Inspiration for facist party was had while in the garden
One hundred years ago the first ever British fascist party was founded by a woman who had the idea when weeding her garden at Langford in Somerset. Eugene Byrne tells the curious tale of Rotha Beryl Lintorn-Orman and the “British Fascisti”.
IN 1909, a huge Boy Scout Rally at Crystal Palace created great excitement. Robert BadenPowell’s movement had only started two years previously, but had already stirred massive worldwide enthusiasm.
The event culminated in a march-past of 11,000 Scouts and an inspection by Baden-Powell.
According to legend, the very last patrol in the whole parade comprised nine girls, including 16-yearold Nesta Maude.
Baden Powell asked them who they were, to which Maude replied: “We’re the Girl Scouts.”
“But you can’t be,” said BadenPowell. “There aren’t any Girl Scouts.”
Maude retorted: “Oh yes there are, ‘cos we’re them.”
According to legend, Rotha Lintorn-Orman was one of the nine members of this “Wolf Patrol”, and she was certainly friends with Nesta Maude.
The unauthorised gatecrashing of the rally by girls made BadenPowell relent and permit the formation of what would become the Girl Guides. Later the same year, Rotha was leading two troops in Bournemouth. It was the ideal outlet for her taste for uniforms and paramilitary activity.
Rotha Beryl Lintorn LintornOrman was born in Kensington in 1895, the daughter of Captain (later Major) Charles Edward Orman and Blanch (née Simmons). Blanch’s father was Field Marshal Sir John Lintorn Simmons.
Rotha - an only child - became enthusiastic for all things martial, and when the First World War broke out, she was desperate for action of some kind. She joined the Women’s Reserve Ambulance, and then the Scottish Women’s Hospital Corps with whom she went to Serbia in 1916. She would later claim that she was twice decorated for bravery.
By 1917 she had caught malaria and so returned to Britain where she joined the British Red Cross and served as commandant of its motor school. Her health, though, would remain affected for the rest of her life, and the malaria might well have turned her into an alcoholic later on.
Much about Lintorn-Orman’s life is clouded in mystery and, some of the time, outright lies.
The Great War had carried off huge numbers of men, leaving many women with little chance of marrying. Rotha was one of them, but her love of uniforms and “masculine” fashion and her close female friendships led to speculation at the time and since that she was a lesbian.
Not long after the war’s end, Rotha (and probably her mother) took over a dairy farm at Langford in Somerset and, the way she later told it, she was weeding the vegetable garden in May 1923 when the inspiration took her to form a paramilitary movement inspired by Mussolini’s Italian fascists
This was to oppose the growing menace (as she saw it) of socialism and its threat to destroy Britain and the empire.
Borrowing from Mussolini, the organisation was initially called the “British Fascisti”, but that sounded altogether too foreign. Soon they were the British Fascists (BF).
The BF were formed at a time when many in Britain feared the rise of socialism and for whom the threat of a Russian-style communist revolution felt very real.
The BF did attract some members, though later claims that it had 200,000, 400,000 and even a million signed up were preposterous. The biggest turn-out it ever managed was 5,000 people at a rally in London.
Certainly the BF seems to have had few members in Bristol, and we can’t find any mention of any activity or meetings here.
It seems to have been a mostly middle- and upper-class affair. It had some supporters among the aristocracy, and also attracted many who would later become prominent fascists in their own right, including William Joyce (later notorious as pro-Nazi propaganda radio broadcaster ‘Lord HawHaw’), and former camel vet Arnold Spencer-Leese, founder of the rabidly anti-Semitic Imperial Fascist League.
Leese would soon split from the BF, describing it as “Conservatism with knobs on”, which, in effect, it was. The BF exhorted members to vote Conservative and provided – often uninvited – “stewards” for Tory and Liberal public meetings.
It made a lot of noise about its loyalty to King and Country. It also devoted a lot of attention to Ulster, now a little outpost of Britain on the island of Ireland and threatened not by Communism, but by Catholicism, as they saw it.
The BF attracted some press attention, but not much, and nothing close to the scale of coverage that Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF) would get in the 1930s.
Much of the coverage was ridicule. For instance when it was revealed that the BF had a “roll of honour”, with just one name on it a member who it was claimed had died after being stabbed by a female communist with “a poisoned hat-pin”.
The left-leaning Daily Herald lampooned the BF as a collection of “Bright Young Things” and “Miss Lintorn-Orman, who claims … to be the head cook and bottlewasher of the British Fascisti. Good for her.”
As a woman, Rotha was not the nominal head of the BF. For much of the time the President was General R.B.D. Blakeney, a respectable figure for whom the BF were a sort of grown-up version of the Scout movement, though he would later join Spencer-Leese’s hardline League. Other members would later defect to Mosley’s BUF.
For much of the time, though, it seems as though Lintorn-Orman, who came from a wealthy family, bankrolled the BF and was certainly prominent, as it allowed women members.
Again, this attracted ridicule. She supposedly told one public meeting: “To the women fascisti it would fall to deal with the Communist women. These were … usually of alien origin, who had a genius for sticking hat-pins in fascists. They trade on the chivalry of men fascists, but there is nothing to stop the women fascists from dealing with them”.
Laughable though some of it might have been, the BF was sincere in its commitment to streetfighting, and for many, Jews were the real enemy. One told a meeting: “Men and women of any alien race, which of course includes Jews, are rigidly excluded, one of our main objects being to keep Britain for the British people.”
The turning point came with the General Strike of 1926, which many on both sides thought was the start of the socialist revolution in Britain. But it passed off largely peacefully. The BF did not get the conflict it longed for, while over in Moscow Lenin despaired of Socialism ever taking root in Britain when he heard of striking miners playing football with police officers.
The BF was riven by splits and arguments, and many drifted off into other right-wing organisations. By the time Mosley’s black-shirted BUF was attracting all the attention in the mid-1930s, the BF was a spent force, with probably less than 500 members.
By now they also had money problems which Rotha could not cover. Her mother was known to have contributed funds, but these apparently stopped when she heard rumours of her daughter’s lurid lifestyle – not just stories of drink and drugs, but of orgies, too.
Her behaviour, exacerbated by alcoholism and possibly drug addiction, became more erratic, and her health was poor. She died at a hotel on the Canary Islands in March 1935 and the British Fascists went into receivership a few months later.