1910s-1950s
Various

1. Introduction
2. Stories
3. Biographical summary
4. See also
5. Further reading
6. References

1. Introduction

UK fascism was initially derived from Mussolini’s Italy but sought its own British identity, sometimes with reference to Tudor or Cromwellian authoritarian history. Views on race and religion varied between groups but tended to become more anti-Semitic over time. The highest-profile group was the British Union of Fascists (the ‘Blackshirts’) in the 1930s, led by Oswald Mosley, which incorporated some of an earlier group called the British Fascists. Mosley was married to Clementine’s cousin Diana Mitford; husband and wife were both detained by Churchill during World War II. Another significant group was the secretive Right Club whose participants included various politicians and members of high society.

2. Stories

• Churchill’s view of Fascism was that it was as loathsome as Communism, calling them ‘infernal twins’.
• Oswald Mosley married Clementine’s cousin Diana Mitford in Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room, with Hitler as a guest of honour.
• Oswald and Diana Mosley were detained soon after Churchill became prime minister.
• Tyler Kent, a cipher clerk in the US embassy in London, triggered the May 1940 anti-fascist crackdown.
• Archibald Maule Ramsay, founder of the Right Club, and Anna Wolkoff, a member, were also apprehended.
• William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany and was the last person to be executed for treason in the UK.
• Maxwell Knight, head of MI5’s anti-subversive section B5(b), was a popular nature enthusiast on BBC radio and television.

Churchill’s view of Fascism was that it was as loathsome as Communism, calling them ‘infernal twins’.

In 1937, Churchill wrote that ‘Since the Great War two new religions have been born into the world. They are the Nazi creed and the Communist creed’. He commented on how similar they were, and how easy it was to imagine Mussolini or Hitler in charge of a communist state, or Stalin as a Fascist Duce or Führer. ‘Nazism and Communism imagine themselves as exact opposites. […] They are, in fact, as alike as two peas. […] I am reminded of the North Pole and South Pole. They are at opposite ends of the earth, but if you woke up at either Pole tomorrow morning you could not tell which one it was. Perhaps there might be more penguins at one, or more polar bears at the other; but all around would be ice and snow and the blast of a biting wind.’¹

Two of the main similarities, he said, were the concentration of power in one individual and the inability to criticise leaders. Both regimes featured the gagging of free speech, eavesdropping, snitching and brutality.

In the same year, a House of Commons debate about the Spanish Civil War had become an argument about which side to support. Churchill’s position was that ‘It is not a question of opposing Nazi-ism or Communism; it is a question of opposing tyranny in whatever form it presents itself.’²

Churchill was confident that the UK’s parliamentary democracy and its (unwritten) constitutional checks and balances were solid defences against domestic pressures from fascism or communism. However, the distinct possibility of a Nazi invasion persuaded him to make use of the temporary draconian measure of detention without trial, introduced by Chamberlain’s government in 1939 by means of ‘Regulation 18B’. He had specifically mentioned internment without trial as being intolerable in his 1937 article. He made use of it but was highly conflicted and in November 1943 pressed for its abolition, saying that it is ‘in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist’.³ Regulation 18B was revoked in May 1945, nine days after Hitler’s suicide.

Oswald Mosley married Clementine’s cousin Diana Mitford in Joseph Goebbels’s drawing room, with Hitler as a guest of honour.

Diana Mitford met Mosley at a party in 1932 and they began an affair. She left her husband Bryan Guinness and moved to a townhouse near Mosley. Mosley did not want to leave his wife Cynthia, but she died in 1933 after an abdomen operation.

The same year, Diana and her sister Unity attended the Nuremburg Rally in Germany in 1933 and Unity became enthrallled with Hitler. She enrolled at a language school in Munich and discovered that Hitler frequently visited the Osteria Bavaria restaurant there. She often sat at a table near him and eventually he invited her to join him for a meal. He was intrigued by her and she became part of his social circle.

Unity introduced Diana to Hitler in 1935 and Diana became friendly with Joseph Goebbels’s wife, Magda. In 1936, Diana and Mosley married secretly in the Goebbels’s home in Berlin with six guests, including Hitler.

Mosley is best known for founding and leading the British Union of Fascists (‘BUF’) which he established after visiting Italy in 1932. The BUF, known as ‘the Blackshirts’ because of its uniform, gained popularity and was supported by the Daily Mail, owned by Lord Rothermere (Harold Harmsworth), who wrote an article entitled ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’⁴ However, BUF paramilitary stewards shocked people with their violence, particularly at a large rally at the Olympia Exhibition Centre, London, in 1934. Rothermere and others withdrew their support and the party went into decline.

Mosley had been the youngest MP at age 22 (the ‘Baby of the House’),* beginning as a Conservative, then becoming an independent, then joining the Labour party. He developed his strong oratory by attacking capitalist oppression, leading to accusations of hypocrisy as he was from a wealthy and prestigious family. He was a hereditary baronet; hence ‘Sir’ Oswald (he was not knighted).**

Like Churchill, Mosley won the public schools’ fencing championship as a youth, attended the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, was commissioned in the cavalry, and served on the Western Front in World War I. Both took flying lessons and had an air crash (Churchill had two). Mosley sustained a serious leg injury, and after aggravating it in the trenches was left with a permanent limp.

* Joseph Sweeney of Sinn Féin was younger but, like other elected Sinn Féin representatives, refused to take his seat in the House of Commons.

** See The UK honours system for an introduction to its complexities.

Oswald and Diana Mosley were detained soon after Churchill became prime minister.

The German offensive against France began on 10 May 1940, the day that Churchill took office as prime minister. The month before, collaborationist Vidkun Quisling had been installed as head of a German puppet government in Norway. If the UK was invaded, it was feared that Mosley could be a candidate to establish a Quisling-style government there. Following a raid that revealed the names of many possible Nazi sympathisers in high places, Churchill authorised the rounding up of Mosley and around 800 other members of fascist organisations, which were soon banned.

Mosley was initially held at Brixton men’s prison in south London and Diana was detained shortly afterwards at Holloway women’s prison in north London. Churchill studied the details of Mosley’s and others’ confinement, asking what privileges they were permitted and advocating leniency. He wanted to know what arrangements had been made for Diana to see Max, her new-born son from whom she had been separated. Mosley was transferred to Holloway in December 1940 where he and Diana lived in a cottage with a small garden. By November 1943, the invasion threat had diminished and Mosley’s leg injury had become seriously inflamed. He and Diana were released under house arrest, to public protest, until the end of the war.

Mosley established the Union Movement and then the National Party of Europe to try and promote European and right-wing unity, with little success. He and Diana emigrated to Ireland, then France, returning to the UK in the late 1950s and 1960s to seek parliamentary office on an anti-immigration platform, again unsuccessfully.

They retired to Orsay in south-west Paris, living near the second home of Edward, Duke of Windsor and his wife Wallis (née Simpson), whom they befriended. Mosley developed Parkinson’s disease and died in 1980, aged 84, and his ashes were spread on his Orsay pond. Diana stayed there until 1999 and moved into a Paris apartment where she died in 2003, aged 93. She is buried next to her sisters in Swinbrook, Oxfordshire. Their son Max became a barrister, racing driver and president of the motor sport organisation Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (‘FIA’).

Tyler Kent, a cipher clerk in the US embassy in London, triggered the May 1940 anti-fascist crackdown.

Tyler Kent was a multilingual US citizen who moved to the UK from a US embassy post in Moscow. He was under MI5 surveillance after mingling with a German agent and a group of White Russian (anti-communist) émigrés in London who were suspected of being pro-Nazi. He was a member of the Right Club, an anti-Semitic organisation of fascist sympathisers opposed to war with Germany.

Maxwell Knight, head of MI5’s anti-subversive unit, arranged for a raid on Kent’s apartment to search for further information on the Russian connections. He found far more, including decoded communications between President Roosevelt and Churchill (during Churchill’s second term as first lord of the Admiralty) which could potentially be used to accuse the US of breaching its war neutrality, shortly before a US election.

There was also a ledger of over 200 names of Right Club members and associates, and some keys that turned out to be duplicates for the US embassy cipher room. Hiding in the bathroom was Mrs Irene Danischewsky, Kent’s mistress and later aunt of British actress Helen Mirren.*

US ambassador Joseph Kennedy Senior, father of later president John F. Kennedy, had waived Kent’s diplomatic immunity before the raid. Ironically, he shared Kent’s anti-war and anti-Semitic views and had also been making copies of correspondence. According to Churchill’s son Randolph, Kennedy was also under British surveillance.

Three days after the raid, following a hasty extension of Regulation 18B, the anti-fascist crackdown began. As a leading figure of UK fascism, Mosley was one of the first to be arrested. He had connections with many in the Right Club but was not a member himself.

Kent was tried in secret and sentenced to seven years in prison. He was held on the Isle of Wight until the war ended when he was deported to the US. He was investigated several times by the FBI who could not determine whether he was a German agent or perhaps even a Soviet one.** He married, published a segregationist newspaper and attempted various unsuccessful business ventures. He died almost penniless in a trailer park in Mission, southern Texas, in 1988.

* Irene Danischewsky (née Mironoff), from a White Russian émigré family, was monitored but cleared of suspicion. Her brother, Vasily Mironoff, changed his name to Basil Mirren and was the father of Helen Mirren, born a few months after Kent’s deportation. He was a protestor against Mosley’s marches.

** There had been some leaks from the US embassy in Moscow during his posting there and he had had a relationship with a female NKVD agent (Soviet secret police).

Archibald Maule Ramsay, founder of the Right Club, and Anna Wolkoff, a member, were also apprehended.

Ramsay was an MP for the Unionist Party, a Scottish centre-right organisation associated with the Conservatives. In the mid-1930s he helped found the UK branch of the Nordic League, an umbrella organisation for pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic fascist groups. Its slogan was ‘Perish Judah’ and members would sometimes add the initials ‘P.J.’ after their signatures. He established the Right Club in 1939 ‘to oppose and expose the activities of organised Jewry’.⁵

Some of his correspondence was discovered during the raid on Kent’s room and it was immediately feared that he could leak it or use parliamentary privilege* to disclose the Roosevelt-Churchill correspondence. He had already used a parliamentary question to publicise the wavelength and broadcast times of a Nazi propaganda radio station. He was detained on the same day as Kent and held in Brixton prison until September 1944. On release he unsuccessfully tabled a House of Commons motion to reintroduce the thirteenth century Statute of Jewry which restricted Jewish occupations and required Jews to wear a large yellow badge.

Anna Wolkoff was the daughter of an Imperial Russian naval attaché in London who remained in the UK after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. The Wolkoff family ran a Russian tearoom in South Kensington which was frequented by White Russians and some Right Club members. Anna also had a hat business, with one of her customers being Wallis Simpson.

Anna was under surveillance after visits to Germany. One day she asked another member of the Right Club, Belgian Hélène de Munck, to pass on a coded letter to a broadcaster of Nazi propaganda in Germany. Unfortunately for her, de Munck was an undercover MI5 agent.

The British spy novel author Len Deighton was Anna Wolkoff’s next-door neighbour in Marylebone and his mother cooked for her dinner parties. Eleven-year-old Deighton and his parents watched out of the window as their neighbour was taken away in the early hours of the morning. Wolkoff was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment in 1940 and was released in 1947. She died in a car accident in Spain in 1973.

* Immunity from legal consequences of statements made within official proceedings of the Houses of Parliament.

William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany and was the last person to be executed for treason in the UK.

Joyce was an American of Anglo-Irish descent who was born in Brooklyn, New York, and relocated with his family to Galway in western Ireland when he was three years old. He remained a US citizen but obtained a UK passport in 1938 by stating falsely that he was British. This would later cost him his life.

He joined Mosley’s BUF in 1932 and rose to become its director of propaganda and deputy leader, with rousing oratory and a willingness to engage in physical confrontation with protestors. Mosley dismissed him in 1937, citing cutbacks after poor election results. Joyce co-founded the National Socialist League but fled to Germany in August 1939 after being tipped off that he was about to be detained.

He became a naturalised German citizen in July 1940 and a well-known broadcaster of Nazi propaganda in English with the nickname ‘Lord Haw-Haw’. He gained a wide audience in the UK, curious about his detailed ‘news’ items and entertained by his dramatic flourish.

In May 1945, he was near the Danish border and had a conversation with some British intelligence soldiers who recognised his voice and apprehended him. He was tried at the Old Bailey in London for treason as it was argued that he had worked for the Nazis while having a British passport. He was executed at Wandsworth Prison in January 1946, aged 39.

Historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote, ‘Technically, Joyce was hanged for making a false statement when applying for a passport, the usual penalty for which is a small fine. His real offence was to have attracted to himself the mythical repute of Lord Haw-Haw.’⁶

Another wartime broadcasting controversy was generated by five radio transmissions from Germany by author P.G. Wodehouse after his one-year internment as a British civilian living in occupied France. Entitled ‘How to be an Internee Without Previous Training’, they were humorous, apolitical and believed by Wodehouse to demonstrate a plucky British spirit. The French authorities and some of the British public took a different view, and although a decision was made not to prosecute Wodehouse in the UK, he moved to the USA after the war, never to return to the UK.

Maxwell Knight, head of MI5’s anti-subversive section B5(b), was a popular nature enthusiast on BBC radio and television.

Maxwell Knight’s agents successfully infiltrated both fascist and communist groups. Knight began his MI5 career by infiltrating the British Fascists organisation in the 1920s (of which William Joyce was a member), becoming its director of intelligence. He was sometimes referred to as ‘M’, which Ian Fleming used as the codename for a character in his James Bond books.* John Le Carré’s character Jack Brotherhood in A Perfect Spy (1986) is based on Knight.

Knight was obsessed with animals from a young age, developing a collection including lizards, mice, hedgehogs, tortoises and a white rat called Agatha. In his adulthood, he shared his accommodation with Bessie the bear cub, a bush baby called Pookie, Rikkitikki the mongoose, Goo the cuckoo, grass snakes, a bulldog, a baboon and a parrot. He would take Bessie for walks in a harness but she was rehoused to find a mate in London zoo, where Knight became known as a willing carer for small creatures needing a temporary home.

He was a jazz enthusiast and would play live instruments to his animals. He wrote two thrillers and numerous books on nature, including A Cuckoo in the House (1955) and How to Keep a Gorilla (1968). John Le Carré provided some illustrations for Knight’s book Talking Birds (1961) using his real name, David Cornwell.

After the war he became a BBC radio presenter of various nature shows and appeared on television, encouraging children in particular to take an interest in animals and their environments. He continued his intelligence work until 1961 but his listeners and viewers knew nothing of that. When he died of heart failure in 1968, fundraisers for a memorial fund included naturalists David Attenborough, Johnny Morris and Peter Scott.

A ‘birdwatcher’ is old British intelligence slang for a spy, with similar skills being required for both pursuits, including unobtrusiveness, patience, observation and identification. Ian Fleming named James Bond after an American ornithologist; there are various bird references in the Bond novels and movies. Knight’s passion for cuckoos was particularly appropriate as they are infiltrators of their own eggs into other birds’ nests.

* The main person on whom ‘M’ is based was Admiral John Godfrey, a director of naval intelligence, for whom Fleming worked as personal assistant.

3. Biographical summary

Example of a prominent UK fascist:

Name	Oswald Mosley, 6th Baronet of Ancoats
Occupation	Activist, politician
Country	UK
Career	Cavalry commission during World War I. Transferred to desk jobs after leg injury from aircraft crash (1915). Conservative MP for Harrow, London (1918-22). Independent MP for Harrow (1922-24). Labour MP for Smethwick, West Midlands (1926-31). Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (minister without portfolio) under Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald (1929-30). Founder/leader of mixed-policy New Party (1931-32). Founder/leader of right-wing British Union of Fascists (1932-40). Founder/leader of right-wing Union Movement (1948-73).
Born	1896 in Mayfair, London (22 years younger than Churchill)
Father	Oswald Mosley (1873-1928), 5th Baronet of Ancoats; distantly related to Queen Elizabeth II and Anthony Blunt (Soviet Spies)
Mother	Katharine Edwards-Heathcote (1874-1948), daughter of an army captain
Siblings	Eldest of three sons: 1. Oswald Ernald (1896-1980) 2. Edward (1899-1980), army major 3. John (1901-1973), stockbroker
Education	Winchester College, Winchester, Hampshire; Royal Military College, Sandhurst, Berkshire
Spouse	1. Cynthia ‘Cimmie’ Curzon (1898-1933), m.1920 until her death from peritonitis, aged 34; Labour MP; Anglo-American 2. Diana Freeman-Mitford (1910-2003), m.1936 until Oswald’s death; her second marriage after Walter Guinness, 2nd Baron Moyne; one of the ‘Mitford sisters’; Clementine Churchill’s cousin; author
Relationships	Numerous, including: Alexandra Metcalfe (née Curzon), younger sister of Cynthia; Grace Curzon, Cynthia’s stepmother
Children	By Cynthia: 1. Vivien (1921-2002) 2. Nicholas (1923-2017), 3rd Baron Ravensdale, novelist and his father’s biographer 3. Michael (1932-2012) By Diana: 4. Alexander Mosley (1938-2005) 5. Max (1940-), barrister; managing director of March Formula 1 team; president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile (‘FIA’) Stepchildren from Diana’s first marriage: – Jonathan Guinness, 3rd Baron Moyne (1930-), businessman – Desmond Guinness (1931-2020), author on art and architecture
Died	1980 at his home in Orsay, Essonne, France, aged 84 (15 years after Churchill)
Buried	Cremated at Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris; ashes scattered on pond at his Orsay home
Nickname	Tom (family and friends)
Height	‘Very tall’
Time magazine	Front cover: 1931

4. See also

Fascist leaders

• Goebbels, Joseph
• Hitler, Adolf
• Mussolini, Benito

UK fascist sympathisers

• Edward VIII
• Rothermere, Lord (Harold Harmsworth)

MI5 surveillance

• Soviet spies

Churchill’s relatives

• Mitford sisters

Churchill controversies

• Anti-appeasement

5. Further reading

UK fascism

• Linehan, Thomas, British Fascism, 1918-39: Parties, Ideology and Culture (Manchester University Press, 2000)
• Passmore, Kevin, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP Oxford, 2014)
• Pugh, Martin, Hurrah For The Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (Random House, 2013)

Oswald and Diana Mosley

• Dalley, Jan, Diana Mosley (Faber & Faber, 2014)
• De Courcy, Anne, Diana Mosley (Random House, 2012)
• Dorril, Stephen, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (Thistle Publishing, 2017)
• Howell, D., Mosley and British Politics 1918-32: Oswald’s Odyssey (Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2014)

Other individuals

• Boyd, Nina, From Suffragette to Fascist: The Many Lives of Mary Sophia Allen (History Press, 2013)
• Clough, Bryan, State Secrets: The Kent-Wolkoff Affair (Hideaway Publications, 2005)
• Holmes, Colin, Searching for Lord Haw-Haw: The Political Lives of William Joyce (Taylor & Francis, 2016)
• Rand, Peter, Conspiracy of One: Tyler Kent’s Secret Plot against FDR, Churchill, and the Allied War Effort (Lyons Press, 2013)
• Willetts, Paul, Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms: The Spyhunter, the Fashion Designer and the Man from Moscow (Little, Brown Book Group, 2015)

The Right Club

• Griffiths, Richard, Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club, and British Anti-Semitism, 1939-1940 (Faber & Faber, 2015)

Counter-fascists

• Beckman, Morris, The 43 Group: Battling with Mosley’s Blackshirts (History Press, 2013)
• Hemming, Henry, M: Maxwell Knight, MI5’s Greatest Spymaster (Random House, 2017)

6. References

1. Churchill, ‘The Infernal Twins: Two Unpleasant Religions – Fascism and Communism’, p. 12.

2. Winston S. Churchill, ‘Situation at Bilbao’, Hansard, 1937.

3. A.W. Brian Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention Without Trial in Wartime Britain (Clarendon Press, 1994), p. 391.

4. Viscount Rothermere, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’, Daily Mail, 15 January 1934.

5. Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9 (Constable, 1980), p. 355.

6. A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945, Oxford History of England (Oxford University Press, UK, 2001), p. 534.