New exhibit is chilling reminder of the days of Jew-hate at Albert Hall
SOMETIMES A single item in an exhibition can make you stop in your tracks because of its power to evoke a time, a feeling, or a sense of the reality of history.
There is a small sheet of paper at the Wiener Holocaust Library’s exhibition on radical right-wing movements in interwar Europe, This Fascist Life, that does just this.
It is a flyer advertising a rally to be held by British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley in October 1934 at the Albert Hall in London.
Almost abstract in design, it simply states in bold, dramatic capitals: “YOU ARE INVITED TO THE FASCIST RALLY: MOSLEY SPEAKS.” It is pristine in its glass cabinet, just as it would have been on the day it was handed out to potential recruit, at a Tube station, perhaps, or a local Blackshirt meeting.
The detail is striking. There is nothing clandestine about this far-right activity. Tickets were openly available from the BUF headquarters on Chelsea’s King’s Road at a range of prices, although tickets for “promenaders” were free. The choice of venue, home of the Last Night of the Proms, would not have been lost on the audience.
This was fascism in plain sight, presenting itself as patriotism.
This was a crucial time in the lifecycle of British fascism, between Lord Rothermere’s infamous “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” article in the Daily
Mail and Mosley’s humiliation.
The exhibition is the result of a collaboration with the European Fascist Movements 1918-1941 Project, at Liverpool University.
Co-curator Dr Roland Clark said: “If we are really serious about combating extremism, we need to understand what it was like for people to be members of fascist movements.”
Somehow the banal fascist flyer for the Albert Hall rally captures just that moment of everyday curiosity when someone might be drawn into the orbit of a charismatic demagogue. This
This was fascism hiding in plain sight
period of British fascism is often written off as ludicrous, a comic interlude from a PG Wodehouse novel, but the photograph of another rally at Olympia in 1934 in this exhibition shows that 10,000 people took it seriously enough to attend and listen to the leader’s two-hour speech. It is true that Mosley’s New Party never gained a seat in Parliament, but the movement was not a joke.
There is much ephemera here from the fringes of the extremist politics of the era. There is literature from the National Socialist League, led by William Joyce, who later broadcast to British listeners from Germany during the war. There is a pamphlet issued by The Britons, another fringe fascist group, outlining the antisemitic views of the American car manufacturer Henry Ford. But it is easy to get distracted by the historical deadend of British fascism. Elsewhere, the rhetoric of these movements, often just as fringe and obscure in their origins, led to far more deadly consequences. Looking around the exhibition, the paraphernalia of German and Italian fascism seem strangely out of place, so familiar are the images and the narrative.
There is a logic to having them in an exhibition of far-right movements in the interwar period, but far more interesting are the lesser-known artefacts from the fascist movements of Romania, Denmark, France, Lithuania and Croatia.
This is an important corrective to the idea that fascism and genocidal antisemitism were imposed by the invading Nazis on otherwise liberal and tolerant nations.
These far-right movements were well-established long before Hitler’s Panzer divisions crossed the borders of these countries.
There was never a fascist internationalism as such, but the far-right movements learned from each other, and common expressions of the populist ideology developed in individual countries.
There are images here of the Danish gymnastics coach Niels Bukh promoting Nazism through sport in 1936 and French Croix-de-Feu fascists working out in the gym.
The dignity of labour is celebrated by Romanian students proudly posing at a brickworks in 1924 where they were working as part of their fascist summer camp activities. In a sinister touch, some have daubed swastikas on their bare chests.
The rise of fascism between the wars is familiar territory from GSCE history lessons to the History Channel and it is always difficult to give it a new life.
But co-curator Barbara Warnock and the team at the Wiener Library have done well to imbed the story in the individual fascist movements of the countries involved.
Placing the British fascists in this context help us avoids the complacency of thinking something more sinister couldn’t have happened here, while helping towards an understanding of why it didn’t: the failure to gain a foothold in Parliament, the resistance of trade unionists and Jewish anti-fascists, the distaste at the thuggery of the Blackshirts.
It wasn’t because the British are somehow immune from antisemitism.
The depressing truth, as recent events in the Labour Party have shown, is that this form of prejudice has always been with us.
Over 10,000 attended an Oswald Mosley rally at London’s Olympia in 1934
‘This Fascist Life: Radical Right Movements in Interwar Europe’ at the Wiener Holocaust Library runs until 4 February, 2022