Daniel Burges and fascism
East Yorkshires which served in Egypt before being sent to the Western Front for the Somme offensive. While the Battalion remained in France, Burges was returned home as an instructor, but in September 1917 was put in charge of the 7th Battalion the South Wales Borderers.
The Battle of Dojran Lake, or just Dojran (usually spelled ‘Doiran’ in English) is not an engagement which features prominently in British histories of WW1. For one thing, it was an Allied failure, as well as being in an obscure theatre of the war.
The Battle, in September 1918, was part of an Allied campaign to knock Germany’s ally Bulgaria out of the war. British, French, Italian, Greek and Serbian forces had attacked the Bulgarians with great success, but the British/Greek attack at Doiran was brought to a standstill. Despite their victory, the war-weary and impoverished Bulgarian people were in open revolt against their government, and Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria was forced to ask for peace anyway. He abdicated days later. It was at Doiran that Burges won his VC. The citation read: His valuable reconnaissance of the enemy first line trenches enabled him to bring his battalion without casualties to the assembly point, and from thence he maintained direction with great skill, AT some point in the 1920s, Daniel Burges joined Britain’s first fascist movement, the British Fascisti, later known as the British Fascists. This was long before Hitler took power in Germany; the British Fascists modelled themselves on Mussolini’s authoritarian, militaristic movement in Italy.
The British Fascists were initially led by Rotha LintornOrman, a soldier’s daughter who served as a nurse or ambulance driver (the facts are unclear) in the Balkans in WW1. Now based at her mother’s farm at
Langford in Somerset, LintornOrman decided to form a patriotic movement which would “save” the country from the twin menaces of communism and the Labour party. The British Fascists quickly splintered into different factions and many members would join the party founded by Sir Oswald Mosley, whom Lintorn-Orman despised as no better than a communist himself. Daniel Burges was criticised for wearing a British Fascist party badge at the Tower of London, but his response was that “British Fascism has nothing to do with politics at all.”
Several army officers joined the British Fascists, but there’s no evidence that Daniel Burges supported Mosley’s party, and he certainly was no fan of Hitler’s.