charisma was second to none. Mosley, who had made the implementation of the Memorandum his life’s work, was angry, but he did not give up. In March 1931, he founded a new party, and gave it its name – the New Party.
This move was to position himself as someone who transcended traditional party divisions and as a representative of a new Britain, fighting against the generation of old men who were the main culprits of the First World War and all the troubles that followed. His aim was simple – he wanted to end unemployment and restart the British economy.
He was joined by a few disappointed MPs from both Labour and Tory parties. He believed that the country needed a breath of fresh air and that his party could be a balance on the scales in Parliament. But circumstances conspired against him. After the October 1931 election, there was a sobering reprieve.
Turn to the right
The elections were early and the New Party was not ready for them. Moreover, Mosley, the face of the party and the biggest vote generator, was bedridden with pneumonia during the campaign. The New Party did not win a single seat and was even behind the Communists in terms of votes. Oswald Mosley, who had resented first the Tories and then Labour, had dangerously closed the door to the British political establishment.
Nevertheless, he was convinced that he had not yet said the last word. He believed that, thanks to incompetent politicians, the economic crisis would soon escalate into a social catastrophe that would have to be tackled with even more radical approaches.
Just a few months after the electoral debacle, he set off on a journey through fascist Italy in search of inspiration. The host of the visit was Benito Mussolini, “a fascinating man who asked many interesting questions”. Mosley was impressed by the way the Duce had dealt with the economic crisis. He put the country back in order in a few years and restored pride to the Italian people.
Cynthia warned her husband against turning to the right and reminded him of the plight of the workers under the fascist regime, but Mosley was no longer concerned about the fate of the workers or the unemployed, for whom he had stood up for just a few months before. He was increasingly convinced that the global economic crisis was a reflection of the decadence of society as a whole and that radical change was needed. The old men in Westminster were leading the country to ruin through their indecision.
He returned to his homeland convinced that Mussolini’s social experiment was the right response to the challenges of modernity. He dissolved the New Party, founded the British Union of Fascists on 1 October 1932, and thus closed the door on the British political establishment for good.
There had been a few fascist parties registered in Britain before, but none of them had any noteworthy political weight. At most, fascism was seen by serious British politicians and the public as an interesting but alien political phenomenon that could never flourish on the Island.
Mussolini was able to become dictator because Italy’s young parliamentary democracy was weak and immature. But in Britain, with its centuries-old tradition of parliamentarianism, such a thing cannot happen. Even Mosley was under no illusions about this, and even Mussolini advised him not to try “any military tricks” in London.
The unhappy triangle
At 36, he has already changed three parties and gone from Conservative to Socialist and back again. All this time, he has remained faithful to his other great love – women. His marriage to Cynthia, who was also his political partner, suffered from this from the start. In high society, adultery was acceptable, provided that everyone involved abided by certain unwritten rules. They had to be discreet during their intimate encounters and, above all, they were not allowed to separate.
Mosley was very free-thinking in this respect, ignoring bourgeois notions of morality and sexuality. Not only was he not discreet, he liked to brag about his exploits in public. He once confided to a friend that he had told his wife about all his mistresses, but then corrected himself: “Well, yes. All except her stepmother and sister.” The incorrigible seducer could not get out of his own skin.
Despite his busy schedule, he always found time for his second love. It was during this period, when he was building the country’s largest fascist party, that he fell in love with Diana Mitford, a married twenty-one-year-old aristocrat. This in itself was not scandalous, but the two adulterers flouted the unwritten rules and socialised in public, living in the same street. Oswald was still fond of Cynthia, who was used to his fence-jumping, and had no intention of divorcing her.
The scandal only erupted when Diana decided to take this outrageous step. The love triangle, which had brought public condemnation on all involved, fell apart when Cynthia died in May 1933 after a long illness. Oswald and Diana married only three years later, but his disregard for social conventions left a big stain on his reputation.
Like Cynthia in the past, Diana fell in love not only with Oswald the man, but also with Oswald the politician. Unlike her chosen one, who was a fan of Mussolini, she was a supporter of the German version of fascism. She visited Germany several times, attended Nazi rallies there and even socialised with Hitler. Her sister was a personal friend of the firer.
Mosley’s unsavoury family connections caused Mosley much political damage later, but in 1933 Hitler was not yet the greatest threat to peace in Europe, but merely an unbalanced screamer in a brown shirt.
Loader factory
The inaugural meeting of the British Union of Fascists was attended by only 32 people, but membership grew rapidly on account of Mosley’s visibility. In addition, the party had a number of influential and wealthy sympathisers who recognised in Mosley a man of a new age. These included disillusioned Tories, military officers and aristocrats.
Most were slightly more orthodox Conservatives, but some were outright fascists, such as the media magnate Lord Rothermere, who was probably the biggest Hitler admirer on the Island. His Daily Mail was the only serious newspaper to support Mosley’s party, but like disillusioned Tories, officers and aristocrats, it eventually turned its back on Mosley, realising that he had no chance of coming to power.
The party’s programme was very radical for the British context. Mosley argued that the British political system was designed to “turn a man into a loader in the shortest possible time” and that parliamentarism was stuck in the 19th century. Fascism, on the other hand, does not suffer from loading and celebrates efficiency. Every British government faces the same problem – instead of governing, it has to navigate the pitfalls of parliamentarism. The opposition, the media and public opinion are holding back the change the country desperately needs. In fascism, however, the government has enough powers that it does not have to deal with such nonsense.
Of course, he did not win many political allies with such views, because British parliamentarism was anything but a load factory. Britain was not Italy; for the British, democracy was something sacred and – familiar. Mosley, too, was an important cog in the British political system not so long ago, but through no fault of his own he ended up on the far edge of it. Now he is attacking that same system from there. The battle was lost, but there was no going back. His rhetoric was becoming more and more aggressive and the methods of the British Union of Fascists more and more violent.
Hooray for the Blackshirts!
Following the Italian example, Mosley introduced a black uniform for his followers. “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” wrote the Daily Mail on 19 January 1934. As there were frequent fights at fascist rallies between Mosley’s supporters and his opponents, especially communists, he also set up the Fascist Defence Force, the paramilitary wing of the party, following Hitler’s example. The British Fascist Alliance became a refuge for angry young men and all sorts of misfits who saw politics as street fighting.
Resorting to violence was a major strategic mistake. Mosley lost the sympathy of potential moderate voters because of the black-shirted thugs. Moreover, he became unnecessarily embroiled in an ideological war with the Communists which quickly escalated into a physical showdown on the streets of English cities. The Communists, whom Mosley considered Britain’s greatest enemies, were in reality an even more marginal political force than the fascists, and the street battles with them robbed the party of credibility in the eyes of liberal Britons.
Mosley never disclosed how many members his party had. British intelligence agencies, which have been tracking Mosley and his associates since 1932, estimate that at their peak there were around 50,000. By comparison, there were ten times fewer Communists in the same period, and the Labour Party had around 400,000 members at the time. The British Union of Fascists certainly had a not insignificant voter base at one time, and also many influential sympathisers, but it lost both very quickly because of the violent methods of its members and the inflammatory rhetoric of Mosley.
Poor advertising
British fascists squandered all their support on 7 June 1934, when they held a huge rally in London’s Olympia Conference Hall. Among the audience were Conservative and Labour MPs who had come to watch their political rival, and many journalists who were expecting sensationalist headlines. Communists, including the famous British writer Aldous Huxley, also snuck into the hall.
The atmosphere in the hall was tense. The vast majority of the visitors were fascists, but Mosley’s opponents were also mixed in. When the leader took the stage and raised his hand in a fascist salute, chaos erupted. The provocateurs tried to interrupt his speech by shouting, but the blackshirts silenced them with fists and kicks. Similar scenes ensued at every interruption. Even women were beaten by the Blackshirts in front of the shouting journalists and Members of Parliament.
“If someone had told me an hour ago that I would stand up for communist provocateurs, I would have told them they were crazy,” said one Tory. Mosley was prepared to be provoked, the rally was just an excuse for violence to show the strength of his party. But the photographs of bloodied people being dragged around the hall by black-shirted men were very bad publicity for the British Union of Fascists.
This was the beginning of the end for Oswald Mosley. After the events in Olympia, the Daily Mail turned the tide and started criticising the Blackshirts. And the intelligence services saw a significant drop in membership. Even moderate fascists, let alone other Britons, did not support physical violence against political opponents. Mosley not only lost many supporters that day, he gained many new opponents.
Fascist rallies were increasingly accompanied by protests, where people who had until recently been apolitical joined the Communists. Another of Mosley’s strategic mistakes – the drive against the Jews – contributed to this.
Battle of Cable Street
In the 1930s, anti-Semitism was present in virtually every European country. Mosley, too, could be said to have suffered from a milder form of anti-Semitism at a young age, and his condition only worsened over the years. In 1933, after Hitler came to power, the disease entered an acute phase. Jews, like Communists, were a dangerous alien in the British social fabric and thus a convenient target. Mosley, of course, was not calling for the physical extermination of the Jews, but was trying to use anti-Semitism to whip up his followers and win new followers who, like him, believed that the Jews were running the world.
But Mosley’s assessment of the level of Jew-hatred among ordinary Britons is poor. Blackshirts marched through Jewish neighbourhoods shouting anti-Jewish slogans, but everywhere they met resistance from anti-fascists. Close encounters between ideological opponents often ended in a fight.
The most significant incident took place on 4 October 1936, when Mosley announced a large rally in the East End, a London neighbourhood with a large Jewish community. Anti-fascists demanded that the police ban the rally, but the police refused, saying that the black-shirts were not breaking any law. At the time, more than 100,000 protesters gathered on the streets of the East End to prevent the fascist parade. They included communists, bearded Jews, Irish dock workers and leftists of all stripes.
Before the rally had even started, clashes broke out between protesters and the police, who were trying to prevent the black-shirts from legally expressing their democratic will. After an hour, the situation began to spiral out of control and the leading men at Scotland Yard had to give way. They banned the rally and escorted the fascists out of the East End. More than 150 protesters were arrested and 175 people were injured.
In the Battle of Cable Street, as the East End media called the incident, Mosley was defeated, even though the police were on his side. Shortly afterwards, the government passed a law banning the wearing of “political uniforms” in public. In addition, the police were given the power to ban any public gathering at their discretion. It was quite clear who the government had in mind when it wrote this law. The British Fascist Alliance was so radical that it made even democratic Britain forget for a moment about freedom of expression and freedom of association.
Publisher
Mosley no longer had any political allies. At least not in his homeland. Just a few days after the events in the East End, he travelled to Berlin. It was a private visit. Oswald and Diana had finally decided to get married after three years. Their host was Joseph Goebbels, the German Propaganda Minister, who gave the newlyweds his Berlin villa. Only six people attended the wedding, and Adolf Hitler himself was the guest of honour. The ceremony was held in the strictest secrecy, otherwise the British public would probably have had too many questions for the patriot Mosley.
After the Battle of Cable Street, he was in a losing position. British fascists were seen as a club of street thugs and a society of bitter anti-Semites. In fact, Mosley had already missed the last train to serious politics the year before the general election. The British Union of Fascists was not ready for a political clash at that time and boycotted that election, thinking that its time had yet to come.
This has never happened. Circumstances changed completely in a few years, and fascism has since acquired a connotation much closer to what it has today. War broke out on the old continent, and Hitler and Mussolini were no longer just unbalanced screamers. The next general election in Britain did not take place until after the end of the war.
Soon German bombers began to fly over London, and although Mosley was never a serious threat to British democracy – after all, he was accompanied at every turn by the secret services – the government did not want a declared fascist and inciter roaming the streets of the capital. At a time when the British people were living in fear of a German invasion, rumours began to circulate that Mosley was a puppet in Hitler’s hands and that he would be the one to lead the country when it fell into German hands.
In reality, he was not taken seriously by the firm, as there were many better candidates for the job among the island’s politicians. Besides, Mosley was too much of a patriot and would never have agreed to be dictated to from abroad. Nevertheless, in the eyes of ordinary Britons, he was at best a suspicious extremist and at worst a traitor.
Epilog
On 22 May 1940, Mosley was arrested along with several other party comrades. A week later, the British Union of Fascists was banned. Although Mosley was not formally charged with anything, different, less democratic laws applied in wartime. He was interned in a prison in north London, where he was joined a few months later by Diana.
As the Mosleys were only officially interned and not imprisoned, they lived in very decent conditions. They had their own garden and were even able to employ other internees as servants.
They were personally advocated by Winston Churchill, then Prime Minister, who did not like British citizens sitting in prison without trial. Moreover, he knew very well that Mosley posed no danger – to him or to the country. Their release at the end of 1943 was accompanied by many protests, something Mosley was already used to. For the rest of the war, he was not allowed to engage in political activities and had to report monthly to the police station. He and Diana spent the next three years on the family estate in the south of England, far from London politics.
After the war, they moved to France and never returned. Mosley continued to work in politics. He founded a new party, wrote political manifestos and even stood twice for parliamentary elections, both times burning out. His time has long since passed.
In his old age, he contracted Parkinson’s disease and retired from public life. He died in Paris in 1980.
