British Union of Fascists

Based on Wikipedia: British Union of Fascists

In 1914, a woman named Norah Elam was thrown into Holloway Prison alongside Emmeline Pankhurst, the legendary leader of the suffragette movement. Elam was fighting for women's right to vote. Twenty-six years later, she would return to that same prison, locked up with Diana Mosley, wife of the British fascist leader. This time, she was fighting for something very different.

The journey from suffragette to fascist sounds impossible. Yet it happened again and again in interwar Britain, and the story of how it happened tells us something unsettling about the nature of political movements and the strange paths people take through them.

A Young Man in a Hurry

Oswald Mosley was, by all accounts, brilliant and impatient. He became the youngest elected Conservative Member of Parliament in Britain, then promptly crossed the floor to join the Labour Party. He was the sort of politician who believed he had answers while everyone else was asking the wrong questions.

By 1930, Britain was drowning in unemployment. Mosley, now serving in Ramsay MacDonald's Labour government, drafted what became known as the Mosley Memorandum. It was remarkably prescient, blending protective trade policies with ideas that would later be associated with John Maynard Keynes, the economist whose theories would eventually reshape Western economies after the Second World War. Mosley wanted the government to spend its way out of the depression, creating jobs through public works.

Labour rejected his plan.

So Mosley did what impatient men do. He quit and started his own party.

The New Party launched in early 1931, and for a brief moment it seemed promising. At a by-election in Ashton-under-Lyne, a working-class town in Lancashire, the party won sixteen percent of the vote. But that would be the high-water mark. The party went nowhere.

Then Mosley made a pilgrimage that would change everything. In January 1932, he traveled to Italy to meet Benito Mussolini.

The Blackshirts Arrive

Mussolini's fascist movement had seized power in Italy a decade earlier, and to many observers in the 1930s, it looked like the future. The trains ran on time, or so people said. The chaos of democratic squabbling had been replaced by decisive action. Italy seemed to be modernizing while Britain languished.

Mosley returned converted. He wound up the New Party but kept its youth movement intact. These young men would form the nucleus of something new. He spent the summer writing a book called The Greater Britain, laying out his vision of a fascist state.

On October 1, 1932, in a building on Great George Street in London, Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, known universally as the BUF. Its members adopted the black shirts of Mussolini's Italian movement, and "Blackshirts" became their common name.

The movement grew with startling speed. At its peak, the BUF claimed fifty thousand members. Lord Rothermere, the powerful press baron who owned the Daily Mail, threw his support behind them. The Mail ran a headline that would become infamous: "Hurrah for the Blackshirts!"

For a moment, it seemed fascism might actually take root in Britain.

The Women in Black

Here is where the story takes its strangest turn. The British Union of Fascists attracted women in remarkable numbers. Eventually, one in four members was female. And among the most prominent were veterans of the suffragette movement.

How could this be? How could women who had fought for democratic rights, who had been imprisoned and force-fed, who had endured violence for the cause of equality, end up marching in fascist uniforms?

The answers are multiple and uncomfortable.

First, there was energy. The suffragette movement had been thrilling, dangerous, purposeful. Many former suffragettes found ordinary politics dull by comparison. The BUF had that same crackling intensity, that sense of being part of something revolutionary.

Second, and more substantively, the BUF made promises to women that mainstream parties would not. Unlike fascist movements in Germany and Italy, which pushed women firmly back into domesticity, the British version claimed it would do no such thing. Mosley promised equal wages. He promised to end the marriage bar, the common practice of firing women from their jobs the moment they wed. He promised state support for new mothers and access to birth control.

Were these promises sincere? Mosley himself said the motivation was "making the best use of women's skills in state interest" rather than feminism. But for women in economically depressed Lancashire, watching their job prospects disappear, the promises were enough.

Mary Richardson, who had once slashed the Rokeby Venus painting in the National Gallery as a suffragette protest, became head of the BUF's women's section. Mary Sophia Allen, who had led suffragette activities in western England and later commanded a women's police volunteer force, became a prominent speaker after visiting Nazi Germany "to learn the truth about the position of German womanhood."

Mosley himself seemed to understand the propaganda value of these connections. When he announced Norah Elam as a parliamentary candidate in 1936, he declared that her candidacy "killed for all time the suggestion that National Socialism proposed putting British women back into the home."

Violence in the Streets

But the BUF was never just about policies and promises. It had a paramilitary wing called the Fascist Defence Force, and the clashes with opponents grew increasingly brutal.

The turning point came in June 1934, at Olympia, the great exhibition hall in west London. Mosley had organized a massive rally. Anti-fascist protesters infiltrated the crowd, intent on disruption. What followed shocked the nation.

BUF stewards didn't just remove the protesters. They beat them savagely. Witnesses described scenes of organized brutality. One observer wrote that he "came to the conclusion that Mosley was a political maniac, and that all decent English people must combine to kill his movement."

The Daily Mail withdrew its support. Lord Rothermere distanced himself. Middle-class members who had been attracted by Mosley's economic ideas began to drift away.

The violence didn't stop. In the East End of London, where a large Jewish community lived alongside working-class English families, the BUF found both support and fierce opposition. The party had been moving in an increasingly antisemitic direction, influenced by Nazi sympathizers within its ranks like William Joyce, who would later become infamous as "Lord Haw-Haw," broadcasting Nazi propaganda to Britain during the war.

In October 1936, Mosley announced that the BUF would march through Cable Street in the heart of the Jewish East End. What followed became legend.

The Battle of Cable Street

The anti-fascists built barricades. Jewish residents, the Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party, and the Communist Party of Great Britain joined forces. When the Blackshirts tried to march, they found the streets blocked by tens of thousands of opponents chanting "They shall not pass!"

The police tried to clear a path, but the resistance was too strong. The march was stopped. Cable Street became a symbol of successful anti-fascist resistance, celebrated to this day.

Yet the story is more complicated than the legend suggests. The BUF continued to operate in the East End after Cable Street. They staged other marches without incident, just not on Cable Street itself. In the London County Council elections of March 1937, the party polled almost eight thousand votes in the neighborhoods of Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, and Limehouse. They elected a handful of local councillors in various parts of the country during the 1930s.

Still, the trend was unmistakable. The movement was shrinking.

The Slow Decline

The British government passed the Public Order Act of 1936, which banned political uniforms and required police approval for political marches. For a movement that called itself the Blackshirts, the loss of uniforms was more than symbolic. The act stripped away the pageantry that had made the BUF seem exciting and modern.

Internal divisions also weakened the party. In 1937, William Joyce and other hardcore Nazi sympathizers split away to form the National Socialist League. The league collapsed quickly, with most of its members eventually interned during the war. Mosley later called Joyce a traitor and condemned his extreme antisemitism, though the BUF's own record on this was hardly clean.

Historians have since revealed that the Nazi government secretly donated roughly fifty thousand pounds to the BUF, a substantial sum. The British press persistently associated Mosley's movement with Hitler's Germany, and as relations between the two countries deteriorated, this association became toxic.

By 1939, total membership had fallen to around twenty thousand, with fewer than six thousand actively participating. More than half were concentrated in Greater London.

Ironically, it was the approach of war that gave the BUF a final surge of relevance. Mosley reoriented the party around opposition to what he called another unnecessary European war. At the peak of this peace campaign, in July 1939, he addressed an audience of eleven thousand at Earl's Court. His message was steeped in antisemitism, blaming "Jewish finance" for pushing Britain toward conflict.

The End

When war came in September 1939, the BUF continued its anti-war campaign. This was a fatal mistake.

On May 23, 1940, with German forces sweeping through France and the threat of invasion looming, the British government acted. Mosley and approximately 740 other party members were arrested and interned under Defence Regulation 18B, a wartime measure allowing detention without trial.

The BUF issued a statement calling on its followers to resist any German invasion. It was too late. On July 10, 1940, the party was declared unlawful and ceased to exist.

Among those interned was Diana Mitford, one of the famous Mitford sisters. She had married Mosley in 1936, with Adolf Hitler as a wedding guest. Her sister Unity had been so devoted to Hitler that she shot herself in the head when Britain declared war on Germany. She survived, brain-damaged, and died in 1948.

And in Holloway Prison, Diana Mitford found herself sharing space with Norah Elam, the former suffragette, who had come full circle to the place where her political journey began.

The Strange Fellowship

The roster of BUF members and supporters reads like a peculiar cross-section of British society. There were aristocrats: the eighth Earl of Glasgow, the twenty-second Earl of Erroll, the twelfth Duke of Bedford, multiple members of the House of Lords. There was Malcolm Campbell, the racing driver who set land speed records. There was Arthur Gilligan, who had captained the England cricket team.

There were also people whose stories would take darker turns. Frank Bossard joined the Royal Air Force, and after the war became a Soviet spy. Theodore Schurch was a Nazi collaborator who would become the last person executed in Britain for a crime other than murder.

And there was Ted "Kid" Lewis, a Jewish boxing champion who left the party when its antisemitism became overt. His presence raises questions that are difficult to answer. What did he think he was joining? What did any of them think they were joining?

William Edward David Allen, a former Unionist Member of Parliament from Belfast, turned out to be working for MI5, the British intelligence service, as an agent inside the movement. Even among the fascists, things were not what they seemed.

The Afterlife

Mosley survived internment and attempted to return to politics after the war. He founded the Union Movement and campaigned for a united Europe, of all things. He stood for Parliament multiple times. He failed every time.

Two former BUF members, Jocelyn Lucas and Harold Soref, were later elected as Conservative Members of Parliament, their fascist past apparently no barrier to respectable political careers.

The British Union of Fascists existed for less than eight years. It never won a parliamentary seat. Its most lasting legacy may be Cable Street, remembered not as a fascist achievement but as a defeat.

Yet the movement's story illuminates something important about the nature of political extremism. It attracted idealists and opportunists, aristocrats and street fighters, former suffragettes and Nazi sympathizers. It promised modernity and economic salvation. It descended into antisemitism and violence. It was, in the end, stopped, not just by government action, but by ordinary people who stood in the streets and refused to let it pass.

The Urban Paradox

There is a curious tension at the heart of fascism that the British experience illustrates perfectly. Fascist movements typically romanticize rural life, tradition, and the supposed purity of the countryside. They despise the chaos and mixing of the city, the cosmopolitan culture, the diversity.

And yet fascism is fundamentally an urban phenomenon. The BUF's stronghold was in the East End of London. Its rallies filled urban exhibition halls. Its street fighters clashed with opponents on city streets. Its sophisticated propaganda depended on modern mass media.

Fascism despises the city but is of the city. It cannot exist without the very urban modernity it claims to oppose. This contradiction never resolved itself in the BUF, any more than it resolved itself in Italian or German fascism.

Perhaps that internal contradiction helps explain why the movement ultimately failed. Perhaps the British simply had too much stubborn common sense to embrace such theatrical politics. Perhaps the memory of the First World War was too fresh, the suspicion of continental ideologies too strong.

Or perhaps we should not be too complacent. The BUF at its peak had fifty thousand members and the support of major newspapers. It took economic depression to create the conditions for its growth, and economic recovery and war to finally kill it. The conditions that produce such movements do not disappear forever. They only go dormant.