Hitler’s “Useful Idiot” in Britain: Oswald Mosley JJ
7 June 1936, Victoria Park, London. Thousands of people stream into the open ground of the park. Blackshirts march in formation, curious onlookers gather, and beyond them, a hostile crowd has no intention of staying quiet. Along the streets leading to the park, supporters line the pavements, raising their arms in the Nazi salute as a car carrying their leader moves slowly through the streets. At the podium in Victoria Park, a baronet and former cabinet minister dressed in the black uniform of his fascist
movement addresses the assembled thousands. For years, he builds a political force to bring fascism to Britain, relying on street-corner meetings, marches, political violence, and a relentless campaign of anti-Semitic propaganda. His name is Oswald Mosley. Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley was born on 16 November 1896 in London into a family rooted in the English landed aristocracy. His father, Sir Oswald Mosley, 5th Baronet, was a wealthy and largely absent figure, addicted to gambling and alcohol, who played little role in his son’s upbringing.
His parents separated while Oswald was still young, and he was raised primarily by his mother, Katharine Maud Edwards-Heathcote, and his grandfather, Sir Oswald Mosley, 4th Baronet. It was his grandfather who became the dominant male figure in his life. One of the reasons was that his grandfather disliked his father and saw Mosley as a substitute son. Young Mosley studied at West Downs School in Winchester and then in 1909 he joined the Winchester College. He found school both difficult and boring, but liked sports. Young Mosley liked to hunt, but interestingly he became
a boxer by the age of 15 and also became fencing champion in his school days. In 1912 Mosley left college without receiving a degree and was looking for his further purpose. In January 1914 he entered the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, but was expelled in June of the same year for a riotous act of retaliation against a fellow cadet. The outbreak of war saved his prospects. When the First World War began in the summer of 1914, Mosley was commissioned into the British cavalry unit the 16th Queen’s Lancers and deployed to the Western Front. He later transferred to
the Royal Flying Corps as an observer. However, while showing off before his mother at Shoreham Airport in May 1915 he crashed his plane and broke his right ankle. He was then sent back to serve on the Western Front. However, his leg failed to heal and he was sent home for further operations which saved his leg but left him with a permanent limp. By October 1916, it was decided that Mosley was only fit for desk work and spent the remainder of the war in desk roles at the Ministry of Munitions and Foreign Office. The war shaped Mosley more than any other
single experience, leaving him convinced that a new generation of leaders was needed in Britain. In December 1918, at the age of twenty-two and with no university degree, Mosley stood as the Conservative candidate for the Harrow parliamentary constituency in the general election. He won with a large majority and became the youngest sitting member of the House of Commons, part of the British parliament. He was tall, handsome, and a fascinating orator, and he moved with ease through the social world of the political elite. On 11 May 1920 he married
Lady Cynthia Curzon, known as Cimmie, the daughter of George Curzon, former Viceroy of India. The wedding was held at the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace in London. The hundreds of guests included King George V and Queen Mary. Mosley was genuinely attached to his wife, with whom he had three children, but he was constitutionally incapable of fidelity. Over the years that followed he conducted affairs with numerous women, including his wife’s younger sister Alexandra and their stepmother, Grace Curzon. Despite these betrayals,
Cynthia remained devoted to him and followed him through successive political reinventions. In the House of Commons, Mosley quickly made enemies by attacking his own side. He opposed Conservative policy on Ireland during the War of Independence, and went away from conservatives and for some time became an independent in the parliament. In 1926 he returned to parliament as the Labour representative for the Smethwick constituency and in 1929 the Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald appointed him Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with specific responsibility
for unemployment policy. In his new position Mosley produced a detailed programme of economic intervention but his proposals were repeatedly blocked by the Cabinet. When the party refused to adopt his programme, he resigned and founded the New Party in early 1931. It was a political miscalculation of the first order as the New Party won no seats in the 1931 general election, and Mosley lost his own seat in the parliament. The failure pushed him in a direction from which there was no return. In early 1932, one year before Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came
into power in Germany, Mosley visited Benito Mussolini in Italy and returned convinced that only fascism could rescue Britain from economic collapse and political stagnation. In October 1932 he founded the British Union of Fascists, known from the start as the BUF, uniting various small fascist groups under his own leadership. The movement adopted black-shirted uniforms modelled on Mussolini’s units, and Mosley styled himself after the Italian Duce. The party claimed up to 50,000 members at its peak, attracted early newspaper
support from Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail, and drew large crowds to its rallies. The BUF’s programme was protectionist, nationalist, anti-communist, and increasingly antisemitic. The turning point came on 7 June 1934, when the BUF staged a mass rally at Olympia, a major exhibition venue in the Kensington district of London. Anti-fascists who interrupted Mosley’s speech were beaten by blackshirted bodyguards of Mosley and this show of violence was witnessed by members of parliament and journalists. The resulting outrage caused Lord Rothermere to
withdraw the Daily Mail’s support. The Night of the Long Knives in Germany that same month, in which Hitler ordered the murder of part of his own leadership, further damaged the BUF’s image among moderate sympathisers as Mosley praised Nazism in Germany. Membership soon collapsed. One observer later remarked: “I came to the conclusion that Mosley was a political maniac, and that all decent English people must combine to kill his movement.” Yet rather than moderate his course, Mosley intensified the antisemitism.
Mosley publicly denounced Jewish interests as controlling British commerce, the press, cinema, and the City of London. Mosley´s antisemitism did not work with his broader audience, and as the BUF membership declined to less than 8000 by the end of 1935, Mosley shifted the party’s focus back to mainstream politics. However, antisemitism never left the movement. By 1936 the BUF was concentrating its resources on the East End of London, trying to win support in the poorer part of the city, but in the end the East End became a symbol of their defeat.
The attempt to march through the East End on 4 October 1936 was intended as a show of force and as a provocation of other parties, but it ended in humiliation of the British fascists. Mosley and his supporters were faced with 100,000 counter-demonstrators who had erected barricades across every planned route. The BUF column of around 3000 supporters was redirected away from the area, and the marchers dispersed. The Battle of Cable Street, as the confrontation became known, was celebrated by the anti-fascist movement as a decisive defeat of British
fascism and entered popular memory as a symbol of community resistance to racism and intimidation. Two days after the events at Cable Street, on 6 October 1936, Mosley, who was a widower since 1933, married his mistress, Diana Mitford. The ceremony took place in Berlin, at the home of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister and Adolf Hitler was among the guests. The marriage was kept secret for over a year. Like her husband, Diana was a committed admirer of the Nazi regime. After Mosley came back to the United Kingdom, he continued to organise marches and the British
government was sufficiently concerned to pass the Public Order Act 1936, which came into effect on 1 January 1937 and, amongst other things, banned political uniforms and quasi-military style organisations. Mosley continued to organise, but the movement was declining. In October 1937, addressing a crowd of 8,000 in Liverpool from the top of a van, he was knocked unconscious by stones thrown from the crowd. By the time the Second World War began on 1 September 1939 with Germany’s invasion of Poland, Mosley was campaigning for a negotiated peace with Hitler and
by many he was viewed as Hitler´s useful idiot. Mosley´s arguments found little understanding in a country preparing for war, and when France fell in May 1940 and a German invasion of Britain seemed possible, the government acted. On 23 May 1940, Mosley was arrested and interned without trial under Defence Regulation 18B. The BUF was banned and Mosley’s wife, Diana, was also interned in June, shortly after the birth of their son Max. The Mosleys lived together for the next few years in a house inside the Holloway prison in London. They were released in November 1943 on the grounds
of Mosley’s deteriorating health, a decision that provoked outrage in the press and in parliament. The Mosleys were placed under house arrest until the end of the war and denied passports for some time to limit their travels. Mosley, despite his political reputation being destroyed and his movement disbanded, tried to rebuild his position. In 1948 he founded the Union Movement, the successor to the BUF, which combined pan-European nationalism with virulent opposition to immigration from the British Commonwealth. In 1951 he left Britain for Ireland and then France,
settling eventually in a house called Le Temple de la Gloire meaning Temple of Glory located in Orsay, a suburb south of Paris, where he spent the remainder of his life. He stood for parliament twice more, in North Kensington in 1959 and Shoreditch in 1966, campaigning on platforms of white supremacy and anti-immigration, and was heavily defeated on both occasions. In the 1950s he became an early proponent of Holocaust denial – while not denying the existence of Nazi concentration camps. He claimed that they were a necessity to hold “a considerable disaffected
population”, where problems were caused by lack of supplies due to “incessant bombing” by the Allies, with bodies burned in gas chambers due to typhus outbreaks, rather than being created by the Nazis to exterminate people. He sought to discredit pictures taken in places like concentration camps Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen. He also claimed that the Holocaust was to be blamed on the Jews and that Adolf Hitler knew nothing about it and criticised the Nuremberg trials as “a zoo and a peep show”. Oswald Mosley died of natural causes at the
age of 84 on 3 December 1980 in Orsay, a town in France. His body was cremated at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and his ashes scattered in the pond in Orsay. The man who had begun his career as the most gifted politician of his generation, praised across party lines for his intelligence and his oratory, spoken of as a future prime minister, ended his life as a footnote to fascism, remembered chiefly for a march that never reached its destination and for some he became the worst Briton of the 20th century.
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