In October 1968, Britain’s most famous fascist, Sir Oswald Mosley, published his memoirs. His autobiography, My Life, attracted substantial coverage and broadly favourable reviews in several British newspapers, including The Times and the Daily Telegraph.Footnote ¹ These featured many examples of the kind of myths, misconceptions, and apologias that have come to shape Mosley’s place in Britain’s national memory. Reviewers excused Mosley of the charge of being personally anti-semitic and remained silent on Mosley’s white supremacist rabble-rousing against Commonwealth migrants in the 1950s and 1960s. They wrote of him as a proto-Keynesian economist, a kind of Icarus of mid twentieth-century British politics; an intellectually vibrant, prophetic, and ambitious political thinker but one who, regrettably, flew too close to a swastika shaped sun.

By the time of the publication of his autobiography, Mosley was 71. The book represented his latest effort at political writing, part of a long campaign to present himself as a serious and respectable political philosopher. Of all of Britain’s fascist leaders, Mosley nursed literary and intellectual pretensions most intensely. Around his British Union of Fascists (BUF), Mosley created several national and local party newspapers, publishing imprints, and pseudo-scholarly journals. Mosley also authored a series of books, manifestoes, and pamphlets himself, while recordings of Mosley’s speeches were available for purchase to his adoring followers. Nor was this just about Mosley. Alongside their literary ‘Leader’– equal parts man of action and man of letters – the BUF attracted others with literary ambitions, as well as established writers.

In this chapter, we consider the genres, formats and styles of the political writings and literary culture of British fascism. We contend that a study of the published output of British fascist organisations, their aesthetic and cultural performance of words and texts, and their construction of a British fascist culture illuminates the ways in which fascism in Britain than is normally assumed. The chapter maintains that British fascism was more than a straightforward imitation of continental fascism. Moreover, it demonstrates that far from being rooted in a fascist parallel political universe, British fascism was rooted in what we would recognise as mainstream British politics, culture, and history.

The literary activities and pretensions of Britain’s fascists have largely been overlooked. In the 2004 collection The Culture of Fascism: Visions of the Far Right in Britain, the editors remarked that ‘[t]he empirical approach’ to the study of British fascism ‘has constructed a narrative of the far Right’s political marginality, personal eccentricity and quirkiness, and “otherness”’.Footnote ² Two decades on, the field of ‘fascist studies’ remains in this empirical rut. With some exceptions, much of the historical writing on British fascism has treated the movement as distinct from Britain’s political culture and its broader history.Footnote ³ Taking this methodological approach and focusing on genres of political writing, and juxtaposing British fascist writing with that of other political hues, should persuade us that Britain’s fascism did not, in fact, occupy a parallel political universe.

The aforementioned Culture of Fascism collection responded to the then recent ‘cultural turn’ in fascist studies. Where subsequent studies departed from studying fascism through this lens, either preoccupied with psephological analyses of fascist electoral performance or else with hiving off fascist movements as isolated political subcultures, this chapter seeks to revive the ‘joined-up’ approach to the study of British fascism pioneered by historians of political culture. It builds upon the small collection of studies that have focused on the print culture and public relations strategy of the British fascist movement and broader ‘radical Right’.Footnote ⁴ It shares the conviction behind David Vessey’s recent work that we should think about the political right in inter-war Britain as a broad formation, in which the fascist press overlapped with ‘radical Right’ periodicals like the Saturday Review as well as more respectable national newspapers like the Daily Mail and Daily Express.Footnote ⁵

Tracing the continuity and genealogy of political ideas is an important part of developing our understanding and analysis of British fascism in innovative, critical, and, above all, actually interesting directions. Thinking in terms of ‘genealogy’, political writing formed the branches and sinews that linked together the political ‘family tree’ out of which British fascism sprouted and developed. Political writing was central to the British fascist movement, both in terms of the political writing activists did themselves and the political writing that they consumed. This chapter focuses partly on the production and consumption of political writing by Mosley’s inter-war British Union of Fascists. It also traces the longer history of British fascism, beginning with the BUF’s ideological forerunners, the British white supremacist and reactionary groups of the 1920s, including the anti-semitic literary society The Britons, Britain’s first self-identifying fascist organisation, the British Fascisti (BF), and the Imperial Fascist League, which broke away from the BF in the late 1920s.

Political Writing and the Emergence of British Fascism

In the case of British fascism, political writing preceded the political movement. What became the British fascist movement during the early 1920s was forged out of three overlapping ‘genres’ of political writing: die-hard Conservative political periodicals, anti-semitic conspiracy theory literature, and ‘white crisis’ literature.Footnote ⁶ ‘Die-hard’ Conservatism refers to a ‘fragmented movement of opinion’ comprising Conservative MPs, peers, and party supporters concerned with the preservation of ‘traditional’ authority, aristocratic privilege, and the preservation of the Empire.Footnote ⁷ The Die-hards were deeply dissatisfied with the performance of David Lloyd George’s second coalition government, especially when it came to crises in Ireland, India, and Egypt. The radical Right was horrified and mobilised by the Bolshevik Revolution and preoccupied with fears of the ‘Reds’ and ‘Pinks’ closer to home. By the time of Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ in October 1922, this section of opinion was hungry for something of a more assertively reactionary flavour when it came to the home front and the imperial frontier.

For this radical wedge of die-hard reaction, dissatisfaction became a full-blown panic about a civilisational crisis with the arrival in Britain of an English translation of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion – the infamous (and famously bogus) anti-semitic outline of Jewish world plot – in the autumn of 1919. The English manuscript of The Protocols was initially delivered to H. A. Gwynne, editor of the die-hard daily newspaper, the Morning Post, who shared it with Lady Bathurst, the Morning Post’s proprietor, and his friend and mentor, Rudyard Kipling, as well as with several others.Footnote ⁸ During the summer of 1920, this led to the publication of ‘The Cause of the World Unrest’, a serialised exposé in Morning Post of the contents of The Protocols that offered a decidedly imperialist interpretation of a document that ostensibly had little to do with the British Empire. Contributors to the series included Gwynne; another member of the Morning Post’s staff named Ian Colvin; the so-called ‘grand dame of British conspiracy theory’, the writer Nesta Webster; and several others.Footnote ⁹

At around the same time, Britain’s first white supremacist organisation came into being. The Britons was founded in 1919. Its founder was an ex-soldier, former Ceylon tea-planter, and southern African settler-farmer, Henry Hamilton Beamish, and beyond Beamish the organisation consisted of a rag-tag group of ex-servicemen, ex-imperial administrators, imperial explorers, itinerant colonial labourers, and eugenicists. The group held its inaugural meeting on 18 July 1919, although its leading members often repeated the lie that it had been founded earlier to give the impression it had emerged out of the patriotic fervour of the First World War. In ideological terms, The Britons were pre-fascist; to call them ‘proto-fascist’ feels narrowly teleological. They were not simply a British forerunner of Mussolini. Rather, they represented a fusion of experiences and prejudices acquired as a result of British settler-colonialism, late nineteenth-century imperialist anti-semitism energised by the South African War, and the influence of American racist and conspiracy theorist literature by ‘Nordicist’ writers like eugenicist and conservationist Madison Grant and moustachioed Klansman Lothrop Stoddard.

Estimates of membership, based on records of average attendance at the meetings The Britons held, range from 30 to 50 members. Additionally, Special Branch officers estimated that their newspaper enjoyed a circulation of about 150 a month.Footnote ¹⁰ Though tiny, the group played an energetic role in the creation and dissemination of anti-semitic and white supremacist political writing. The organisation’s activities began in earnest in 1920, when The Britons negotiated a deal to take over the publishing of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Eyre & Spottiswoode, the company responsible for the first English edition.Footnote ¹¹ Beyond The Protocols, they also championed the anti-semitic pamphleteering of American automotive magnate and later Hitler devotee, Henry Ford, disseminating copies of his newspaper the Dearborn Independent in Britain.Footnote ¹²

Their newspaper – initially published under the title Jewry Ueber Alles and later changed to The Hidden Hand or Jewry Ueber Alles and finally to The British Guardian – reveals clues as to the other kinds of political writing that fuelled and shaped the prejudices of The Britons. In 1924, Professor George Mudge, a founding member of The Britons, and professor of zoology at the University of London, provided an elaboration on the group’s ideology of ‘Nordic’ supremacy in a series of articles entitled ‘The Pride of Race’.Footnote ¹³ Mudge’s articles make heavy use of eugenicist terminology borrowed from the work of Madison Grant and quoted from Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race.Footnote ¹⁴

Alongside this, in a series of other pamphlets and articles in their newspapers, pseudo-scientists, pseudo-historians, and pseudo-archaeologists projected the battle between the ‘Nordic’ or ‘Aryan’ race (terms they used interchangeably) and the ‘Jewish power’ back into the distant past. In doing so, they made use of the old Orientalist theories of Anglo-Indian scholars dating back to the late eighteenth century, which were originally used to justify British domination of India.Footnote ¹⁵ The Britons appropriated theories about the foundation of ancient Indian civilisation by light-skinned ‘Aryan’ invaders, claimed as the ancient ancestors of British colonisers, and its ruin at the hands of dark-skinned barbarian ‘Dravidians’. They further credited Aryan initiative and other qualities not only for the splendour of ancient India but also for the advancements of ancient civilisations in India, Egypt, Greece, Rome, and Sumer. As in the original Orientalist narrative, the amateur racial theorists among The Britons attributed the fall of these great civilisations to racial mixture. However, they also fused old Orientalism with anti-semitism. The author of one pamphlet, writing under the pseudonym ‘Apionus’, claimed that ‘Semitic’ subversion played a key role in the fall of great civilisations from Babylon and Rome right through to the French Ancien Régime and Tsarist Russia.Footnote ¹⁶ The Britons fused Orientalist pseudo-history with anti-semitic conspiracy, crafting object lessons and warnings of the potential future which might befall the British Empire.

Though the political writing that which they produced might initially appear rather esoteric, there is some evidence that the organisation maintained links to the ‘mainstream’ political right. They republished, in pamphlet form, the writings of die-hard Conservative, former Governor of Victoria (1901–1903) and Bombay (1907–1913), and anti-semite, Lord Sydenham of Combe.Footnote ¹⁷ The Britons also appear to have had some kind of political relationship with Henry Page Croft’s National Constitutional Association (NCA). Before it returned to the Tory fold in early 1921, the NCA was known as the National Party, a xenophobic, militarist, imperialist party that broke away from the Conservatives in 1917.Footnote ¹⁸ The NCA’s National Opinion newspaper recommended and advertised publications produced and sold by The Britons as informative texts on the ‘Jewish Question’.Footnote ¹⁹

Not long after the founding of The Britons, its leader, Henry Hamilton Beamish, fled Britain for Southern Rhodesia to avoid fines for a libel charge brought against him by Sir Albert Mond, the First Commissioner of Works. Beamish had accused Mond (of German-Jewish extraction) of providing financial assistance to Germany during the First World War. In his stead, the homeopath Dr J. H. Clarke assumed leadership of the organisation, which was then later taken over by J. D. Dell. From 1925, its journal ceased to appear altogether, and it confined its activities more or less entirely to publishing. Nevertheless, The Britons left a durable and entirely poisonous political legacy that extended beyond the inter-war period. From the 1920s right through to the 1970s, they provided nourishment to the most extreme, most openly Nazi and (in the post-war period) neo-Nazi sections of the British fascist movement. They continued to publish an English edition of The Protocols, and by 1968 were issuing their eighty-fourth impression of the work. Beamish also acted as a mentor to Arnold Leese, a former veterinary specialist in the treatment of camels and, later, founder of the Imperial Fascist League, a breakaway group from the British Fascisti in 1928. Leese took the torch of white supremacist politics from Beamish and The Britons. Through Leese’s obsessive activism and prolific political writing, the political writing produced and disseminated by The Britons acted as a key ideological influence on a new generation of fascist activists in the 1950s.

Away from The Britons and their white supremacist networks of political writing, the frustrated aristocrats on the most reactionary rightward end of die-hard Conservatism continued their agitation. The Morning Post dropped its promotion of The Protocols shortly after they were unmasked as fraudulent.Footnote ²⁰ However, for other die-hard Conservatives, The Protocols confirmed and connected all of their worst fears in a way that was far too persuasive to let facts get in the way. For Alan Ian Percy, the Eighth Duke of Northumberland, The Protocols confirmed his conviction that unseen forces were operating against the British Empire. He used his journal, The Patriot, as a mouthpiece for these views. Northumberland was a signatory of the 1922 ‘Die-Hard’ manifesto and ‘the alternative leader of the Die-hards’ next to Lord Salisbury and John Gretton MP.Footnote ²¹ Northumberland’s Boswell Press also printed a range of right-wing conspiracy theory literature.

Months before Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ or the emergence of the first self-identifying fascist organisation in Europe, Northumberland was already pining in the pages of The Patriot for a ‘resuscitation of Conservatism’ to establish ‘strong government’ and save the Empire from ‘Democracy’ and ‘Socialist bureaucracy’.Footnote ²² The journal functioned as a forum for those attempting such a resuscitation. In late 1922, it offered supportive coverage and column inches to a short-lived reactionary organisation called the Loyalty League, led by a veteran army officer and former Royal Irish Constabulary district commissioner, Brigadier-General Cyril Prescott Decie.Footnote ²³ The Loyalty League burst onto the political scene a few weeks before the ‘March on Rome’ and shortly before the general election of November 1922.Footnote ²⁴ Members of the League variously styled it as anti-communist, a British equivalent to the Italian ‘Fascisti’, and ‘an information bureau’.Footnote ²⁵

While relatively little was heard from the Loyalty League after 1922, the calls for a more radically assertive reactionary movement continued unabated. With the rise of Mussolini, they only grew in volume. Looking to Italy, while thinking also of recent imperial controversies, an early article discussing the Italian fascisti longingly pondered whether ‘Ireland might have been saved from her present anarchy if she had possessed a Mussolini.’Footnote ²⁶ In The Patriot’s letters pages at around the same time, one lieutenant-colonel thundered that:

Four months later, the first of six advertisements appeared in the back pages of The Patriot for a group calling themselves the British Fascisti and appealing enigmatically to ‘[a]ny reader interested in purely practical work of a definite nature’.Footnote ²⁸

The British Fascisti (1923–1935)

Rotha Lintorn-Orman, a public-spirited young woman from a prestigious colonial-military family, placed those adverts in The Patriot.Footnote ²⁹ She went on to found and lead the first British organisation to call itself ‘fascist’. The British Fascisti (or BF) grew to an estimated 30,000 members at its height.Footnote ³⁰ Around this burgeoning movement, Lintorn-Orman and her followers established their own newspaper, published under various titles throughout the group’s existence as The Fascist Bulletin, The British Lion, and simply British Fascism. Though it never developed the same kind of large-scale operation as Mosley‘s BUF, through their publications and political activities, they constructed a rudimentary British fascist political culture.

Early British fascist political writing ‘spoke’ with the ‘voice’ of the colonial officer class. Many of its most prominent members had served, worked, travelled, or lived out in the Empire. Its ranks contained former Indian colonial police officers, veterans of colonial military campaigns from Khartoum to the North-West Frontier, and high-ranking intelligence officers who served in the Irish War of Independence. These experiences meant that early British fascist political writing was characterised by a rhetoric of ‘anxiety, fear and angst’ – in short, the language of colonial panic.Footnote ³¹ As a political project, both in word and deed, early British fascism was shaped by the fear of a collapse of power, on the one hand, before the black masses abroad in the Empire and, on the other, before an increasingly militant and ‘Bolshevised’ working class at home.

One leading figure in this conspiracy craze – the writer Nesta Webster – served as a member of the British Fascisti’s ruling ‘Grand Council’ from 1926 to 1927 and exerted a formative influence on the group’s ideology.Footnote ³² Webster had also been a contributor to the Morning Post’s ‘The Cause of the World Unrest’ series and to Northumberland’s journal The Patriot. A deeply eccentric figure, Webster argued that a coordinated body of Freemasons, the Illuminati and ‘German-Jews’ lurked behind all of the British Empire’s enemies from Ireland to India.Footnote ³³ However, Webster’s ideas reflected more than her own personal eccentricities. Her analyses spoke to a vein of casual anti-semitism and conspiracy-mindedness within British imperial thinking. Webster had travelled the British Empire extensively and even married the son of a well-established Anglo-Indian family who was also a superintendent in the Indian imperial police.Footnote ³⁴ Her grand narratives of anti-imperial plots clearly struck a nerve among her fellow men and women ‘on the spot’, even attracting plaudits from Winston Churchill in 1920.Footnote ³⁵

British Fascisti members articulated their movement’s aims and intentions as primarily defensive, an auxiliary response to the sinister world plot outlined in Webster’s books. In one of the first manifestoes printed in their newspaper, the British Fascisti defined their aim as to defend ‘the British Constitution and Empire’ from the forces of sedition and even from ‘the constitutional authority’ itself, if it ever became ‘treacherous’.Footnote ³⁶ They essentially imagined the extensive application of the ethos of colonial military service, that of taking whatever steps necessary to ensure the maintenance of law and order, reinstating this throughout the Empire as well as applying it in the metropole.

The active section of the British Fascisti’s membership spent their time preparing for the crisis that they anticipated in their political writings. Within this context, their newspapers also acted as an organisational tool, including branch details and meeting reports from groups both within and beyond the United Kingdom. The group was organised into paramilitary units, with (from 1927) a uniform of a dark blue shirt, to which they added (from the early 1930s) a beret and a pair of dark trousers or a skirt. British Fascisti members engaged in military drills and made a habit of carrying small firearms without a permit.Footnote ³⁷ BF members also took the fight to the allegedly seditious elements in Britain whom they saw as agents of the plot against the British Empire, breaking up Communist Party meetings and providing security for anti-communist political meetings.Footnote ³⁸ Just as contributions to their newspapers often looked back to the glory days of the Empire or the memory of heroism in the Great War, their members also held marches and demonstrations to commemorate Empire Day and Remembrance Day.Footnote ³⁹

A Times newspaper report on one such march noted the ‘large number [of] women’ in attendance. While the exact number of female members of the British Fascisti remains difficult to determine, they constituted a significant and visible activist presence. Their newspapers featured political writing by and for women, on perceived ‘women’s issues’ and women’s political role in the fascist movement. The British Fascisti newspaper and pamphlets provided a key forum for the discussion and promotion of youth work by the so-called the ‘Women’s Unit of the British Fascists’. The women involved articulated and advocated their activities as a form of ‘Empire building work’ to which women fascists were uniquely suited.

This youth work took the form of Fascist Children’s Clubs, founded by Lintorn-Orman and several other women fascists in 1925. By February 1926, their newspaper claimed that there were now 30 Children’s Clubs with an overall membership of 1,000.Footnote ⁴⁰ While we should take these numbers with a pinch of salt, there is evidence that the Clubs existed throughout the United Kingdom as far as Belfast and remained active as late as 1934, just one year before the collapse of the British Fascisti. The Clubs provided their members with a combination of physical, ‘moral’, and political education in a manner reminiscent of Robert Baden-Powell’s Scout Movement.Footnote ⁴¹ Lintorn-Orman herself had been an early ‘Girl Scout’ – one of the keen young women who anticipated the founding of the Girl Guides.Footnote ⁴² As well as a range of Scout-like activities, this section of the movement also produced political writing targeted at younger audiences.Footnote ⁴³ Through the Children’s Clubs, they distributed the kind of books that they thought would provide children with a fascist political education. In one case, a fascist activist named Lieutenant-Colonel A. H. Lane presented one hundred copies of his anti-immigration diatribe The Alien Menace to members of the Fascist Children’s Clubs.Footnote ⁴⁴

Elsewhere, one edition of their newspaper in 1926 contained a New Year’s message addressed to ‘The Children’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This leaflet-length address, envisioned as the first issue of a regular publication that seems never to have materialised, contained a few short poems and rhymes, a story, a competition, and a rule or moral. It also included a letter from a British Fascisti member who had recently visited the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. The contents of this letter read like a plagiarised extract from Scouting for Boys, encouraging young fascists to emulate the ‘heroes of old’, the ‘gallant British gentlemen [and women]’ who left home and struck out overseas to find their fortune and forge an ever-larger empire. Elsewhere, their newspaper featured a ‘Fascist Children’s Creed’ very similar to the ‘Scout Promise’.Footnote ⁴⁶

The BF’s forays into youth political organising, and the accompanying literary efforts, represented a fascist adoption and adaption of wider trends. The expansion of the franchise after 1918 led to increased competition for an increased pool of voters and this led ‘to a drive to politicize youth’.Footnote ⁴⁷ The form and tone of the Fascist Children’s Clubs and their publications bore semblance to the kinds of material seen not only in the Scout Movement’s The Scout magazine but also from Conservative Party youth groups like the Junior Imperial League (JIL), with their newspaper The Imp, and the Young Britons League (YBL), with their The Young Briton. Founded in 1906, the JIL was revived in the 1920s, while the YBL represented a 1920s reinvigoration of the Primrose League youth group known as the ‘Buds’. These groups, both of which dwarfed the BF’s efforts, hoped to inculcate Conservative and imperialist principles in young people and to inoculate them against the Left’s efforts at youth political organising. Styled as ‘an empire league for children’, the YBL in particular bore striking similarities to the Fascist Children’s Clubs.Footnote ⁴⁸ Much like the BF’s sputtering attempts at children’s publications, the YBL made didactic use of their Young Briton magazine, which ‘regularly expound[ed] on British history, martial heroes, the constitution, and the empire’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Where Conservative youth groups represented an innovation in the age of mass democracy, in their attempts at youth organisation, the BF sought to harness democratic means and put them to authoritarian ends. As with much else of their political experimentation, their project was not merely imitative; they sought to create fascists out of a residual popular imperialism, not to drum up support for the already existing forces of parliamentary Conservatism.

With the formation of the British Union of Fascists in October 1932, the BF faced stiff competition for the fascist brand. By the early 1930s, the movement’s fortunes were in terminal decline, and their leader, Lintorn-Orman, was struggling with alcoholism. Enterprising members in the British Fascisti and the British Union Fascists made attempts to merge the two organisations, first in 1932 and again in 1934. Lintorn-Orman strenuously and successfully resisted both attempts. With this, several members of the British Fascisti’s leading ‘Grand Council’ jumped ship to the BUF. The Fascisti dwindled even further, finally foundering altogether with the death of Lintorn-Orman in 1935.

The Greater Britain on Page and Stage: Mosleyite Fascism

There was a significant shift in political status, positioning, and proximity to the centres of power when Sir Oswald Mosley began his faltering yet determined journey from Labour rebel to full-on fascist. While there are a number of continuities with the BF in terms of definitions of fascism, ideas about the state, and the institutionalisation and para-militarisation of fascist belief, Mosleyite fascism represented a new phase of the movement and its expressions. The intermediary New Party phase (1931–1932) was important too in determining the literary qualities and aesthetics (and artistic sophistication) of British fascism, even as many of the most intellectual figures – such as John Strachey and Harold Nicolson – abandoned Mosley once he enthusiastically adopted and adapted Mussolini’s fascism to the British terrain. The New Party phase was intellectually vibrant and vitalist, and the main publication, Action, edited by Nicolson, sought to provide a forum for the interplay of hitherto conflicting ideas, temperaments, and modes of political rhetoric.

In articulating ‘What this Paper Stands for’, Nicolson wrote that ‘our purpose, in a phrase, is to provide you with hope. To provide you with a new sense of purpose. To give you renewed zest’. The New Party’s watchwords were ‘Truth, Courage, Intelligence, Vigour’, with an editorial policy to match. As such, Action was a bit of a pastiche, combining political editorial, policy pronouncements, news of the New Party’s activities and organisation, set alongside book, theatre and film reviews, gardening advice (by the famous gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Nicolson), with a woman’s page and an ear for compelling human interest stories. It contained favourable reviews of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary; it advertised Henry Havelock Ellis’s More Essays on Love and Virtue; and Christopher Isherwood contributed an article on ‘The Youth Movement in the New Germany’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The New Party was to be the ‘modern movement’, an echo of the anti-modern modernism of Marinetti, the Futurists, and the British Vorticists.

Mosley developed his political writing in the New Party in an attempt to clarify his economic ideas, and, of course, as a means of gaining recruits. Action had an air of the debonair, the sophisticated, and the avant-garde, while it would be in the youth wing’s, NUPA’s, New Times (nos. 1–3. June–August/September 1932) where proto-fascist speech was given free rein. Mosley’s so-called ‘Biff Boys’ luxuriated in their own aggressive natures, their reaction, their puerile enjoyment of political violence, anti-semitism, and rage.

The assumptions of the literary merits, or lack thereof, of British fascist writing and literary production are largely based on the fact that British fascism quickly proved to be intellectually bankrupt, and that, within less than a decade from the publication of Mosley’s The Greater Britain (October 1932), the movement was an unmitigated political failure. This has too often led to the caricaturing of British fascism and of fascists as potential intellectuals or literary figures, and assumptions that there was little merit, interest, or quality to the movement’s literary productions. The most powerful narrative is that Mosley’s impact was not on policy or political ideas, but on public space and generating political spectacle of a kind that was new and innovative, while broadly unwelcome and easily parodied and satirised by an array of critics. This narrative was first articulated by contemporaries and opponents, as the comic portrayals of the BUF served as a powerful political tool in the multi-pronged fight against fascism. The automatic assumptions about the anti-intellectualism of fascism and the ideological sterility of Blackshirts – as Biff Boys and brutish, brainless Blackshirts – were born in the heat of political strife and have remained deeply branded in the historiography. But are these assumptions simplistic and, ultimately, counterproductive?

Certainly, performance took priority over substance from the advent of Mosleyite fascism. Already in the New Party ‘propagandists’ were being reminded: ‘it is the big drum, the show outside and the roar of the lion that draws the crowd in – showmanship pays. The average Englishman will follow any crowd. Get a crowd, then.’Footnote ⁵¹ Political spectacle quickly became the BUF’s stock and trade. For instance, it was after the Albert Hall meeting in 1934 – there is debate among historians as to whether it was at this meeting that political antisemitism was launched as BUF official policy – that Robert Bernays MP felt more certain than ever that the future of British democracy was in peril.Footnote ⁵² He noted that Mosley had pulled off a tour de force insofar as he spoke for an hour and thirty-five minutes in his celebrated oratorical style, without ‘a note and he never once stumbled’. But Bernays was unimpressed by the content of the over-long speech, noting a number of factual errors and weak argumentation, and that there was little ‘intellectual depth’. He was most shaken by Mosley’s appeal to the young men in his audience, who had ‘about them a fire and enthusiasm’.Footnote ⁵³ This example serves to underscore the way the political establishment identified Mosley as the man of action, the ‘Rudolph Valentino of Fascism’, and as such, bereft of political ideas.Footnote ⁵⁴

However, it is important to recognise the variety of political writing and the range of writers who represented fascist ideas and ideals in their work. Further, this can also support a keener understanding of British fascism as embedded and integrated into the British political and literary culture of the era. With this in mind, and turning to Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (1932–1940), it is important to think about the changing modes, styles, literary features, structures, graphics, and aesthetics of fascist literary production in the 1930s, especially as they reflect the evolution of fascist policy and theory on a range of issues such as race, class, and gender, and on matters of economics, political theory, empire, and foreign policy. Further, it should be stressed that fascist writers were not writing in a vacuum – ideas, styles, and designs ricocheted off respective political adversaries.

In the early phase of the movement, Mosley was given plenty of space in the national press. The main platform was Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and Sunday Dispatch newspapers, from late 1933 to mid-1934. Not only were BUF events favourably and extensively covered, but Mosley was given plenty of column inches to pontificate about the new creed and try to rouse Daily Mail readers to action. In true tabloid style, these articles were invariably accompanied by matinee idol–quality photographic portraits of Mosley. The mighty ‘Hurrah’ and the press exposure Rothermere provided so generously was not the only publicity the BUF was allowed, however.Footnote ⁵⁵ Up to 1935, Mosley was frequently invited onto the air waves. For example, in March 1933, he was pitted against Megan Lloyd George in a debate broadcast on the BBC, and this was followed up by a three-page article where he put his case across as to why ‘Does England Need Fascism?’ in The Listener.Footnote ⁵⁶ Here, Mosley emphasised that ‘our policy does not consist of academic theory or dreamy internationalism. Our policy meets the hard facts which face Great Britain, just as Fascism has met and overcome the particular problems which have faced other countries’ – a typical refrain about the rejection of intellectuals, talking shops, and ideologically driven political movements.

The various genres of fascist writing were weapons in what was as much a war of words and ideas as it was a battle for the state and the streets, at least in the British context. Perhaps, it is an obvious but no less an important point that British fascists were in competition with their opponents for the most effective means of disseminating their messages, all part of the same bellow and bluster of new ideas in a new age of mass communications, marketing, public relations, public opinion polling, and totalitarianism. While the ideas might have been diametrically opposed between, for example, Blackshirt and the Communist Party of Great Britain‘s Daily Worker, the forms, layout and rhetorical structures were comparable. Further, we should bear in mind that British fascism was grist to the mill for another genre of political writing and pamphleteering, a body of specifically anti-fascist political literature that existed to make a mockery of fascism in ideas and in practice, issue warnings about the menace of fascism, and expose the corruption and criminality of the movement and its members. John Strachey’s The Menace of Fascism (1933) was one of the pioneering works in this canon. Of course, this genre was given institutional form with the foundation of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, and, to a lesser extent, with the launch of the Penguin Specials.Footnote ⁵⁷

British fascist political writing must be seen in relation to its distribution and performance. There is little benefit in close textual analysis and literary criticism of British fascist political writing in isolation or divorced from the mode of dissemination. Newspapers were material objects and consumer products sold at meetings and on street corners. To put it anachronistically, they were the movement’s ‘merch’. Manifestoes were recruiting documents. An array of pamphlets on a great variety of subjects were sold on bookstands at political events, as well as at the BUF’s own book shops. It is difficult to know how many of these shops existed, and some only lasted a short time before ceasing to be economically viable – we have no official BUF records of membership or branches. Songs were sung on the march as an essential feature of fascist spectacle. Recordings of songs and speeches were then made available for purchase as gramophone records. Short stories, poetry, and novels (rarely of good quality) were intended to be instructive, didactic, and inspirational. Speeches were part of the elaborate choreography of fascist meetings and rallies. The BUF devoted considerable resources to training Blackshirts as speakers, and the movement placed a premium on public speaking, either through spontaneous presentations on the soapbox or through set-piece speeches at indoor meetings and rallies. Many of these speeches were then published in the BUF press, filmed or audio recorded and made into records. The gestural politics of fascism is well illustrated by the title of the aforementioned proto-fascist New Party weekly newspaper Action! (1931), and then the BUF’s more middlebrow and outward facing of its two weekly newspapers, again called Action! that ran from 1936 to 1940.

Certainly the state was concerned with the content, reach, and dissemination of fascist literature. In the systematic surveillance of the BUF, from 1933 Special Branch and MI5 tried to gauge support and the level of threat by monitoring the movement’s propaganda machine. In one example, they were aware of the BUF’s ‘Scheme for Provincial Bookshops’, and the pragmatic attempt to mobilise women Blackshirts to take charge of these shops and deal with requests for information.Footnote ⁵⁸ In another example, in November 1936, Special Branch was made aware that the British Union was trying to ‘win over’ D. B. Wyndham-Lewis, and to persuade him to become a contributor to Action. At the same time, the authorities were aware that through Lovat Dickson, of the publishing house L. Dickson Ltd., there were moves afoot to establish a Book Club which ‘while not openly fascist, would popularize books circulated to awaken sympathy for Fascism, in the same manner as the Left Book Club’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Further, and helpfully, Special Branch reports include print figures for the BUF’s newspapers, and in October 1937, for instance, these were as follows: ‘Action (Sept. 16,500, Oct. 17,500) and the Blackshirt (Sept. 12,250, Oct. 13,350)’.Footnote ⁶⁰ These figures do suggest that the BU was far more influential in print than it was by the measure of its active membership, which the authorities estimated at around 5,800 in January, 1938.

Is ‘Action’ the opposite of writing? What is the relationship between the pen and the sword? Fascist writing and writers struggled to reconcile the movement’s fundamental anti-intellectualism, its vitriol against the intelligentsia, with their own sense of stylistic possibility and self-importance. This then raises questions about British fascism’s relationship to Britain’s broader history, as well as its place within the broader universe of the political right. Spurning a conception of fascism as ‘other’ – concocted under the humanities’ equivalent of laboratory conditions – we need to critically analyse British fascism embedded in and constructed from a wider cultural and political context. While the movement inveighed against intellectuals, Modernist artists, Bloomsbury Group aesthetes, the allegedly ‘Judaic’ discipline of psychoanalysis, and literary decadence, ‘experts’ and ‘professionals’ were to be the backbone of the Corporate State. Many of these figures made all or part of their living from writing as well. Indeed, this discourse and the violent exchange of criticism and critique foreshadows the ‘culture wars’ of our own time.

As with most authoritarian movements, the cult of personality and the personal preferences of the dictator figure determine the tastes, styles, aesthetics, and literary and artistic modes of the organisation as a whole. This was certainly the case of the BUF, an organisation made in the image of its leader. Mosley was also foremost among the fascist literary figures. He had been hailed as a stylish rhetorician, a dynamic (if verbose) speaker, and a man of ideas rapt by the literary philosophising of writers like George Bernard Shaw and Oswald Spengler.Footnote ⁶¹ After breaking with the ‘party system’ and ‘old gang’ politics, and falling out with collaborators like the politician and bohemian diarist Harold Nicolson and Labourite-then-communist John Strachey, his new circle included British South African and Shakespeare enthusiast, A. K. Chesterton; English graduate and later ‘Lord Haw Haw’, William Joyce; and the so-called ‘Alfred Rosenberg of British fascism’, philosopher Alexander Raven Thomson. Away from high-minded fascist philosophising, other allies were well-versed in the literary medium, such as advertising man William E. D. Allen.Footnote ⁶² Allen, writing under the pseudonym James Drennan, published BUF: Oswald Mosley and British Fascism, a part puff-piece biography of ‘The Leader’ and part rumination on the political and cultural decadence of the era that called for the fascist revolution. In the book, Allen described fascism in terms of grandiloquent eroticism as the:

This Spenglerian overblown rhetoric was self-consciously European in other ways too. Drennan/Allen wished to differentiate the British fascist outlook from dominant expressions of British political culture, especially in terms of the place of humour:

British fascism, self-avowedly extremist and iconoclastic, had the stated purpose ‘to recall to British men and women those fundamental standards upon which the British people have built their national life during two thousand years of history, to proclaim those human values which, for men and women, are eternal’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Indeed, the place of humour or the inability and unwillingness of the movement to laugh at itself is a key characteristic of the British fascist aesthetic. The only humour permitted is that which parodies and degrades the political and racial other.

Beyond Drennan’s romantic language and highfalutin prose, the BUF’s published output featured the work of several fellow-travelling literary celebrities, including artists Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, and authors Henry Williamson (of Tarka the Otter fame) and Francis Yeats-Brown (author of the swashbuckling imperialist memoir The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, later adapted into one of Hitler‘s favourite films).Footnote ⁶⁵ The movement also nurtured literary talent, for example, Olive Hawks, who rose to the position of head of the Women’s Section in 1940, cut her literary teeth in the movement’s publications, and wrote her first novel while interned in Holloway Prison – a fictionalised account of a Blackshirt family in the East End of London titled What Hope for Green Street? (1945).

Surveying the genres of British fascist political writing is revealing of the movement’s ambition, strength, financial position, and, of course, a clear window onto its aspirations of establishing a British dictatorship, a dictatorship that was racially pure, determinately imperial, and economically autarkic. The British fascist movement produced and disseminated writing in almost every literary form. We know quite a lot about the BUF’s internal operations in this regard, and Mosley and others bankrolled the movement’s own publishing company, the Sanctuary Press and Abbey Supplies Ltd.

The BUF consistently published not one but two weekly newspapers: Blackshirt ran uninterrupted from 1933 to 1940; Fascist Week from 1933 to 1934, and Action: Britain First from 1936 to 1940. There were a number of local newsheets and bulletins for internal distribution, as well as the cyclostyled the Woman Fascist (1934, a limited run). The newspapers contained an array of materials – news articles, editorials, pen portraits of the movement’s leaders, poems, short stories, cartoons, book and film reviews, and a lot of visual material too (photography and graphic design). For example, the first issue of the 1936 run of Action contained a review of Korda’s new film of H. G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come. The reviewer judged that it was a film ‘British people can truly be proud of’, despite the fact that it offered a dystopian rendering of a fascist state.Footnote ⁶⁶ But in that same first issue, one column set out the intended seriousness of the newspaper’s style; it was to be the literary embodiment of the creed of action and the rebirth of the British spirit: ‘It will not be required of us that we should attempt to find a mellow style or strike a reassuring note. This is no time either for belles lettres or for the Utopian policies of the flaneur.’Footnote ⁶⁷

Alongside the newspapers, longer-form policy documents were published as pamphlets, and usually in accord with an established template. By the mid-1930s the BUF wished to assert the scholarly calibre of fascist theory, and therefore began publishing a (pseudo)academic journal, the Fascist Quarterly (later titled British Union Quarterly) from 1935 to 1940.Footnote ⁶⁸ The Fascist Quarterly was launched in 1935 (1935–1936) with the stated aim of formulating and articulating ‘the intellectual background of the Fascist creed’.Footnote ⁶⁹ In 1937, it was renamed the British Union Quarterly (1937–1940), published by Action Press. It contained everything from articles on the philosophy and economics of fascism, to commentary on colonial and foreign policy from BUF members and guest writers (including Joseph Goebbels; Ezra Pound; and, on one occasion, Norwegian future ‘fifth columnist’, Vidkun Quisling), and British fascist literary appraisals of the work of figures like Thomas Carlyle and William Morris.Footnote ⁷⁰ There were also links with other highbrow and commercially minded publishing enterprises, such as the Right Book Club, an attempt to create a competitor enterprise to Victor Gollancz’s much more successful Left Book Club.Footnote ⁷¹

A focus on fascist political writing exposes the common assumption that British fascism was an alien European import cordoned off from British political culture writ large. Instead, we are suggesting that it was an enduring feature of British metropolitan and imperial political culture. By reviewing the full range of British fascist literary production, we come to understand the movement in the round and as a whole, and not merely as a spectacular political failure. We need to highlight the performative nature of fascist language – songs, poetry, selling of the papers, speeches, rallies, etc. – in order to measure the full impact of British fascism on the movement’s followers and on the parameters of the political discourse of inter-war Britain. The exchange of ideas and political aesthetics was two-way and much more interactive than we might at first suppose. As all fascist movements, the BUF aestheticised politics, and part and parcel of this was what was written on the page, and the development of a distinctly British fascist literary aesthetic. It is by surveying the range of literary production and the place of these texts in the performance of British fascism that we are better able to situate the movement’s literary output within the context of the genres of political writing of their political opponents, rivals, and competitors.