The man known to history as Oswald Mosley was born on the 16th of November 1896 on Hill Street in Mayfair in London. His father was Sir Oswald Mosley, fifth baronet Mosley. The baronetage had been introduced in Britain in the seventeenth century as a rank of minor nobility. The Mosleys were a lower-ranking scion of the British aristocracy with considerable financial independence. The Mosleys traced their lineage all the way back to the twelfth century and the early stages of Norman rule in England. Sir Oswald served for a time in the military during Oswald Jr’s youth, notably in
Egypt, a British protectorate which had been effectively conquered in 1882 to secure Britain’s interest in the Suez Canal and the sea route it provided to British India. Young Oswald’s mother was Katharine Maud Edwards-Heathcote also a member of the British minor nobility with strong familial ties to the military. The family was also extremely wealthy, a near ancestor, Sir John Heathcote, having emerged as a major Business figure in Staffordshire in the late eighteenth century in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. Oswald was the first of Katharine and Oswald Sr’s three children. They had two further sons,
Edward and John Arthur, born respectively in 1899 and 1901. Oswald’s youth was troubled one in some significant ways. Though he clearly benefited from growing up as a member of a wealthy aristocratic family, his parents’ marriage was not a happy one and as the eldest of their three children he was inevitably front and centre in dealing with their marital problems. The conflicts between Oswald Sr. and Katharine usually focused on his adultery and over-bearing nature, bordering on physical aggression. Eventually Oswald’s parents separated in all-but name. Meanwhile Oswald Jr., who was known primarily to family members in his
youth as Tom to distinguish him from his father and his grandfather, who also was called Oswald, was sent to live with his grandparents at Apedale Hall in Staffordshire, a large country estate. There he was apparently spoiled by his grandparents for several years before being sent to West Downs Preparatory School and then on to the Winchester College, an elite school which had been originally set up in the fourteenth century and which acted as a feeder college to Oxford University in a time when one’s class dictated their educational aspirations in Britain. At Winchester Mosley excelled in several
sports, becoming both a boxer and a fencer. His proficiency in the latter was notable and had he been born in a different age and to a different social background he might well have ended up as a professional fencer. When he was just sixteen Mosley left Winchester. Unlike others he didn’t head for Oxford, but rather for the Royal Military College at Sandhurst. In the nineteenth century the sons of the British royal family had begun serving in the British Royal Navy and armed forces and it soon became a well-established tradition that sons of the nobility should serve
in the military or navy for some period of time in order to further the interests of Britain’s extensive empire. Following in this tradition Oswald arrived in Sandhurst in 1913. By that time he had already developed a reputation as having a quarrelsome personality, Regularly getting drunk and picking fights when out and about Sandhurst. In the early summer of 1914, he was expelled from the Military College for his behaviour after he participated in a brawl in which he fractured his right ankle. Luckily for Mosley, within weeks Europe rapidly marched towards the First World War after the assassination
of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo in late June. Due to this, he was accepted back into the military and was commissioned into the 16th the Queen’s Lancers, a cavalry unit, as British forces prepared to head to France where a large proportion of the most intense fighting would play out on the Western Front over the next four years. Early in the war both sides had grasped the potential of aerial warfare. The first plane had only been successfully flown in late 1903 by the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk in North Carolina,
but immediately upon the outbreak of the conflict in the late summer of 1914 the British, French, Germans and others realised the potential of aircraft, first for flying reconnaissance missions And then as devices to break the military deadlock on the ground. Mosley quickly became interested in joining the incipient British Royal Flying Corps and began training as a pilot. His fleeting career in the air-force proved disastrous. He quickly completed his pilot’s training. Then in May 1915, while demonstrating his flying abilities in front of his mother at Shoreham, he crashed his plane. The impact shattered his right ankle
which had only recently healed from the fracture caused during the riot that he was involved in at Sandhurst a year earlier. The double injury to his ankle exacerbated the wound and made it unlikely it would heal 100%. Then, to compound matters, he headed back to France to fight in the trenches before it was fully healed. After re-exacerbating the wound again he was informed that if he didn’t head back to England to convalesce there was a possibility of amputation. Mosley followed doctor’s orders when so informed in 1916, but his ankle never fully recovered and for the
rest of his life he walked with a slight limp. Mosley saw active service at the Battle of Loos on the Western Front in France in the autumn of 1915, Where he passed out from the pain in his leg, but his return to England early the next year left him effectively confined to administrative duty at the Foreign Office and in the Ministry of Munitions for the rest of the First World War. Nevertheless, his eagerness to serve in France and the fact that it had left him with a permanent injury had gained him some respect in political
and aristocratic circles. As the war came to an end he was consequently contacted by senior figures in the Conservative Party with an eye towards contesting the 1918 general election. He was duly elected for the constituency of Harrow, where he won easy election in an uncompetitive race. Thus, just weeks after turning 22, he entered the British parliament as its youngest member. He began to make his mark there based on his oratorical abilities, his speech-delivery being far better than most of the other members of the house. He served as the representative for Harrow for the next six
years, gaining re-election in 1922. These were also important years in Mosley’s personal life. In the late 1910s he began a relationship with Cynthia Blanche Curzon, A daughter of George Curzon, first Marquess of Kedleston and Earl Curzon. Curzon had served as Viceroy of British India between 1899 and 1905, as head of the burgeoning Air Board for a time during the war and finally emerged as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in 1919. He would become leader of the House of Lords in the mid-1920s and was both wealthy and powerful. He suspected Mosley wanted to marry his
daughter for her wealth and social status, but he nevertheless gave the union his blessing and Oswald and Cynthia were married in May 1920. A daughter and a son, Vivien and Nicholas, followed in the first years of the marriage, and belatedly a third child, Michael, was born after a long gap in 1932. Other than this veneer of family stability, their marriage was a chaotic one in which Oswald unleashed chaos amongst the Curzons. He engaged in an affair with Cynthia’s younger sister Alexandra for a time and also Grace Curzon, Cynthia’s stepmother who had married Lord Curzon in
1917, his first wife, Cynthia’s mother, having died many years earlier. There were other affairs Mosley engaged in, but these ones with His wife’s sister and stepmother were clearly of a level of moral dubiousness that was unusual. Despite the peculiar nature of their marriage, Cynthia and Oswald shared many similar political views and she appears to have even influenced him substantially in the 1920s. She was a supporter of the Labour movement and later in the 1920s even became a supporter of Leon Trotsky, the powerful member of the Soviet Union government who eventually fled from Russia after a
power struggle with Joseph Stalin. Oswald too ended up drifting to the left politically in the 1920s. In 1922 he ‘crossed the floor’, a well-known euphemism for when someone changed political parties in the British parliament to join a rival party. Historically ‘crossing the floor’ was associated with individuals moving between the Conservatives and the Liberals, the two dominant parties during the nineteenth century, but in the post-war period Labour had outflanked the Liberals to become the major rivals of the Conservatives. When Oswald absconded from the Conservatives in 1922 he initially sat as an independent, but in 1924 he
eventually joined Labour. His principal motive in doing so was opposition to the manner in which the British government had handled the Irish War of Independence fought between 1919 and 1921, particularly the use of the notorious Black and Tan irregulars and the atrocities they committed against the civilian population in Ireland. More broadly, Mosley’s views on economic policy were drifting left of the Conservatives in the 1920s and Labour, at least for a time, seemed like a good home for his revised political stance. Mosley’s decision to cross the floor led to a temporary hiatus in his political career.
In October 1924 the first ever Labour government, a minority administration led by Ramsay MacDonald, collapsed after less than a year. In the election which was held at the end of October Mosley was put forward to run in the Ladywood constituency in Birmingham, something of a Chamberlain family stronghold that supported the Conservatives. Labour lost the wider election nationally by a large margin, primarily because the Liberal vote collapsed and transferred to the Conservatives, but in Ladywood Mosley came very close to unseating Chamberlain, a future British Prime Minister. In fact he may have actually done so. On the
first count Chamberlain was apparently elected by just seven votes. Mosley understandably demanded a recount. On the second effort Mosley emerged as the victor by a margin of two votes. Eventually, on the final count, Chamberlain’s vote appeared to suddenly jump by nearly a hundred votes, and he won by a majority of 77. Mosley’s political career was briefly on hiatus, though he had given Chamberlain such a scare that in the next election he switched to the safer seat of Edgbaston. With his parliamentary career temporarily at an end, Mosley and Cynthia went travelling. In the 1920s they visited
various parts of Europe and the British Empire, notably India where Cynthia had spent some of her earliest years when her father was viceroy there and where the Curzons were well-respected. There Mosley met with Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian independence movement. It is an indication of the contradictions which characterised Mosley that he could, despite displaying a clear Streak of virulent Anti-Semitism and racism in other respects in later years, demonstrate his respect for Gandhi after meeting him in the 1920s, while the Indian political leader, for his part, also stated that Mosley had made a favourable
impression on him. Meanwhile, as he was out of parliament in the mid-1920s, Mosley kept an eye on developments at Westminster and the Labour Party was anxious to have a skilled orator representing them again in parliament. Therefore, when the Smethwick seat in Staffordshire fell vacant in 1926, Mosley was an obvious candidate to stand in his mother’s native region. He won the campaign that December and so after a hiatus of two years returned to Westminster. Two years later he would also ascend to the minor nobility as he succeeded as sixth baronet Mosley on the death of his
father. Over the next several years Mosley steered his way towards a senior position within the Labour shadow cabinet while the Conservatives governed for nearly a five-year period following their earlier victory in the 1924 election. It was not until an election was held in May 1929, Nicknamed the ‘Flapper Election’ owing to it being the first British election in which women in their twenties were allowed to vote, that the political situation changed. Although the Wall Street Crash would not occur for several months yet, the election was fought against a backdrop of some early economic warning signs and
rising unemployment in Britain, factors which saw Labour make extensive gains over the Conservatives and returned MacDonald to 10 Downing Street as Prime Minister of a new minority government. Mosley had hoped for a senior cabinet appointment, but had to make do with the lesser position of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, an office which centres on administration of the royal estate. MacDonald did not wish to alienate a figure who he viewed as full of promise and whom many in political circles in the 1920s viewed as a potential leader of Labour and future Prime Minister. Hence, MacDonald
gave him some unofficial duties in solving the unemployment problem, but Mosley was generally impeded in his efforts by more senior Labour Party stalwarts who had been involved in the party’s economic policy-formation for Decades. As this occurred, his frustrations with his position in the Labour administration grew. The events of the late 1920s and early 1930s were to determine the course of the rest of Mosley’s life. In the autumn of 1929, after a half decade of intense economic growth as Europe was rebuilt following the First World War and the civil wars that had followed through 1923, the
economy in Europe and the Americas became so overheated that it resulted in the Wall Street Crash, one of the largest financial meltdowns in history. As is well known, the Great Depression followed, a period of economic decline and stagnation that saw tens of millions of people lose their jobs and a level of deprivation amongst the poor of countries like Britain, Germany and the United States that is without equal in modern times. The Great Depression also led to massive political fluctuations in Europe and the western hemisphere that led to the collapse of centrist governments. From 1930 onwards
political extremes on the left and right were once again in vogue. For Mosley the crisis of the Great Depression led to him once again reconsidering his political Stances as he came to conclude that the Labour Party did not have the ability or the ideas to meet the economic crisis head on. Having flirted with the Conservatives in years gone by and now the Labour movement, he would from 1930 onwards hew his own political path. The first major sign of Mosley’s increasingly independent streak was seen in 1930 when he drew up and released what is now known
as the Mosley Memorandum. The Memorandum was Mosley’s blueprint for how Britain could pull itself out of the Great Depression. In it he called for the implementation of high tariffs on imports of goods from other European countries in order to protect British industry and commerce in the midst of the crisis, a measure which he believed would increase employment at home. Where goods had to come into Britain from abroad he proposed that they should be sourced from parts of the British Empire rather than obtained from the United States, Germany, France or other competitors. He also called for
the nationalisation of certain British industries, a radical overhaul of the educational system to ensure British men and women stayed in Education for longer and more people went on to higher education, while other features of the memorandum aimed towards reducing the highly class-based nature of British society. Effectively what Mosley was aiming towards was a state-led version of a knowledge economy where the aim was to create a broad and dynamic middle class. While Mosley is a very controversial figure today, there is no denying the fact that there were attractive elements to the Memorandum and it was widely
praised at the time by economists, including John Maynard Keynes, the most important economist of the first half of the twentieth century. Over half a century later policy analysts in the British Conservative Party reconsidered it as a means of responding to the economic downturn of the early 1990s. As much as the Memorandum was praised by figures like Keynes at the time, it was clear to Mosley that it would not be accepted as the basis of the Labour Party’s economic policy. He quickly decided to split with the party. However, unlike Winston Churchill, whose family was somewhat close
to the Mosleys and who had once crossed the Floor from the Conservatives to the Liberals only to come back again to the Conservatives in the 1920s, Mosley would not return to the Tories, nor would he join the Liberals, which were a rapidly declining force in British politics once support for the Labour Party expanded in the 1920s. Instead, Mosley formed his own party, calling it the New Party. Formally established in the spring of 1931, it immediately emerged as a minor parliamentary group as Mosley convinced half a dozen fellow Labour MPs to join him. Its main policy
platform was the Mosley Memorandum. Ultimately the New Party lasted for only year for in 1932 Mosley formed a new organisation and amalgamated the New Party into it. He called it the British Union of Fascists. Meanwhile, the New Party lost its parliamentary representation quickly as its main figures, including Mosley, lost their seats in the 1931 general election. It is worth pausing in our story to consider the politics of Europe in the 1930s. The economic and social crisis wrought by the Great Depression, combined with the fears of a communist takeover of much of Europe following the establishment
Of the Soviet Union near the end of the First World War, had created a general desire for a new form of politics in Europe, one which combined elements of radical nationalism and also elements of socialism. This curious mix of left and right wing politics is typically identified as fascism today and is associated with extreme racial views, but contemporaries would have understood it more as a form of corporatism, the idea that the citizens of a country would be unified in a corporate manner in furthering and advancing their nation’s cause in a way which was both nationalistic
but also socialistic in the sense that the wellbeing of the middle and lower classes was to be favoured as much as the upper classes. While it has enormously sinister overtones today as a result of the barbaric racial elements which were incorporated into this fascist politics, when Mosley established the British Union of Fascists in 1932 those same negative overtones did not yet exist. Moreover, what he was doing was entirely in keeping with the general drift of politics in the western world at that time. Nearly every country in Central Europe adopted some form Of fascism or corporatism
in the mid-1930s, so did Portugal and Spain, and even in countries where corporatist parties did not rise to power such as in Ireland, there were still quasi-fascist movements during the 1930s that had major links to the political establishment. As such, what Mosley was doing in the early-to-mid-1930s, needs to be viewed in context. The period when Mosley was establishing the New Party and then the British Union of Fascists in 1931 and 1932 were also years of continuing infidelity in his marriage. The new object of his affections in the early 1930s was Diana Guinness, a scion of
the Mitford family, a British aristocratic family that could trace their lineage all the way back to the Norman Conquest in the eleventh century. Diana was married to Bryan Guinness, a member of the wealthy Anglo-Irish brewing dynasty, and as with Oswald, she had children from her first marriage. Nevertheless, she divorced her husband in 1932 and her affair with Oswald became more and more serious over time. For his part he had repeatedly asserted his intention to leave Cynthia, Though one suspects he might never have done so had fate not intervened in 1933 as Cynthia died at just
34 years of age from complications of peritonitis which in turn had emerged following an operation for appendicitis. With this, Oswald and Diana were able to pursue their relationship more openly and they soon emerged as the most prominent couple in the world of British fascism, with Diana espousing the political movement faithfully, having come from a family which was keenly divided between adherents of fascism and socialism. It was not until 1936 that Oswald and Diana eventually married. They would have two sons, Alexander and Max. The British Union of Fascists had mixed success in the 1930s. Its membership
grew to over 50,000 people and it began to acquire support from elements of the established British media such as the Daily Mail newspaper which once ran a headline proclaiming, quote, “Hurray for the Blackshirts!” in reference to the blackshirt uniform which Mosley had the members of the BUF adopt. It found particular success in certain parts of London and other urban centres where unemployment was high As a result of the Great Depression and there was growing anti-migration sentiment. However, it met with very little electoral success, not contesting the 1935 general election and holding no more than a
few seats on local councils at various points in the 1930s. This is how things stood for the most part throughout the decade. But while the BUF did not have any real parliamentary presence, they were still a factor in British political life that could not be avoided, with their distinctive uniforms, their rallies and Mosley’s oratory. Even those who reviled the BUF politically had to admit that Oswald was perhaps the most effective political speaker in the country during the 1930s. If the BUF met with little electoral success in the 1930s this was perhaps largely owing to concerns
about the party’s connections to European fascism and in particular with Nazi Germany. The Nazis under Adolf Hitler had come to power there in 1933. Much of their rhetoric centred on reviving Germany after the humiliation of the First World War and the Treaty of Versailles that had been imposed on Germany in 1919. With their Talk of Germany’s re-emergence as the greatest power on the continent, many in Britain were uneasy about this new political experiment being orchestrated from Berlin and what implications it might have for Britain and for peace in Europe. Despite the general unease with Hitler,
Mosley positively cozied up to the Nazis. When he and Diana were married in 1936 the ceremony was carried out in Germany at the home of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Mosley was also a great admirer of the Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini. In 1937 he began an initiative to establish a pro-German radio station broadcasting from the Channel Islands. It was all enough to give many in Britain pause as to where Mosley’s political loyalties lay and what his motives were with the BUF. Hand in hand with his growing ties to the fascist movements on the
continent was an adoption of an increasingly xenophobic and antisemitic stance by Mosley and the BUF, particularly towards the Jewish community in Britain. There was also a more virulent form of anti-migration rhetoric in Mosley’s political statements towards groups Such as the Irish and the peoples of the British Empire in regions like India and South Africa, a development which points towards a fundamental shift in his own political views from the more tolerant figure of the 1920s. All of this came to a head on the 4th of October 1936 in the Battle of Cable Street in the East
End of London. That day a march was held by Mosley and the BUF, one which would involve separate divisions of the Blackshirts and their supporters proceeding from the Tower of London to Bethnal Green and Shoreditch where speeches would be made by Mosley and others. In response, a separate counter-march was organised by a coalition of anti-fascists including the British communists, trade unionists and groups representing both the Jewish and Irish communities in London. Barricades were also erected by those opposed to Mosley’s event, primarily on Cable Street to impede their march, thus the name ‘The Battle of Cable
Street’. The Metropolitan Police managed to prevent the event from boiling over into major violence, with well over a hundred people arrested. Overall, it demonstrated the growing racism Of the BUF movement, but also the determination of many different groups in London to unite to oppose them. A petition to try to prevent the march garnered over 100,000 signatures and the government moved afterwards to pass the Public Order Act of 1936 which prohibited large gatherings in which paramilitary uniforms like those of the Blackshirts would be worn. The late 1930s were an increasingly fractious period in the history of
the BUF. On the continent, Germany was rapidly rearming in a breach of the terms of The Treaty of Versailles, while in the spring of 1938 it violated another major tenet of the peace treaty of 1919 by entering a political union with Austria to create a ‘Greater Germany’. No sooner was this undertaken than Hitler began pressing Britain, France and Italy to be allowed to annex the Sudetenland, a region of Czechoslovakia where a majority of people spoke German and identified as being ethnically German. Eventually the British and French caved to pressure from Hitler at the Munich Conference
of September 1938, but warned that any further acts of aggressive expansion Would lead to war. As these events played out, Mosley and the BUF became ever more controversial in England. At a rally in Liverpool late in 1937 members of the public pelted Mosley with rocks after he gave a fascist salute to the crowd. Yet he continued to have a loyal following. At the Britain First rally held at Earl’s Court Exhibition Hall on the 16th of July 1939, 30,000 people attended the largest indoor political rally in British history. There Mosley enflamed the crowd with talk of
how a Jewish conspiracy was leading Britain to war with countries that should be its natural allies and that the coming general election, which was due to be held in 1940, would be bought and sold by Jewish financiers and those who controlled the media. It was a clear manifestation of the degree to which Mosley had adopted the ideological beliefs of German Nazism. Even as Mosley was presenting his conspiracy-laden and antisemitic speech to his loyal base of followers at Earl’s Court, Europe was plunging into war. In March 1939 Hitler and the Nazis abandoned the promises made at
Munich the previous Autumn and annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia, with the city of Memel stripped from Lithuania at the same time. Their attention then turned to Poland. The Nazis began an aggressive campaign to convince Europe of Germany’s rights to Polish territory. In August 1939, just weeks after Mosley’s Britain First rally, a non-aggression pact was signed between Germany and its ideological enemy, the Soviet Union, paving the way for the Nazis to invade Poland on the 1st of September after a false flag operation. As German tanks rolled over the eastern border, London and Paris declared war on
Berlin. The Second World War remained a largely European affair for months thereafter, with little major action. The Germans and Russians quickly overran Poland and carved it up between them, but little occurred in the winter of 1939 and the spring of 1940, so much so that some began to call the war a phoney war. It wasn’t until the late spring that the next steps were taken when Denmark and Norway were quickly occupied by the Germans and then the German Wehrmacht began massing on the western border for the long awaited invasion of France. In Britain, Mosley’s position
was utterly compromised by these events. As the leader of the British fascist movement and as someone who had made no secret of his ties to the regime in Berlin he was now viewed as the leader of a potential fifth column, a British equivalent of Vidkun Quisling, the former Norwegian former minister of defence who had formed a fascist party there in 1933, the Nasjonal Samling or ‘National Gathering’. Quisling had facilitated the Nazi occupation of Norway in April 1940 and later became the head of Nazi Norway. Mosley was perceived as a potential British version of Quisling. Yet
there was also the possibility that he might be useful for the British government. There was no shortage of individuals in late 1939 and into 1940 in Britain, many within government circles, that believed Britain would be better off reaching an arrangement with Hitler and the Nazis and combining against the Soviet Union and other radical movements on the far left of the political spectrum. In calling throughout the first months of the war for a negotiated peace Mosley was positioning himself as someone Who could negotiate with Berlin on Britain’s behalf if the tide swung in favour of peace.
Whatever ambitions Mosley might have held to become the architect of peace were scuttled in just a few weeks in May 1940. Early that month, in response to a growing crisis over the wartime leadership of Mosley’s old rival from the 1924 general election, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, was forced to step down as Prime Minister. He was succeeded by Winston Churchill, a figure who had consistently warned about the threat posed by the Nazis during the 1930s and who was committed to war with Germany. With this Mosley hopes of negotiating peace terms ended. Moreover, the same day that
Churchill took office, the 10th of May 1940, German army divisions invaded neutral Belgium and then headed into north-eastern France. The campaign which followed was a disaster for the French and the British Expeditionary Force, the latter of which only narrowly avoided complete destruction at Dunkirk. With the fall of France and a potential German invasion of Britain on the horizon, the British government moved to secure its position Domestically. In late May, Mosley was arrested and interned under Defence Regulation 18B. This emergency legislation had been passed in September 1939 at the beginning of the war to allow for
the arrest and detention of suspected enemies of the state during wartime without charge or trial. It was primarily utilised in the years that followed against the British Union of Fascists and members of the Irish nationalist movement in Northern Ireland who were opposed to the partition of the island back in 1921. Mosley would be held for three years under Regulation 18B. The terms of Mosley’s internment during the Second World War were not as onerous as they might have been, in considerable part owing to the intervention of the Prime Minister. Although their political views had diverged enormously
during the 1930s to occupy the polar opposites of the political spectrum in Britain, Churchill had admired Mosley back in the 1920s and viewed him as a figure of great potential. In 1940, he arranged for Mosley to be held under favourable conditions at Royal Holloway Prison. His wife Diana was detained as well in the summer of 1940 after Giving birth to their son Max. She was allowed to join Oswald, apparently due to the direct intervention of Churchill. The reasons for this lay with the tangled paternity of Churchill’s wife Clementine. Clementine’s mother Blanche had been known for
her infidelity during her lifetime and it was widely suspected that Clementine’s father was actually Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford, Diana Mosley’s grandfather. Diana’s family apparently appealed to Clementine and Churchill in 1940 to ensure that Diana and Oswald were interned together. Meanwhile, their children from their first marriages and their marriage to one another were looked after by several different family members during their period of detention. Oswald spent three years in prison. He and Diana were not charged, for though they had come under very reasonable suspicion as the leading figures of British fascism, they were not technically guilty of
having committed any crime. By 1943 their detention had become something of a cause celebre in British politics. This was related to the changing circumstances of the war. While Mosley had been arrested in the Direst days in 1940 as France was about to fall and the Battle of Britain lay ahead, the nature of the conflict had altered dramatically from late 1941 onwards as the German assault on the Soviet Union failed to strike the killer blow before the Russian winter set in and the United States joined the war following the attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese.
1942 saw the Western Allies turn the tide in the North Africa campaign against the Italians and Germans and in the summer of 1943 they opened a Southern Front in Italy. Meanwhile the Battle of Stalingrad was won by the Russians in the autumn and winter of 1942. With this the course of the war had changed enormously in favour of the allies and any danger that Mosley and other British fascist leaders had posed was effectively nullified. Consequently, after a major debate in the House of Commons in the early winter of 1943, the Mosleys were released. They would
still spend the remainder of the war under house arrest. Oswald and Diana spent the last year and a half of the war living with Mitford relatives and at the Shaven Crown Hotel in Oxfordshire. Their movements were restricted and they were kept Under police supervision, but they were reunited with their children and were given a large degree of liberty. The press covered their movements extensively. This was also a period when news of the Holocaust of six million of Europe’s Jews and the mass murder of other groups such as the Romani and Sinti people by the Nazis
began arriving to Britain in the final months of the war as camps were liberated across Europe. In these months and the years that followed the war Mosley never expressed any regret for his involvement with the Nazis in the 1930s or the Anti-Semitism of the British Union of Fascists. Moreover, in years to come he would become one of the leading voices in Britain in efforts to argue that the Holocaust had been exaggerated or that it had been orchestrated by rogue elements within the SS rather than having been directly ordered by Hitler and the other senior members
of the Nazi regime. As such, while Mosley’s politics moved on to other concerns in the post-war period, he never expressed any contrition for his role in the fascist politics of the 1930s and the genocidal programmes which Had resulted from it on the continent. With the end of the war in Europe in the early summer of 1945 Mosley was now free to return to his life without any further punishment. One might have expected him to be happy enough to live a private life, enjoying his family’s extensive wealth and staying out of politics after spending half a
decade in prison and under house arrest. Furthermore, he was not in good social standing after the war in a way which might merit a political comeback. This did not deter Mosley in the slightest. After reconnecting with many of those who had been involved in the BUF prior to its prohibition on the 23rd of May 1940, the very same day that Mosley was arrested, he began plotting his political comeback. To this end in 1946 and 1947 he published two political memoirs and defences of his conduct in the 1930s, respectively entitled My Answer and The Alternative. My
Answer, in particular, set out to portray Mosley as a British patriot who had been unjustly maligned during the war years. His argument was that he could not have known what would transpire from 1939 onwards and though it Would have fallen on deaf ears in the mid-1940s there had been many prominent political figures who had not exactly been virulently opposed to the Nazis back in the 1930s, notably Britain’s wartime leader during the First World War, David Lloyd George, and the former British monarch, Edward VIII. Having presented these arguments in his books, Mosley returned to politics in
1948 when he formed the Union Movement. In many ways the Union Movement was a return to his old politics. The party certainly fell far on the right of the political spectrum, its economic views were corporatist and it continued the anti-Semitism of the interwar fascist movements, with Mosley trying to make political capital out of developments in the Levant where the Zionist movement had become violently opposed to the British Mandate administration in the two years following the end of the Second World War. But where the Union Movement differed from Mosley’s pre-war political ideology was in its promotion
of pan-Europeanism. In his 1947 book, The Answer, Mosley laid out a theory that Europe had been moving inexorably towards a greater union for Several centuries, beginning with the formation of large nation states such as the United Kingdom, Spain, Germany and Italy out of much smaller polities during the late medieval and early modern periods. Mosley’s conclusion was that the formation of a European supra-national state, one which would unite countries like Britain, France and Germany after centuries of conflict, was inevitable. Such a state would operate on the basis of a centralised European authority, with individual countries retaining
large degrees of autonomy, but acting in union with one another on a wide array of issues, particularly economic policy. In this way, Mosley argued, the new movement, which he called ‘Europe a Nation’, would be able to walk its own relatively independent line without being dominated by either the United States or the Soviet Union in the emerging post-war Cold War order. Thus, very quickly after the end of the Second World War, Mosley sought to rehabilitate himself as a major advocate of pan-Europeanism or a form of European nationalism as a replacement to the national socialism and corporatism
of the 1930s. There is no disguising the fact that what Mosley was arguing for in the post-war years was very much a political movement that mirrored how the European Coal and Steel Community, then the European Economic Community and finally the European Union would develop, though Britain was slow to embrace involvement in the European project and was a hesitant member for four decades before pulling out in the late 2010s. Perhaps it was this British ambivalence to the growing pan-European movement which led to the Union Movement meeting with little success, though it was much more likely that
the very support of Mosley would have made the British public even less supportive of involvement with the inaugural ECSC in the 1950s. The British press had not forgotten the Mosleys’ wartime betrayal and at the start of the 1950s Oswald and Diana with their younger children moved to Ireland, a country where anyone ostracised from the British political system was welcome, no matter how dubious the road which had led to their disgrace. The Mosleys lived there for several years, an exile which was made more favourable by the fact That several of Diana Mitford’s siblings also had ties
to Ireland, Deborah Mitford, for instance, having married into the Cavendish family which had extensive estates in the south of the country. As much as Mosley might have tried to embrace a less controversial form of politics in the post-war years and attempted a political comeback, his politics retained their racist edge. Two developments in the 1950s emphasise this. The first of these related to Africa. In the aftermath of the war Britain was unable to ignore calls for independence from many of its colonies. After India and Pakistan acquired their independence in 1947 calls escalated for the same in
Africa where the British held lands covering much of southern Africa around modern-day Zimbabwe, Botswana and Zambia, extensive territories further north around Uganda, Kenya and Sudan and other lands to the west in Nigeria and Ghana. Mosley’s solution to calls for independence was a form of continent-wide Apartheid whereby the European powers, Britain and France being the two nations who controlled huge swathes of the continent, would divide their colonies Into white and black controlled areas, mirroring in many ways the system which had been created in South Africa in the late 1940s to preserve the position of the white
minority Afrikaner community there. Mosley’s proposals were soon abandoned, especially in the aftermath of the disastrous Suez Crisis of 1956 and the British and French began granting independence to nations all across the continent. Mosley would remain an ardent supporter of the Apartheid regime in South Africa for the remainder of his life, visiting there in the 1960s long after the Apartheid movement had started to become controversial internationally. Furthermore, he continued holding business interests in South Africa throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The second episode which was revelatory of Mosley’s racial views in the post-war period occurred in
Britain itself in the late 1950s. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Britain, like many other European countries, had been left with a large labour shortage owing to the death of hundreds of thousands of young men during the war. Where Germany, for instance, had turned to countries like Turkey for foreign workers, Britain Reached out to its empire. In the course of the late 1940s tens of thousands of people began arriving from the Caribbean and other regions, the so-called Windrush Generation, named after the HMS Empire Windrush, a ship that had arrived with one of the first
large numbers of Caribbean migrants in 1948. By the mid-1950s the growing influx of people from overseas into London and England more broadly was creating increasing inter-community hostility in some parts of England’s major cities, especially during periods of low employment when people born in England perceived the newcomers as taking jobs they might otherwise have acquired. This led in the autumn of 1958 to the Notting Hill Race Riots in the Notting Hill area of London. A week of violence saw attacks on people of West Indian descent and scores of arrests. Mosley’s reaction was to return to England
and run for election in the Kensington district of London in 1959, fashioning his campaign around exploiting racial tensions in the capital. Some of the proposals he mooted during the campaign were regressive in the extreme, not just favouring a ban on further migration From the empire or what remained of it, but also proposing forced deportations of those who had arrived in the decade or so after the war and a ban on intermarriage. It was as close to a major political breakthrough that he would ever have in the post-war years, capturing nearly 10% of the vote, though
ultimately failing to win a seat. In the aftermath of his failed election bid in 1959 Mosley relocated with Diana to Paris. They spent the remainder of their lives for the most part in Orsay, a wealthy suburb on the outskirts of the city. From here he began efforts to try to co-ordinate with other pan-European, far-right political movements in other countries. This led in the 1960s to the formation of the National Party of Europe, an umbrella organisation which included Mosley’s Union Movement in Britain, the Deutsche Reichspartei in West Germany, the Italian Social Movement and Jeune Europe in
Belgium, all far-right parties with elements of neo-fascism in their workings. A manifesto released in 1962 foreshadowed many elements of what would become the European Union, calling for a European parliament and other federal measures of that Kind. But others harked back to the corporatist politics of the right in the 1930s in declaring the movement’s antipathy to both communism and capitalism. Effectively it called for a third way whereby Europe would separate itself off from both the US and the USSR, while another proposal was for the dismantling of the United Nations and its replacement with a tripartite body
which would be formed of the US, the USSR and the new European supra-national state. A final novel element to it was the description of parts of Africa as constituting part of Europe, clearly a provision that was designed to keep the Maghreb under European control in order to generate support for the movement in France as that country was still at war to try to retain control over Algeria. The National Party of Europe met with very little success in the 1960s or 1970s, though its policy platform is curious in retrospect as offering an alternative view of pan-Europeanism
at a time when the founder members of the European Steel and Coal Community were only beginning to consider the idea of a more formal union between their countries. Interestingly, While the far right has generally become opposed to European federalism in the intervening decades, in the 1960s far right parties were in favour of federalism, though of a kind which sought to curb migration from overseas and implied a land grab of North Africa. Meeting with little success in the initiative, Mosley began writing an autobiography in the second half of the 1960s, one which would build on the
political defence he had first provided in My Answer back in 1946. My Life was published in 1968. It was hardly an attempt to seek redemption for his past political life, but rather sought to explain away certain criticisms of him which had been made over the years, with Mosley being unrepentant in his views that Europe should be a continent for Europeans and claiming that his politics in the 1930s was a response to the ineffectiveness of both Labour and the Conservatives. By the time My Life was published in 1968 Mosley had entered his seventies. His health was
gradually declining. He had made one last effort to gain election in Britain in 1966 and after a fresh humiliation in which he acquired Less than 5% of the vote he effectively resigned himself to the end of his political career. The Union Movement was wound up in the early 1970s and was replaced by the National Front as the main far-right party in Britain. By the time it began in the mid-1970s to gain some popularity in Britain as the UK entered the worst economic crisis it had seen since the Great Depression, Mosley was suffering from Parkinson’s in
France. His last years were spent largely uninvolved in active politics owing to poor health and old age. He died in Orsay on the 3rd of December 1980 at 84 years of age. A small funeral was held in Paris after which Oswald was cremated and his remains were scattered around the famous Pere Lachaise Cemetery. Just over two years later, his eldest son, Nicholas, born in 1923 of his first marriage to Cynthia, published a two-volume biography of his father and the Mosleys’ family life. Oswald had requested Nicholas, who he had a difficult relationship with, to write it,
making his private papers fully available to allow him to do so. The work was generally critical of Oswald and his political Career while humanising him as a father. Oswald Mosley was a complex figure. It would be easy today to dismiss him as simply a would-be fascist dictator of Britain, and admittedly there were many elements of that kind to his politics. Yet his political views in the 1930s should not be read entirely in light of what the Nazis did across Europe in the late 1930s and first half of the 1940s. There were different types of corporatism
and fascism, such as Franco’s regime in Spain. Similarly Mosley’s form of corporatism was different to what was being espoused in Germany. Moreover, his economic policies were endorsed by a large cross section of leading British economists during the Great Depression, while his pan-Europeanism after the Second World War foreshadowed the general drift of politics within what has become the European Union. However, these complicating factors aside, there is absolutely no doubt that Mosley also advocated for a form of racial hierarchy, one which displayed acute Anti-Semitism and also called for racial segregation across Africa where much of the continent
would have been Transformed into an expanded version of Apartheid South Africa. As such, while his political views were complicated, they were also not entirely estranged from the racial fascism of Nazism. What do you think of Oswald Mosley? Should he be perceived as a straight forward fifth-column of the Nazi movement within Britain or was he a more complex figure? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching. The man known to history as General Franco was born on the 4th of December 1892 as Francisco Franco Bahamonde in
the coastal city of El Ferrol in the province of Galicia in the north-west of Spain. His father was Nicolas Franco, a descendant of an Andalusian family which had served in the Spanish navy for six generations, back into the early eighteenth century, and Nicolas himself would continue this tradition, working as an officer in the Spanish Naval Administrators’ Corp in the late nineteenth century, however, the relationship between Nicolas and his son Francisco would prove to be fraught, Nicolas being eccentric and a somewhat decadent character, traits which his son grew to dislike in his father. Francisco’s mother was
Maria del Pilar Bahamonde de Andrade, a native Galician from a well to do upper-middle class family, Francisco would grow to become close to his mother, admiring her Roman Catholic piety and the serious demeanour she displayed in contrast to his father. As Francisco grew up he developed a disciplined and serious character himself from a young age, he was originally destined for a career in the Spanish Navy, like multiple generations of the Francos before him, however, his family life was thrown into turmoil in 1907 when Francisco was just fourteen years old, at this time his father, Nicolas,
abandoned his family and would soon marry another woman in Madrid, Francisco never forgave him and Only maintained a limited relationship with his father for the remainder of his life. It is hardly a coincidence that just around the time that Nicolas Franco abandoned his family in Galicia, Francisco discarded any plans to join the Spanish Navy and instead entered the Spanish Infantry Academy in Toledo at just fourteen years of age, though the decision was also partly attributable to the massive decline in the Spanish Navy in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War of 1898. Francisco eventually graduated in
1910 as a second lieutenant, his performance at the Academy had been relatively modest, graduating towards the lower end of his class, but this can be partially explained by his age, many of the cadets at Toledo being two or three years older than Franco. The Spain that Franco now entered military service for, was on the cusp of a protracted political emergency, indeed it had been enduring a very prolonged crisis in one shape or another for two centuries, in the sixteenth century Spain had been the foremost European power, The superpower of its day, fuelled by an enormous
empire in the New World and huge gold and silver bullion flows from Mexico and Peru, however, in the seventeenth century the Spanish Empire had entered into a period of rapid decline as those same bullion inflows from the Americas dried up, such that by the eighteenth century Spain was a second-rate power with a backward, under-developed economy, moreover, the country’s politics were crippled by the excessive power of the Roman Catholic Church and an ineffective monarchy, then in the early nineteenth century independence movements in South America and Central America robbed the country of most of its overseas empire.
However, a reform movement was underway, during the first years of the nineteenth century the country fell into the orbit of Napoleonic France and a new generation of Spanish politicians was calling for a complete overhaul of the country’s politics, economy and society, A new liberal constitution was adopted in 1812, but tensions remained, as a result the civil war known as the First Carlist War occurred between 1833 and 1840 over the succession to the monarchy and disputes between liberals and conservatives within the country. Two further Carlist Wars would follow in the late 1840s and the mid-1870s, the
Third Carlist War having briefly seen the monarchy suspended and the First Spanish Republic created between 1873 and 1874, thus, when Franco was born in 1892 the country had been subjected to nearly a century of conflict between left-leaning liberal reformers who wished to reduce the power of the monarchy, aristocracy and Roman Catholic Church, and right-leaning conservatives determined to keep the traditional structures of Spanish society and politics in place, these twin forces would continue to dominate Spanish politics into the early twentieth century and shape the course of Franco’s life. At the time that he left the Infantry
Academy In Toledo in 1910, though, the more calamitous political confrontations which Spain was to endure in the 1930s were still some way off, in the early 1910s the Iberian state’s main concerns lay in North Africa, where the country held some of the last vestiges of its once great colonial empire, having lost the bulk of its other possessions in the Caribbean and the Philippines in the late 1890s, in particular Morocco had become a major focus of Spanish imperial activity, the country had held territories here for several centuries, notably the city of Ceuta across the Straits of
Gibraltar. Spanish interest in the region had been further expanded in the First Hispano-Moroccan War between 1859 and 1860 and brief conflicts with some of the Rif tribes of northern Morocco in 1893 and again in 1909, a more substantial land grab was effected in November 1912 when a treaty was agreed between France and Spain whereby Morocco was divided between them,
