Max arrested in punch-up, and Nazi salutes in Jewish East End
On JULY 31, 1962, Max Mosley who, as we have shown, has a genius for both forgetting and rewriting history, Keith Gibson and Barry Ayres — his companions on that trip to Dachau — were back in the UK and at Sir Oswald’s side again on important Union Movement party business.
The fascist leader who had once spoken of ‘the stink of the Jew’ was to address his followers at a rally in the Jewish district of Ridley Road, Hackney.
Mr Ayres recalls that the Special Branch had warned the far-Right demagogue against going, but ‘there was a certain arrogance about Oswald Mosley and he wouldn’t hear of it’.
In his 1991 autobiography, the brutal Tony Lambrianou — a Kray twins gang member — said that he and other thugs were ‘getting £50 a time to be out there Jew-baiting’ at Mosley’s Hackney meetings.
He said he was approached by a friend of Sir Oswald who said: ‘Mosley wants to do a bit of talking in Dalston (Hackney). You could have a few mates up there to create a fracas.’
Lambrianou recalled: ‘ His aim was to attract publicity.’
The deliberate provocation did indeed spark a violent response by locals and counter-demonstrators.
In the melee, Sir Oswald was floored and his son Max was arrested for using threatening behaviour. Dozens of people from both sides were detained.
The Mail recently spoke to several of the Jewish counter- demonstrators who were arrested. One, a former refugee who had escaped Hitler and served in the RAF during the war — when his parents were murdered in Auschwitz — was fined 30 shillings simply for shouting ‘You nazi!’ at Mosley senior.
The man — now in his 90s — declined to comment publicly because, he said, he was so ashamed at having been arrested for the only time in his life.
A very brief — and highly selective — account of the Ridley Road affair appears in Max Mosley’s 2015 autobiography.
The passage is worth repeating here almost in full. It can then be supplemented with the absent context and facts drawn from archival material and new eyewitness accounts that were unavailable to his readers or indeed the original magistrates’ court hearing.
‘In London my father suddenly became the target of violence,’ Mr Mosley writes in his book.
‘He had been holding regular meetings all over the place for years with no significant problems, but out of the blue those who disliked him decided to attack.
‘ I went with him to a meeting in the East End where we were rushed by a group of people. I reacted as one would and a police superintendent arrested me.
‘next day in court . . . I cross-examined the superintendent with some success along the most obvious lines. My elderly father is attacked; the police though present do not protect him. Do you say I should stand idly by?’
Mosley Jnr certainly didn’t do that. Graphic
Pathe film footage of the riot, recently put back into the public domain, shows Max at the scene dressed in black or other dark colours; one demonstrator arrested with him recalled his outfit as a ‘fascist uniform’, while Barry Ayres recalls that UM members often wore items of black in token defiance of the 1936 Public Order Act, which banned political uniforms such as those worn by the Blackshirts.
Max is then seen launching himself at a protester rushing at his father, before moving to throw a punch at someone further away in the crowd. It is possible that the target of his punch is the same protester, who had been hauled off by a policeman.
Next day, having changed into a smart suit and tie more befitting an Oxford-educated law student, Max told the court hearing: ‘I couldn’t be described by any stretch of imagination as a fighting person.
‘My activities at Oxford (were) in the Union [debating society] rather than the boxing club.’
He added; ‘ There is no suggestion that I fought at random with other members of the crowd.’
A comparison of Max’s reported oral evidence and the Pathe footage suggests that at the description he gave in court of his is behaviour during the melee was not a full account.
Pathe has confirmed that the footage was as not released for public viewing until the day ay after the trial. If the film had been available le to the magistrate, it would have resulted in n Max Mosley taking further questions, if not ot necessarily affecting the outcome.
Max was acquitted. (Four months after er Ridley Road, he reportedly told an undercover rof Daily Herald reporter: ‘In our kind of politics one needs to be as good at a punchup hrs as at talking to a university professor.’)
On the court steps, Sir Oswald told reporters he was ‘really proud of my boy’.
As presented by the Mosleys, the brawl was as indeed a tale of filial devotion and courage. e. But the unexpurgated story of the Mosleys at Ridley Road is, of course, much darker and d more disturbing.
Retired Metropolitan Police chief ef superintendent Sidney MacKay is the chairman r- of the Police Roll Of Honour Trust, a registered charity dedicated to the memory of officers who were killed in the line of duty. In 1962, he was a 19-year-old constable when he and his Limehouse-based colleagues were ordered to Hackney to support local officers ahead of anticipated trouble. PC MacKay got a front row view of what happened.
HE RECALLS: ‘It was an obvious provocation by the Union Movement to go into such a Jewish area. The majority of protesters there that day were Jews, I would say.’
With Sir Oswald having regained his feet and Max in custody after the affray, the fascist leader briefly addressed the crowd from the back of a lorry.
‘ I was close enough to see Oswald Mosley on the lorry, and see the response of the crowd,’ recalls MacKay. ‘ He was antagonising everyone with what he was saying about Jews. It was frightening. After a few minutes, a senior officer made him step down.
‘I could not believe what I was hearing and seeing only a few years after the end of the war with Hitler.’
Contemporary Press photographs show Holocaust denier and Max’s travel companion Keith Gibson welcoming the fascist leader up onto the lorry platform. Several supporters below are giving the Hitler salute.
One of those saluting men was well known to Max. Indeed, other media photographs show the pair fighting alongside each other a few moments earlier to protect Sir Oswald. The man has been identified by Mr Ayres and another UM contemporary of Max’s as one Peter Dawson.
Dawson, who escaped arrest at Ridley Road, was one of the UM’s most notorious thugs and racists. In a September 1961 interview with the Laboursupporting People newspaper, Dawson, now dead, admitted: ‘I hate Jews and blacks and I’m prepared to spend the rest of my life getting them out of this country.’
In the same interview, he boasted wrongly that a UM member was responsible for the shocking racist murder of a black man, Kelso Cochrane, in Notting Hill in May 1959 — a case which has chilling echoes with the racist killing of 18-year- old Stephen Lawrence in South London in 1993.
Cochrane, a young West Indian carpenter, was chased and stabbed to death by a gang of white youths as he made his way home. He was saving money to study law. His funeral attracted more than 1,000 mourners.
Dawson had also daubed swastikas and the Nazi slogan ‘Juden Raus’ — ‘Jews Get Out’ on a synagogue.
He also organised a protest against the visiting black Jewish American entertainer Sammy Davis Jr because he had recently married a white woman, and Dawson was jailed for a vicious attack outside the Ritz on an African politician who he had mistaken for the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.
In 1961, Sir Oswald Mosley had made a public display of expelling Peter Dawson from the party only after he and Keith Gibson broke into the London HQ of the AntiApartheid Movement.
But the expulsion was for show, as Dawson’s presence as Sir Oswald’s bodyguard at Ridley Road in 1962 demonstrates.
Novelist Nicholas Mosley — who unlike half-brother Max rejected their father’s ‘squalid’ politics — described in his 1983 family memoir how there was an unspoken ‘complicity’ between Sir Oswald and his beyond-the-pale thugs, whatever the leader said about them for public consumption.
Ridley Road wasn’t the only occasion on which Max Mosley has been arrested.
yet another significant absence from his substantial autobiography — or any other of his public accounts of his life — is the criminal conviction he received for his part in a counter-demonstration against an anti-apartheid vigil in Trafalgar Square.
On March 19, 1961, 2,000 people staged a silent procession to mark the first anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa.
South African police had opened fire on a crowd of unarmed black civilians demonstrating against racist laws at the Sharpeville township in the Transvaal. Sixtynine were killed, including eight women and ten children, and 180 were wounded. Many were shot in the back as they fled.
In Trafalgar Square, all went off peacefully until a builder’s lorry and two cars belonging to the UM pulled up. They contained members of the North Kensington branch and carried slogans including ‘ Mosley for White Britain’. On this occasion, Sir Oswald was not present.
Inside the lorry were six lengths of lead wrapped in paper, a mallet and four pick-axe handles which eyewitnesses said the Mosley men were banging on the floor.
Police arrested more than 20 UM supporters for possession of offensive weapons and other offences. Max Mosley’s associate, Barry Ayres, had been in the lorry and was among those detained and later convicted. He already had a conviction for malicious damage having driven a car from which a Mosley thug had thrown a brick through a window.
Max — who was not in the lorry — was arrested in nearby Duncannon Street for wilfully obstructing a police constable in the execution of his duty. Mr Ayres remembers meeting Max at a nearby police station while they were both under arrest.
‘We were all in a large room when we first arrived and then we were put in cells and pulled out one at a time and then officially charged,’ he says.
LONDON Metropolitan Archives show that Max Mosley appeared at Bow Street magistrates the following day.
Mr Mosley said he had been part of the ‘ counter- demonstration’, but pleaded not guilty to the alleged offence.
Records and newspaper reports show his case was transferred to Marlborough Street court where, on May 3, 1961, he was convicted and fined £2 with two guineas costs. An archived letter sent from Sir Oswald Mosley to the Mosley family lawyers confirmed his son’s conviction.
Mr Ayres says today: ‘ I am ashamed of what happened. I can’t excuse that one — it was an anti-apartheid meeting. We were there for one reason only, to intimidate. Max was there at the demo, but I don’t know where.’
Mr Ayres was eventually persuaded by his family to give up far-Right politics. He went on to lead a law- abiding and successful career, mixing in very different, liberal artistic circles. He was the executor of the will of the late broadcaster and raconteur Ned Sherrin.
‘I have been terrified for the past 40 years of that part of my past being revealed,’ he says. ‘ Over the past few weeks I have told my friends and they were fine except one who said the Trafalgar Square incident was unforgivable.’
He added: ‘ I do not regret meeting Oswald Mosley because I was passionate about history and it was extraordinary to spend time with someone like him.
‘But I also attended drinks parties thrown by fellow members in West London, at which the Horst Wessel (the Nazi party anthem, glorifying a Stormtrooper thug) was put on the record player.
‘I mixed with racists and Nazis who made their appalling views quite clear. Max would also have mixed with these people and heard the same things as I did.
‘Once, during a car journey to Hull University where we were both speaking, I asked Max about this and he shrugged and said: “We’re a broad church.” His father said more or less the same thing.
‘I can see now I was complicit by my silence at the time. Now I would slap down people like this immediately.
‘There are lots of things in life where you look back and you wish you hadn’t done that.’
Not a refrain we have heard from Mr Max Mosley.
Once when asked by Mr Ayres if he had any regrets, Sir Oswald replied: ‘There is no point in having regrets because you cannot change the past. you can only change the future.’