Hurrah For The Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars

These British Women Fought and Won the Vote. Then They Joined the Fascist Movement.

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Hurrah for the Blackshirts!: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars

All listings for this product Buy it now Buy it now. Trending price New. About this product Description Description. Britain is celebrated for having avoided the extremism, political violence and instability that blighted many European countries between the two world wars.

Disillusionment with parliamentary democracy, outbreaks of fascist violence and fears of communist subversion in industry and the Empire ran through the entire period. He has written ten books on aspects of nineteenth and twentieth century history and is on the board of BBC History Magazine. He is currently writing a social history of Britain between the wars for Cape and Pimlico. Publication Data Place of Publication. Show more Show less. But local evidence increasingly reveals a far wider social range and some distinct regional variations.

The movement was highly opportunistic in that it exploited issues which had local relevance. Mosley focused his speaking tours in areas of declining industry, notably Lancashire and Yorkshire, where the working-class Conservative tradition offered potential recruits. The most surprising aspect of the BUF was the extensive participation of women in its activities.

Its counterparts in Germany and Italy, which enjoyed a reputation for extreme patriarchal attitudes, had effectively suppressed their feminist movements. In Britain, pro-fascist writing by philosopher and social critic Anthony Ludovici in the s had attributed the degenerate state of politics partly to female emancipation, and s fascists continued to uphold such prejudices. In , Mosley himself wrote: Yet in practice, the movement became remarkably open to women.

Although the organization obviously included many anti-feminist men, it seems clear that the female members of the BUF played a very active role. Nellie Driver conceded that in Nelson, the women did make tea for the men returning from active duty, but they also received training in jiujitsu so that they could throw people out of meetings; this was thought necessary if only because male Blackshirts could not decently manhandle female Communists. As doorstep canvassers, the women presented a more reassuring image of fascism than that created by street violence and mass demonstrations. The fascists boasted that 10 percent of their candidates were female, a higher proportion than in any other party, and that this proved they were not trying to force women back into the home.

Why the British Union Fascist movement appealed to so many women.

In explaining the motivation that led women into fascism, it would be erroneous to dismiss them as being either misguided or manipulated. Many joined for reasons that had little to do with their gender; middle and upper-class women from Conservative backgrounds were reacting against conventional politics for the same reasons as men. In fact, their migration to fascism was far less anomalous than it appears at first sight. During the war, the suffragette leadership had adopted an extreme brand of patriotism and after , suffragette Christabel Pankhurst repudiated votes for women along with the entire parliamentary system.

In some sense, the ex-suffragette fascists still regarded themselves as feminists. As Alexander Raven Thompson and Anne Brock-Griggs explained, the corporate state would give women greater privileges than they enjoyed under democracy by ensuring proper representation for them as housewives. Pugh's admirable, provocative new study has no truck with complacent assumptions that fascism was always "fundamentally alien" to British political culture, no more than an ugly sideshow.

That it failed to grow into a major movement here, he argues, was only a matter of chance - "of timings and contingencies". Had Britain suffered the same kind of devastating economic collapse as Weimar Germany, for example, things might have turned out very differently.

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As Pugh points out, Mosley's BUF and the other blackshirt groups were able to draw on Britain's own heritage of far-right politics think of Edward Carson's paramilitary Ulster Volunteers. He also identifies long-standing connections between the fascists and a shadowy hinterland of ultra Conservatives who were fanatically anti-Bolshevik, suspicious of democracy, anti-semitic and set on a dogged defence of empire.

These Tories were full of admiration for Mussolini and full of hatred for the trade unions. Many MPs, Pugh reveals, were "remarkably unembarrassed" about having ties to a fascist organisation.

Yet it's difficult to take our first home-grown blackshirts too seriously. The British Fascisti, formed in by the eccentric former servicewoman Rotha Linton-Orman, took much inspiration from the Boy Scouts, and became a refuge for desperate military and empire types, as well as dilettantish young adventurers.

When a band of its members kidnapped Harry Pollitt, the communist leader, on a train in Liverpool, "they apparently intended to punish him by forcing him to spend a weekend in North Wales". The best-known follower of the National Fascisti, a splinter group formed a year later, was the transvestite Valerie Arkell-Smith, who, masquerading as "Colonel Barker", taught fencing and boxing to teenage recruits, and advised them to avoid getting mixed up with women. The league was controlled by the obsessive anti-semite Arnold Leese, an expert on the diseases of camels, whose only real friend was his bull-terrier.

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The BUF, formed in , was an altogether more serious proposition.

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