When I met the ex-leader of Blackshirts
AS a journalist I once met Oswald Mosley, whose family have historic links to Manchester and Cheadle, during a dinner in Hough End Hall, Chorlton cum Hardy, a former Mosley family residence.
At 80, Oswald Mosley was a striking figure, tall and erect with wide shoulders, offset by an equally impressive paunch.
His handshake seemed enormous.
His deep-set piercing eyes, above a hawk-like nose, regarded us with polite sang froid.
There was something vulture-like in his stance.
During the dinner we sat among elderly exBlackshirts.
One continually shouted out loudly that: “Sir Oswald Mosley is the greatest living Englishman!”
On the top table Mosley sat with his wife, one of the celebrated Mitford sisters, a great beauty in her day and a reputed admirer of Hitler.
Her face, pale and blue-eyed, remained impassive, she believing that excessive facial expression causes wrinkles!
The chauffeur of their Rolls who had driven from their mansion in France sat with us in the body of the hall.
Sir Oswald rose to say that his doctor had pronounced him 100 per cent fit (he died a few years later).
He urged that an emergency government of all the talents was the only way forward (in 1976).
His hand assumed the old swaggering pose, but instead of resting on a trim manly waist, it found a distracting lodgement on the side of his large paunch.
Once a young man in a hurry, he was now an old man in a dawdle.
He gave us some historical portraits.
Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour PM, was, ‘an old windbag’.
Lloyd George, PM in the First World War, ‘was a great man’.
I can’t remember what he said about Churchill, who had him locked up in WW2.
He spoke of that ‘unnecessary war’ and the suffering of the men and women who had worked for the party.
Then he spoke of seeing the grey hordes of soldiers advancing towards British lines in WW1 which so impressed him with the German spirit.
This convinced him of the necessity for a united Europe! (Europhiles take note)
Mosley was a fluent orator.
His first impression of the House of Commons being ‘zoological noises striving for the heights of human speech’.
He enjoyed Lloyd George’s parties occupying an entire floor of a famous London hotel, for the great and influential, including newspaper proprietors, yet never a whisper entered the press.
Oswald Mosley was not a ranting Hitler, a puny Goebbels nor a chubby Mussolini but a swaggering alpha male.
Lord Boothby (an admirer of both the Kray twins and Churchill), said of Mosley: “He would have befriended the Devil for his country,” and he probably did. »»You can read other obscure tales in Stockport Heritage Magazine £2.80 in newsagents www. stockportheritage magazine.co.uk