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Fascists in the family
What becomes of children raised to hate? Cressida Connolly meets sons and daughters of Oswald Mosley’s blackshirts
In a memoir published in 1998, journalist Trevor Grundy recalled how, when he was a boy just after the war, his mother used to come out on to the front step of their house in Paddington to see him off to school. As he turned out of the square where they lived, he’d wave back at her.
Each morning, she’d stand to attention and fling out her right arm in a full fascist salute. ‘I returned it. “PJ,” she shouted – Mosley-follower speak for “Perish Judah”. I shouted it back.’ And then he’d run, satchel flying, to catch his bus.
A decade earlier, in Sussex, a little girl called Diana Bailey had been taught to greet people in the same way. Her parents, too, were supporters of Sir Oswald Mosley. Those who knew him always speak of Mosley’s remarkable charisma. Muscular (he was a keen fencer), with a characteristically upright bearing, he was a life-long womaniser, with a dash of the swashbuckler about him. Bailey’s parents instructed her to use the straight-arm salute and to say ‘PJ’ to passers-by when they went for an afternoon stroll. Sometimes people responded in kind: the Bognor Regis area had an especially active branch of Mosley supporters.
It was near here – on farmland around Pagham and Selsey – that fascist summer camps were set up by Mosley followers during the 1930s. For 25 shillings a week, members in their hundreds would come with their children from all over England for sea bathing, fellowship and fun. There was also an educational aspect to the gatherings – and even a jokey camp newsletter. It became part of their folklore that Mosley’s annual visit always brought the sun out: people would refer to it as ‘Leader weather’. At eight and nine years old, Diana was brought along by her parents.
When I happened upon a book of photographs of these camps, called Blackshirts-on-sea, the juxtaposition of their apparent sunny innocence with Mosley’s dark ideology intrigued me.
One photograph showed two ladies of a certain age – with pearls, parasols and floral frocks – selling the British Union of Fascists (BUF) newspapers, Action and The Blackshirt; another depicted four young men, grinning through the entrance of their bell tent. They looked for all the world like ordinary British holidaymakers. As I came to write my new novel, After the Party – about three sisters and the ways in which they influence and then betray one another – I knew the summer camps would find their way into my story. Set in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the book charts the women’s gradual immersion into the world of provincial English fascism. It examines, too, the longterm consequences that holding such views could have on the rest of the family.
Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (later renamed the Union Movement) was active during the 1930s. To most of the electorate, Mosley’s politics – of which anti-semitism formed a key part, especially after 1934 – were simply odious. So there was no outcry when he and his wife, Diana (who was one of the aristocratic Mitford sisters), as well as some 800 of his followers, were interned in 1940 under Defence Regulation 18B. It was thought that their fascist beliefs might make them Nazi sympathisers; that they were potential enemies of the state. To the prisoners and their families, however, 18B was an outrage because their right to habeas corpus was suspended. (Right-wing commentators today compare 18B’s suspension of legal rights to Guantanamo Bay.)
A few hundred of these internees were subsequently shipped to the Isle of Man, where seaside boarding houses were requisitioned as dwellings. Some local Manx men and women jeered them as they landed in the island’s capital, Douglas. It’s well known that many German Jewish refugees were sent to the Isle of Man during the Second World War, but the Mosley supporters’ time there has been less well documented. A portion of my novel is set there, in the pretty little harbour town of Peel. Their leader, however, remained in London. It was thought that sending him to the Isle of Man would cause too much upheaval.
When Mosley’s health began to fail, Winston Churchill, anxious to avert the publicity that might result from a fascist martyr, moved Mosley from Brixton Prison to Holloway Prison, where he shared married quarters with Diana.
The BUF was never represented in Parliament. At its peak in 1934, however, it attracted some 50,000 followers, many of whom were deeply devoted to their leader. Some remained so, long after the party was disbanded in 1940. After the war, Mosley formed the Union Movement. He stood for Parliament in North Kensington in the 1959 general election, the year after the Notting Hill race riots. His campaign called for forced repatriation of Caribbean immigrants and a prohibition on mixed marriage. To his dwindling band of followers, he was still the greatest orator this country had ever produced, a man of singular vision. So what was it like to be brought up in such a milieu? BUF members salute as they head to a rally in Birmingham to hear Mosley speak
Blackshirts peer out of atentata fascist camp
It became part of camp folklore that Mosley’s annual visit always brought the sun out
Mosley died in 1980, but his name and the politics associated with it cast a long shadow. In 2008, his son Max Mosley successfully sued the News of the World, for reporting on an orgy which was falsely alleged to have had Nazi themes. Max Mosley has since become a campaigner for tighter press regulation. When his son Alexander died in 2009 from an accidental drug overdose, a cousin told the Telegraph, ‘It is sometimes not easy having this name.’
Earlier this year, Max Mosley was accused by the Daily Mail of having published, in the early 1960s, a racist leaflet in support
of his father’s Union Movement. Photographs were published showing a young Max accompanying his father to a meeting in London’s East End. This part of London had been the scene of the notorious Battle of Cable Street in 1936, in which local residents intervened to prevent Mosley and his followers from marching through the area. Interviewed on Channel 4, Max Mosley said, ‘You are entitled as you get older to change your views.’
Today Diana Bailey, that little girl from Sussex, is in her 90s. She radiates intelligence and warmth. She is tall and bookish: she lives in a tall house full of books, not far from the Cotswolds. In the spring of 1940, when she was about to turn 14, she was a boarder at a Roman Catholic school. One day, as she was passing through the school hall, she saw the daily newspaper laid out on a table. The headline was ‘Naval Officer’s Wife Interned’. With a mounting sense of dread she read the accompanying article, in which she learnt that the woman in question was her own mother. ‘My whole body swept with flush, if you know what I mean,’ she recalls now.
She took the paper and tore it into tiny pieces so no one else would see it. Later that day the headmistress – a nun – invited Bailey into her study. She said, ‘Daddy has telephoned and he’s told me everything. Mummy’s been taken off in handcuffs to
Holloway jail. But you mustn’t worry. Daddy’s going to bring you a birthday cake and I’ll never tell anyone if you don’t want me to.’ She was as good as her word: no one in the school learnt about what had happened.
For Bailey, the consequences of her parents’ political beliefs were to shape her life. Her family was broken up. Her father was imprisoned a few weeks after his wife, then sent to the Isle of Man. Her mother was detained for nine months, during which time she lost her teeth and her hair turned grey. ‘I went to see her, with Granny, and I hardly recognised her. She couldn’t speak, she just sat on the other side of a wide table, crying. She put out her hand, but I couldn’t reach it. I was just so sad and horrified.’
But a far greater shock was to come. In 1945, when Richard Dimbleby made his famous and devastating broadcast from Bergen-belsen, Bailey learnt what had been happening to the Jews under Hitler. ‘It was a shot to my heart. I suddenly thought: I was doing that, I’d written “PJ” on walls. I felt so guilty.’ The images of the piled-up bodies of the dead were awful, terrifying. She determined to try to make up for what she’d done as a girl. She was fortunate to meet Anglican clergyman James Parkes, a driving force in the Council for Christians and Jews (The Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton
continues his work), and spent the next two years working for him. After her children grew up, she worked as a guardian ad litem, representing the interests of children in court cases.
And yet, like the other children and grandchildren of Mosley supporters I spoke to, Bailey feels no anger towards her mother and father. When I suggested to her that teaching a child of eight to perform the fascist salute and parrot anti-semitic views might now be considered tantamount to child abuse, she just shrugged. George Vincent, from Plymouth, is similarly forgiving. The fact that he takes an active interest in history, attending courses and lectures at his local U3A, gives him a wider historical perspective through which to view his parents’ past. He didn’t find out about their political affiliations until after the war. ‘My father never, ever mentioned it; but when I was 13 my mother showed me her scrapbook and there were cuttings from newspapers, describing how she’d spoken at political meetings. She’d also published articles. She later destroyed the book and never really referred to it again.’
What did Vincent think, when he discovered his mother’s sympathies? ‘I saw it as a passing phase she’d gone through. She’d been very left wing as a young woman, before she followed Mosley. I don’t know that she continued to hold views sympathetic to his cause; I think she became a liberal in the end. A lot of people go through the political spectrum. I can’t
say that it’s affected me in any way, but neither of my brothers will talk about it, even now. Our dad was interned for a few months, but I was too young to have been aware of it. My oldest brother, though, I think he knew about it at the time.’
One man I spoke to was more sanguine than rueful about having had grandparents and parents who were followers of Mosley. As a child at school in the 1950s, he misheard a teacher who was talking about the Bible story of Moses, thinking instead the lesson was about ‘Mosley and the bullrushes’. This only confirmed to his young mind the importance of the man whose name was constantly discussed at home. ‘When I first used to go round to friends’ houses after school, I couldn’t believe my ears – all they talked about was football, the garden, going on holiday. At home we all read the papers, political pamphlets… We talked about politics, debated.’ In which spirit, he challenged me on the premise of this article: ‘You wouldn’t be asking me all these questions if my parents had been members of the Communist Party,’ he said. As it happened, his other set of grandparents were, in fact, communists. But he had a point. In this country at least, fascism may leave a stain on future generations that communism does not. And yet, as our conversation drew to a close, he began expounding theories about banking and Israeli expansionism that have uncomfortable echoes.
For some of the children brought up with fascist parents, the older generation’s politics became a quest, a riddle to be solved. In order to try to better understand his parents, Trevor Grundy wrote Memoir of a Fascist Childhood, while Francis Beckett published a memoir entitled Fascist in the Family. Beckett’s father, John, had once been a Labour MP. ‘I was proud of my father, for having stolen the Mace, which no one had done since Oliver Cromwell,’ he recalls affectionately. As he says of his father in his book: ‘He was intelligent, sincere, noisy and very human.’ He was also a passionate fascist. And, as it
turned out, a Jew. John Beckett hid his heritage all his life.
Grundy’s mother, the one who called out ‘PJ’ after him every morning, had also been born Jewish. Neither writer is able to account for what made their parents become so ardently anti-semitic. Grundy did not remain an acolyte. ‘He [Mosley] was no longer God; he could be laughed at,’ he says, despite clearly maintaining a certain admiration for the fascist leader. He notes in his book: ‘The last night of Mosley’s 1959 comeback campaign ended with him making a magnificent speech in Ladbroke Grove, which revealed, once again, his amazing power as an orator of the grand style.’ But few agreed: Mosley won just over seven per cent of the vote.
Sir Oswald Mosley’s eldest son, Nicholas (by his first wife Cynthia), a distinguished writer, struggled with his father’s legacy throughout his long life. His father’s politics were abhorrent to him. There were many years when the two did not speak. Before Oswald’s death there was a reconciliation, of sorts; although, subsequently, after Nicholas published two volumes of biography about his father, Mosley’s widow Diana never forgave her stepson for what she saw as his betrayal of her beloved husband. She not only shared her husband’s fascist views, it was said among some who knew them that, in fact, she was more right wing than him. She never recanted, up to and including her 1977 memoir, A Life of Contrasts, and a difficult appearance on Desert Island Discs. While Grundy experienced the workaday end of British fascism, Diana had presided over the considerable upper-class strain.
Nicholas’s eldest son, Ivo Mosley, didn’t meet his grandfather until his early teens. He found nothing to like. ‘He was just a horrible person, quite sadistic, with no charm at all. I don’t mind when people ask me about my surname. What does trouble me is when people say, “Your grandfather wasn’t really that bad.” Because he was. He embraced evil. He was even very unpleasant about the people who followed him; he had a cynical contempt for them,’ he says.
Ivo wasn’t much minded to attend the dinner for his grandfather’s 80th birthday, in 1976. But friends persuaded him – it would be historic. Over the course of the evening he went up to the old man and asked him what he was up to at present. ‘I’m waiting for the call,’ Mosley replied.
His grandson teased him: ‘What, the call of nature? The call of the wild?’ ‘No,’ said Mosley, ‘The call of the people. This country is descending into crisis. I will be required.’
After the Party, by Cressida Connolly, is published on Thursday (Viking , £14.99). To order your copy for £12.99 plus p&p, call 0844-871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
‘People say, “Your grandfather wasn’t really that bad.” He was. He embraced evil’