British Fascist Research Articles

‘We are not the Last of Yesterday but the First of Tomorrow’: Futural Nostalgia and the Emotionology of Postwar British Fascists

Drawing on both the history of emotions and study of radicalised temporalities in fascist cultures, this article defines and explores variants of ‘futural nostalgia’ in British fascist discourses from the 1940s to the present day. It defines ‘futural nostalgia’ as a specific type of nostalgia that is both backward looking and forward focused: it looks to the past to evoke a sense of rooted identity, community and ontological security that underpins myriad critiques of the present day as in crisis; it looks forwards in time to provide a vision of an alternate future based on its idealizations of the past. After conceptualizing this term, it explores forms of postwar British fascism that evoke this trope. Starting with Oswald Mosley and the Union Movement, the article examines variants of futural nostalgia in the emotionology of postwar British fascism, including in the National Front, Blood & Honour, the British Movement, the British National Party and National Action. It concludes by suggesting futural nostalgia is an extreme variant of far-right nostalgia, and further exploration of the phenomenon could help establish family relationships between the fascist and populist far right.

From Periodic Decline to Permanent Rebirth: Alexander Raven Thomson on Civilization, Pathology, and Violence

Alexander Raven Thomson was a British fascist philosopher, active from 1932 to 1955. I outline Thomson’s Spenglerian views on civilization and decline. I argue that Thomson in his first book is an orthodox Spenglerian who accepts that decline is inevitable and thinks that it is morally required to destroy civilization in its final stages. I argue that this suffers from conceptual issues which may have caused Thomson’s change to a revised form of Spenglerianism, which is more authentically fascist. This authentically fascist view is then seen to fall prey into the problem inherent in the very idea of permanent rebirth.

‘Breeders for race and nation’: gender, sexuality and fecundity in post-war British fascist discourse

ABSTRACT Burnett and Richardson’s paper has two related aims. First, it develops a model of how gender is articulated within fascist and other far-right discourses based on a review of the relevant scholarship. This model is presented in the first section. Researchers have in the past suggested a gap, or even a wilful ignorance, of gender in studies of the far right, and claimed that the topic is ‘neglected’ and ‘under-researched’. This gap is to some extent held open by disciplinary, historical and definitional boundaries that work fractally to split inquiry. Burnett and Richardson have thus read the literature in a kaleidoscopic fashion, including analysis across different historical periods and country contexts, to examine how gender surfaces in various ‘fascist’ discourses. This approach covered psychoanalytical, discourse analytical, historical, art historical, literary, political and anthropological approaches to gender and fascism. The second aim of the paper is to show how the model proposed is brought into relief in a particular country context: that of the United Kingdom since the Second World War. Gender in post-war British fascism has been the subject of several important studies, though none of them have specifically traced the textual journey of key ideas and themes related to gender in mediatized far-right discourse. Building on a discourse-historical analytic approach to the development of fascist politics of this period, Burnett and Richardson argue that paying attention to gender in fascist discourse is a useful lens through which to analyse the local and historical contingencies that make one fascist discursive formation differ from another.

The Civil War in Spain, 1936-1939 and the Image of Enemy in the British Fascist Press

The article deals with the analysis of publications of British Fascists newspapers 'Action' and 'The Blackshirt' during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. The main directions of image of enemy formation are studied on the example of these papers. Forms of presentation and ways of international problems interpreting by far-right publications are studied. The fascist newspaper Action, The Fascist Week and The Blackshirt spoke from the position of nationalism, Imperial identity, anti-liberalism, anti-Soviet and anti-Semitism. The concept of "communism" in the pages of the fascist press has accumulated the most precisely the image of enemy. Articles and notes shaped confusion between "Soviet", "red" and "Communist". The USSR seemed to be "the warmonger" and the "architect of the Civil war in Spain". The destructive role of Soviet Russia in the conflict was proved in the British fascist press. Soviet Union was accused of seeking to plunge Spain and Europe into anarchy. In British fascist publications trend towards stereotyping and myth-making were noticeable, they were opposed to "Western" civilization (as individualistic) and "Eastern", "Communist" (oppressive, traditionalist).

A British Fascist in the Second World War: The Italian War Diary of James Strachey Barnes, 1943-45, edited by Claudia Baldoli and Brendan Fleming, London, Bloomsbury, 2014, 264 pp., £65,00, ISBN 9781472505798

A British Fascist in the Second World War: The Italian War Diary of James Strachey Barnes, 1943-45, edited by Claudia Baldoli and Brendan Fleming, London, Bloomsbury, 2014, 264 pp., £65,00, ISBN 9781472505798 - Volume 21 Issue 3

The Use of Quantitative Analysis of Digitised Newspapers to Challenge Established Historical Narratives

This article illustrates the benefits of employing quantitative analysis of digitised primary sources in historical research, demonstrating how it can challenge old orthodoxies and create new insights. The author has used a database of scanned copies of British fascist newspapers from the 1930s to create a large, consistent and representative sample of fascist discourse during this period. Employing a coding methodology, the author has recorded all mentions of Jews within that sample, enabling him to trace over time the evolution of the fascists’ antisemitism, in terms of its quantity, typology and prominence within their discourse. This approach—in combination with more traditional analysis of sources—challenges various longestablished and widely accepted aspects of the relevant historiography. In particular, the author demonstrates that the consensus among historians regarding the chronological evolution of British fascist antisemitism is false, and instead he presents a new, fivestage model of its development. This more accurate timeline allows the author to offer a clearer explanation of the motives and ideology that underlay the fascists’ attitude towards Jews.

Daniel Tilles, British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932-1940. London: Bloomsbury, 2015, 274pp. £59.00 (hbk).

Daniel Tilles, British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932-1940. London: Bloomsbury, 2015, 274pp. £59.00 (hbk).

British Fascist antisemitism and Jewish responses, 1932-40

British Fascist antisemitism and Jewish responses, 1932-40

British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932–40. By Daniel Tilles

<i>British Fascist Antisemitism and Jewish Responses, 1932–40</i>. By Daniel Tilles

Hard Times

Hard Times Phillip Parotti (bio) Peter Liddle, Captured Memories 1930–1945: Across the Threshold of War, Volume II. Pen & Sword, 2011. 336pages. Illustrated. $50. Dr. Peter Liddle, F.R.Hist.S, teacher, lecturer, editor, and author, is also the founding director of two important archives on the world wars of the twentieth century. The Liddle Collection, located in the Brotherton Library, the University of Leeds, is devoted to the collection of personal experiences regarding World War i. The Second World War Experience Centre, established in North Wetherby, outside Leeds—the institution of which Dr. Liddle is life president—documents the lives of more than nine thousand people in that war, a multitude of the Centre’s interviews having been personally [End Page 336] collected by Dr. Liddle across a span of years. Captured Memories 1930–1945, which contains forty-seven of the most vivid recollections he has recorded, is a skillfully edited, well-illustrated, and admirable companion volume to Captured Memories 1900–1918, the collection of twenty-nine interviews that he published in 2010. Organized into two major sections, the 1930s and 1939–1945, and five subsections, including The Thirties, At Sea, In the Air, On Land, and On the Home Front, volume ii covers a staggering range of experience with such precision of scintillating detail that the reader’s interest never flags. And, once a reading is complete, the reader wishes only for more. Liddle opens with an examination of the decade immediately before the war; this section entitled The Thirties, contains eight fascinating interviews. Wilfred Shaw, Annie Millar, and Joseph Reck testify in compelling ways to the grinding poverty endured by many people in Britain during the Great Depression. In contrast the privileged sons Humphrey Prideaux and George Savile describe their attendance at Eton, advanced educational opportunities, and preparation for important careers. While Shaw went without shoes and wore clogs to school, Prideaux, reporting to his Indian regiment as a twenty-one-year-old subaltern, found that he was to be waited on daily by no fewer than seven servants. Baroness Barbara Castle records her lifelong Labor Party activism, while admiral of the fleet Baron Hill-Norton offers the best recollection of years at Dartmouth Naval College and the education of an officer in the Royal Navy that until now no one was ever likely to see in print. The final interview in the section is with Oswald Mosley, the British fascist, and it delivers a surprise: no matter how deeply one disagrees with the man’s political views, one cannot help but be impressed by Mosley’s eloquence and intelligence as he describes the formation of his movement and some of the events that led to his incarceration during the war. The book’s At Sea selections begin with Commander Loftus Peyton- Jones’s descriptions of his Arctic convoy duty and the Battle of the Barrents Sea before going on to cover his later capture, escape, and evasion in Italy. Frank Arkle follows with a vivid account of close combat in the St. Nazaire raid, and Vernon Upton describes his training for the Merchant Marine and his extended command of two lifeboats in the Atlantic, an exploit for which he was rightly awarded the George Medal for saving more than forty lives after his ship was torpedoed. Henry Leach records the catastrophic experience of being in Singapore on the day when his father, commanding the battleship Prince of Wales, was sunk and killed off the coast by Japanese air attack; and then he tells of his participation in the sinking of the Scharnhorst. Clarence Smith concludes the section by recalling the fury with which he hurled a potato at a passing Japanese pilot even as the West Virginia was sunk out from under him at Pearl Harbor, the pilot passing so close down the side that Smith felt certain that he had struck his target. Invariably Dr. Liddle begins the individual interviews by asking his [End Page 337] characters about their upbringing and education, and invariably the paths that led to later service prove unique. Squadron Leader George (“Ben”) Bennions, a fighter ace who accounted for thirteen victories during the Battle of Britain, actually began his service...

Re-storying bankers: historical antecedents of banker bashing in Britain and America

Whittle and Mueller's discursive psychological analysis of banker storying during the recent British Treasury Select Committee hearings is the latest twist in the financial crisis storytelling genre. Although Whittle and Mueller focus on storytellers' use of classically derived story tropes, they otherwise pay scant attention to how history enters into stories in which bankers are blamed for economic turmoil. The current paper moves beyond their work by showing how culturally transmitted historical narratives provide potent discursive resources for banker bashers. Focusing on the 1920s and 1930s, our examples are the American Catholic priest-cum-broadcaster Charles Coughlin and the British fascist Oswald Mosley. Each drew their banker stories from content-laden, culturally supplied master narratives: traditional American populism and British declinism, respectively. Studying the emplotment of bankers within a nation's deep-seated historical storylines, we argue, is the key to factoring history back into the banker storytelling debate.

Conduct Unbecoming? Attitudes towards Jews in the British Fascist and Mainstream Tory Press, 1925-39

The study examines the employment of antisemitism in the press of three interwar fascist organisations in Britain — the British Fascists, the Imperial Fascist League, and the British Union of Fascists — demonstrating its differing use by the three movements and its evolution over time. Furthermore, comparison with the mainstream press demonstrates that, except for one issue, refugees, the antisemitism of fascist publications does not represent a reflection of the views and attitudes expressed in mainstream media, and in many cases goes far beyond what was socially acceptable. However, attitudes to refugees in the fascist press and the popular mainstream press do exhibit clear similarities.

A Fascist ‘Jihad’: Captain Robert Gordon-Canning, British Fascist Antisemitism and Islam

Little exists in the literature on British fascism to suggest the pivotal importance of Palestine to British antisemites and fascists during the interwar period. This lacuna is especially surprising given that Britain was the Mandatory power in Palestine from 1920 until 1948. This study explores the interaction between British fascists and Palestinian Arabs during the interwar period and the immediate aftermath of the Second World War through the activities and views of Captain Robert Cecil Gordon-Canning (1888–1967), one of the leading luminaries of the British Union of Fascists (BUF). The study will examine the physical and ideological connections of British fascism outside of its European context, a focus that has dominated previous studies on the trans-national rather than trans-continental, in order to offer some provisional insights into the relationship between leading British and Islamist extremists prior to the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948.

Uniting a Divided Community? Re-appraising Jewish Responses to British Fascist Antisemitism, 1932-39

Traditionally, work on Anglo-Jewish responses to British fascism has concentrated on its ‘working-class’, activist manifestations, particularly in east London over the period 1935-37, when Jews were prominently involved in confronting the British Union of Fascists. Such a focus has neglected other forms of Jewish activity, and this study examines two such aspects — early responses in the period up to 1935, and the defence work of the Board of Deputies of British Jews — drawing attention to the varying forms that Jewish opposition to domestic fascism took, as well as the different motivations that lay behind them. Furthermore, it challenges the perception that the communal leadership was unsympathetic to Jews who directly faced fascist antisemitism and ineffective in protecting them from it. Finally, it contests the belief that the debate over communal defence caused divisions within Anglo-Jewry, demonstrating instead that, while it certainly highlighted existing fissures, reflected in the varied initial responses to British fascism, the fascist threat eventually helped bring about greater unity and played a significant role in wider shifts in communal identity and power.

The Marketing of Megalomania: Celebrity, Consumption and the Development of Political Technology in the British Union of Fascists

This article offers a reassessment of British fascist politics during the 1930s by shifting the empirical focus away from area studies and investigations of policy and ideology to the reading of the movement’s visual culture, its relations with the media, and its development of a distinctive material culture and innovative political technologies. It seeks to place the BUF within its own national and metropolitan context by adopting an approach informed by cultural history to extremist politics in the 1930s. Critical discourses about British fascism appropriated the language of popular culture to describe and understand the phenomenon of the BUF. The movement was clearly not to be understood only as the next phase in the history of party formation, and thus the language of high politics was either inappropriate or insufficient to conceptualize the movement. Instead, the BUF seemed to represent a merger between a politics of provocation and the new lexicon of cinema and celebrity, a protean movement that blurred the lines between high politics and popular culture. Mosley was described as a dog track promoter, a pantomime character and a swash-buckling movie star. His meetings rivalled the cinema, and his followers were figured as ‘fans’. This examination of the BUF’s cultural production and cultural responses to the movement invites us to problematize the easy dichotomy between left-wing modernism and extreme-right anti-modernism, and to ponder whether the BUF represented political innovation despite political failure.

Women and British Fascism Revisited: Gender, the Far-Right, and Resistance

Women and British Fascism Revisited Gender, the Far-Right, and Resistance Julie V. Gottlieb (bio) It would be tempting to claim that the history of women and inter-war British fascism has been completely excavated and fully examined. Two monograph-length case studies have been published in recent years: Martin Durham's Women and Fascism and my own Feminine Fascism. Given the relatively small size of the movement (between 40,000 and 50,000 members at its height), the intellectual bankruptcy, and the ultimate political and electoral failure of Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF)—by far the most significant British fascist movement to emerge in the 1930s in spite of the fact that not one of its members was elected to public office—it might seem that there is little left to say. Even before women's historians turned their attention to the question of female participation and to the movement's women's policies and sexual politics, the historiography of British fascism was already flourishing. Important debates about political marginality; party structure and British political culture; race, ethnicity and community; political violence and public order; and British relations with fascist movements across Europe had been framed, and grew increasingly more heated. All of these debates were fueled by the greater accessibility of public records, the willingness of former members to come forward to give testimony and set the record straight as they saw it, and the more systematic archiving of miscellaneous printed sources, branch records, and unpublished memoirs. To the cynic, it seemed quite possible that there were more historians working on British fascism than there had been prominent Blackshirts proclaiming their political faith on the streets of Britain during the 1930s. However, a number of empirical and theoretical developments, as well as contemporary political events, suggest that further research on the British far Right, and the more specific study of women and extremist politics, would be fruitful and by no means reach a dead end. What historiographical and historical factors render the study of women and British fascism salient? There are a number of issues to consider here, including the richness of the source material, the potential of applying different theoretical perspectives, and the topicality of the subject in light of current events. In terms of primary material, the source base continues to expand, with notable developments in the release of MI5 documents (accessible at the National Archive, formerly the Public Records Office), the deposit of Mosley family papers, the publication of new biographies [End Page 108] of leading figures such as Diana Mosley, and the continued attempt to gather oral histories, testimonies and private papers from the few former members of the BUF who are still living.1 During the 1990s, two excellent collections for the study of British fascism were deposited, and they continue to grow: the British Union collection at the University of Sheffield and the Mosley Papers at the University of Birmingham. For instance, when I was working on my book no copies of the cyclostyled Woman Fascist—a journal for women members that was printed between 1933 and 1934, and the only publication that was addressed to women members exclusively—were known to have survived. In the past few years, however, miscellaneous copies have surfaced and are held by the British Union collection at Sheffield, revealing the concerns and details of quotidian female activity. While the drive to gather more oral testimonies has no doubt been thwarted in recent years by the fact that most of the women involved are either no longer alive or, if still with us, in their eighties and nineties, the release of more Home Office files relating to the internment of Lady Diana Mosley raises some important issues. If the official position revealed in these files is to be taken at face value and as representative of government perceptions of British fascism, then it would now appear that the most dangerous British fascist of the 1930s was a woman. While the historical narrative has thus far positioned Sir Oswald Mosley as the leading protagonist, or rather the antagonist, among the "fellow travelers of the Right," as the man who might emulate Quisling and collaborate...

The Swastika and the Shamrock: British Fascism and the Irish Question, 1918–1940

The last fifteen years have seen an efflorescence of scholarly studies of British fascism between the wars. Once identified exclusively with the figure of Sir Oswald Mosley and dismissed as a wholly derivative imitation of its Italian and German counterparts, fascism in Britain is now understood as a complex and variegated phenomenon whose roots run no less extensively in British political culture than in external influences. As historians have probed more deeply into the ideological underpinnings of the British ultra-right, they have made increasingly apparent the numerous connections between this new form of political mobilization and long-standing tensions within British politics and society. While scholars continue to acknowledge the many important ways in which British fascism was indebted to its Continental equivalents, they can no longer maintain—as did Robert Benewick in 1969 in his groundbreaking survey of the radical right—that fascist policy was developed “with a callous disregard for principles” or that the distinctively fascist elements of British ultra-right ideology were imported en bloc from overseas.It is all the more surprising that existing histories should have overlooked so completely one of the most important “indigenous” components of British fascist ideology - its preoccupation with the Irish question. In the 1920s and 1930s, anti-Irish sentiment became a principal theme of several leading fascist groups, exceeded in prominence only by anti-Semitism and anti-Bolshevism, to which it was often explicitly linked. For these small, politically marginal societies, the formulation and dissemination of hibernophobic ideas held obvious attractions.

Fascism and the State in Britain: The Case of the British Fascist 1923‐31

Fascism and the State in Britain: The Case of the British Fascist 1923‐31

‘Colonel’ barker: A case study in the contradictions of fascism

In 1929 ‘Colonel’ Barker, known as a leading light in a British Fascist organization, the National Fascisti, appeared in a London court on two counts of perjury. The Colonel’ was soon revealed as Valerie Arkell‐Smith, a woman who had married her lover, Elfreda Haward, in a Brighton Parish church and literally convinced hundreds of men with her disguise. The press coverage devoted to Valerie Arkell‐Smith's sensational trial for her activities as ‘Colonel’ Barker, reveals the intricate and complex workings of gender ideology in the late 1920s. This paper also explore the reasons why, in the post‐war era, notions of female emancipation became so closely linked with militarism that Fascism appealed directly to women.

Politics and race, gender and class: Refugees, fascists and domestic service in Britain, 1933–19401

Between 1933 and the outbreak of the Second World War 20,000 Jewish women escaped from Nazi Europe to become refugee domestics in Britain. At the same time some ‘native’ domestic servants were attracted to the British Fascist movement. Both groups of women have been ignored by historians. This article suggests that this is a serious omission which has led to an incomplete view of the refugee and Fascist movements in Britain. Indeed consideration of class and gender issues sheds valuable light both on the relative failure of Fascism in Britain and British responses to the Jewish refugee crisis in the 1930s.