Fears, Smears and Volunteers: Kingston and the General Strike of May, 1926

Ninety-eight years ago this month, in May, 1926, Britain experienced a General Strike, called by the Trades Union Congress (T.U.C.), and – for a few days at least – ‘normal’ life in the country was put on temporary hold and fears were expressed in some quarters that a ‘revolution’ could develop. In a previous blog I explored some of the impact of this strike on Surbiton in Surrey. We can also trace some of the effects of the strike on nearby Kingston-on-Thames, as some of the official activities associated with trying to respond to and deal with the dispute embraced both towns and showed very similar patterns.

The strike, which lasted from 3rd-12th May, 1926, saw ’emergency measures’ being put in place in Kingston from day one of the dispute (Monday 3rd). Rightly or wrongly, there were genuine fears held by some members of the local town council that law and order might somehow break down and serious food shortages would occur. A representative from the heart of central government in Whitehall came down to the Municipal Offices at Kingston and, with the assistance of the Mayor and the Town Clerk, the foundations were laid out for how the local network of the government’s ‘Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies’ (O.M.S.) and its volunteers could be organised to ensure food supplies and the maintenance of existing services.

An appeal was issued for more local volunteers in Kingston-on-Thames, who were asked to register at the Town Hall and other local Municipal Offices. It was decided that the most urgent requirements were for assistance in transport by road and rail, and the appeal stated that ‘offers of the use of motor vehicles will be especially welcome’.

Voluntarism

Over the next two days (4th-5th May), the Town Hall in Kingston was, according to the local Surrey Comet newspaper, ‘besieged by volunteers eager to help in the present crisis’. The paper noted that it was emphasised by the officials that ‘nothing in the nature of any attempt at strike-breaking was desired, the only purpose of the organisation being to maintain absolutely essential services’. In fact, in the Kingston district, by the Wednesday morning (5th May), a thousand volunteers had been registered, with the work divided up into clerical duties, motor-driving and general labour. As well as the main local police, the official ‘Special Constabulary’ was also called out for extra policing duties and used the Kingston Public Library’s lecture hall as their temporary headquarters. A number of volunteers were also enrolled as ‘Special Constables’, and equipped with emergency powers to detain troublemakers if necessary.

By 8th May, the Surrey Comet itself had been reduced in size and could only be published as an ’emergency’ edition. The paper’s mechanical printing staff, while showing loyalty to their Trade Union, had still allowed a special shorter version of the newspaper to come out, containing brief items of news about the progress of the strike. The Comet also posted news updates outside its offices in Clarence Street in Kingston.

A Peaceful Affair

The first two or three days of the strike did see some overcrowding on buses and considerable activity by volunteer car-drivers, and the very few trains that ran into Waterloo were also very full. Overall, however, as with Surbiton, Kingston-on-Thames remained relatively quiet during the strike, with little sign that the lives of Kingstonians were being seriously effected or disrupted. As the Comet noted in its emergency edition: ‘There has been nothing in the nature of disorder in this district. The men as a rule have been loyal to their Unions, and have complied with the instructions given, though in many instances with very great reluctance’.

At the local utility depots in Kingston, there were some signs of tension, but nothing had really interfered with the supply of power to the town. Kingston Gas Company had managed to retain a full staff at work and had a good supply of coal, even though customers were still urged to make ‘greatest economy of use’. At the electricity plant, things were a bit more pressured, but still calm. Many of the workers at the electricity station had joined the strike, and had been replaced by 50 volunteers. Mr. T.A. Kingham, the Kingston Borough Electrical Engineer, admitted to the local press that he was having ‘a very strenuous time’, being practically chained to his office owing to depleted staff, but he was nevertheless ‘quite optimistic as to being able to keep up the supply of current’. He said he had been able to secure an adequate number of volunteers to ensure continuity of current.

Meanwhile, the local Conservative MP for Kingston, Mr. F. G. Penny, issued an appeal to every citizen to ‘stand fast and be calm’ and to do ‘all in their power to assist the Prime Minister [Stanley Baldwin] in the very grave and anxious days which are undoubtedly before us’. He said he hoped ‘reason will prevail’ and a satisfactory solution would be found to end the dispute. Penny was also enrolled by the Mayor of Kingston as a temporary Special Constable, and immediately reported for duty.

As with Surbiton, there was some evidence that the local branch of the NCU (‘National Citizens Union’, formerly the Middle Class Union), a rightwing pressure group, were quite active in the town, helping with the supply of volunteer drivers, who offered their private motor cars to ferry local people to work. The NCU nationally had sought to smear the strike’s main leaders as the tools of ‘Red’ revolutionaries, and probably hoped that there would be some serious confrontations, which would confirm the claims made in the NCU’s rather paranoid propaganda.

Meetings

Arguably one of the clearest signs of the strike in the town could be seen in the series of evening meetings arranged by the Kingston Strike Committee in conjunction with the local Kingston Labour Party. This series of meetings came to a climax on the first Saturday of the strike, when a ‘massed demonstration’ of the strikers of Kingston, Surbiton and Teddington was held in Kingston Market Place, in the centre of the town.

Estimated to be 1,000 in number, the crowd of strikers, which included men and women, heard a series of platform speakers. As the Surrey Comet noted: ‘Practically every speaker urged the strikers to keep calm and go about their legitimate duties as pickets and in other capacities in such a manner as not to arouse others to rowdyism, and to refrain from looting’.

In hindsight, there was very little likelihood of ‘rowdyism’ and looting breaking out in Kingston-on-Thames. The evidence suggests that many strikers were keen to get back to work as soon as possible, and there was undoubtedly a sense of relief when the T.U.C. called off the General Strike just a few days later.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was published here in 2018.

For a few days in May: Surbiton and the General Strike of 1926

In May, 1926, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) called a General Strike in Britain and, for about nine days (from 3rd-12th May), it appeared to many people that the country’s industrial relations had reached a new low-point. The Armed Forces were put on alert by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative government and troops were stationed at docks, electricity stations, and ordered to also accompany food convoys. Armoured cars even appeared on the streets at certain locations in London, something that one of Baldwin’s Cabinet Ministers, Winston Churchill, seemed to particularly relish.

The government also made use of the ‘Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies’ (O.M.S.), a voluntary network that had been indirectly created by the Home Office for use in precisely such an industrial emergency. The strike began at midnight on 3rd May, and there was genuine uncertainty about how such a national stoppage would affect the country. Was this a prelude to a revolution? Such questions were asked by the press and also deliberately encouraged by people on the far Left and the Die-hard Right.

In hindsight, it all proved to be a very ‘British’ and mild affair. While various factories saw mass pickets at their gates and the transport system was seriously impacted in some of the major urban areas (with some reports of vehicles being overturned), in other parts of the country life carried on relatively normally and things remained surprisingly calm and quiet. There were no major shortages of food (as some observers had feared) and the predictions of alarmist commentators at the time that the nation would somehow slip into turmoil and ‘Red’ revolution proved to be unfounded.

In many parts of the nation, the strikers became rather fed up after just a few days and slowly drifted back to work. A special delegation from the TUC (see photo) eventually went to Downing Street and negotiated a ‘peace deal’ with the Conservative Prime Minister.

While there has been some research on how Kingston-on-Thames in Surrey fared during the 1926 Strike, much less has been written about the impact of the event on the nearby town of Surbiton. So, how did Surbiton and its local municipal officials and inhabitants respond to the Strike? What arrangements were put in place for what some local dignitaries feared would be a long and drawn-out affair?

Volunteering in Surbiton

One key feature of the response of the local authorities was to issue what the Surbiton Times newspaper (on May 7th) called a ‘strongly-worded appeal for volunteers’, citizens who could offer themselves up on a temporary basis, and would act under the authority of the national government to help in the ‘feeding of the people’; they would be drawn from ‘all classes, irrespective of their views on the subject of the strike’.

A few days later, the local press gave details on the ‘strike measures’ that were enacted in Surbiton to cope with the national dispute. The chairman of Surbiton District Council, Mr. F.B. Ray, JP, explained the various measures that had been taken ‘to keep conditions of life normal during the Strike’. According to Ray, recruitment of local volunteers under the government’s scheme for maintaining efficient services had ‘proceeded well’, and ‘640 Surbitonians had volunteered’. Between 150 and 160 Special Constables had been enrolled and ‘valuable work’ had been accomplished ‘though the medium of a voluntary car service to enable business people to reach their work in London and elsewhere’.

Indeed, evidence suggests that local members of the National Citizens Union (formerly the Middle Classes Union), in conjunction with the O.M.S., were very active in organising the ‘Voluntary Car Service’ in the town. In particular, Mr. G. Owens-Beatty, of Beaufort Road in Surbiton, and who was a leading member of the local National Citizens Union branch, appears to have put considerable time and energy into organising a large team of motor-car owners in Surbiton, with a special registration post at Surbiton train station. Commuters who were unable to catch trains into work due to the strike action on the railways were thus able to try and get a lift from the volunteer motor-car owners instead.

Interestingly, the local Surrey Comet newspaper, published in a roughly produced ’emergency’ form in nearby Kingston, also reported on events at Surbiton train station during the strike: according to the paper, crowds gathered at the station each morning hoping to catch a train, but most had to find other ways to reach central London: ‘Every kind of conveyance, ranging from Rolls-Royces to traders’ delivery vans, was pressed into service, and many a rusty push bicycle was brought out of its hiding place to do duty once more’. When an occasional train did appear at the station, it was apparently greeted with wild excitement. The May 8th edition of the Comet reported, for example, that the volunteer locomotive driver of one such train ‘reaped a tremendous harvest’ when nearly every passenger ‘gave the bearded veteran a contribution’.

This ‘voluntarism’ was also seen in other ways in Surbiton, and local middle-class women seemed to be especially keen to encourage what they saw as a ‘community’ spirit during a time of emergency. Mrs. Amy Woodgate, for example, who was a member of Surbiton District Council (and chair of the Kingston and Surbiton Branch of the Women Citizens’ Association) helped register volunteers at Surbiton Council offices in Ewell Road (see photo), and the Association itself also registered as a body for volunteer service.

Similarly, to give another example, Mrs. W.A. Clowes took charge of a ‘rest house’ for the volunteer Special Constables on Surbiton Hill where, ‘assisted by a number of willing lady helpers’, she provided what the Surbiton Times called ‘a real home from home for the gallant volunteer policemen, who are intensely grateful for the benefits they derived from the hostel’.

Surviving the Strike

At noon on May 12th, 1926, members of the TUC met Prime Minister Baldwin at Downing Street and agreed to re-open negotiations. The strike was called off. It had originally been called in support of the Miners, who were facing a wage cut and an increase in their working hours. The Miners were now left to struggle on alone until November, 1926.

On May 21st, the Surbiton Times, in an editorial which surveyed what had happened during the strike at local level, expressed great satisfaction about what it felt were the qualities on display by local people ‘in the face of direct adversity’, and proclaimed grandly: ‘The General Strike of 1926 will go down to history as an event which perhaps more than the Great War itself revealed the wonderful fortitude and resourcefulness of the British nation’.

The newspaper’s editor also indulged in some notably stereotypical language and highlighted what he claimed was ‘that splendid spirit the true Britisher always displays in times of emergency’, when ‘thousands of volunteers came forward to render what assistance they could to prevent every-day life from becoming stagnant’.

While more research is required on the impact of the General Strike in Surbiton, and indeed in Surrey more generally, the brief details above can perhaps provide us with some initial insights into the effects of the industrial action, and the response of various local people to this significant stoppage in the town.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of the this blog was published here in April, 2018.

Left and Right? New claims about Soviet spy Anthony Blunt

In a fascinating and provocative article in the Sunday Times (April 28th), Rosamund Urwin discussed the possibility that Anthony Blunt, the ‘fourth man’ in the infamous ‘Cambridge Five’ Soviet spy ring, may have passed secrets to the Nazis in World War Two. Urwin’s article set out and summarised some new findings and a controversial fresh thesis being put forward by Robert Verkaik in his new book The Traitor of Arnhem (published by Headline publishers on May 9th, 2024).

Sir Anthony Blunt (1907-1983), of course, was the art historian and very ‘establishment’ man who became Adviser for the Queen’s Pictures and Drawings, working for years for the Royal Household. But he had also privately confessed in 1964 to having been a Soviet spy. Astonishingly, he was allowed to keep his job as surveyor of the Queen’s pictures. This was something that was not made public until 15 years later, when he was named as a double agent by the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons. His naming led to a major outcry in the press but also saw great efforts by the establishment to cover up the enormity of Blunt’s treason and to engage in damage limitation. While he was stripped of his Knighthood in November, 1979, after his exposure as a traitor, Blunt still emerged from all the scandal and publicity largely unscathed, undoubtedly helped by his close friendship with the Queen. There were allegations that the establishment had closed ranks to protect one of their own and water down the scale of Blunt’s betrayals.

A ‘good chap’

Indeed, in many ways, Blunt had been the epitome of a British establishment man. After graduating from Cambridge University and serving in the British Army for a year, he had joined MI5, the domestic Security Service, in 1940, and rose rapidly up its ranks to become a key Intelligence Officer. However, he had also been recruited as a Soviet spy while at Cambridge, and was part of a group of upper-class spies which became known as the ‘Cambridge Five’, a group which included Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean and Kim Philby. They all wormed their way into the very heart of the wartime and post-War establishment, helped considerably by their social backgrounds as ‘good chaps’ and loyal patriots. Burgess and Maclean had defected to Russia in 1951, but Philby managed to remain at the heart of MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, for another 12 years, until he too fled to the Soviet Union.

As Verkaik notes, while Burgess, Maclean and, in particular, Philby gave many secrets to the Soviet Union which led to the loss, torture and brutal murder of numerous British and other agents, Blunt has often been seen as one of the more harmless of that group. But Verkaik’s research suggests that Blunt was, in reality, arguably one of the ‘most devastatingly treacherous’ of the five. Verkaik’s new study accuses Blunt of being the most likely candidate to be ‘Josephine’, who passed details of the vitally important Allied plan to try to end the war early, Operation Market Garden, to the Germans, but whose identity has never been established.

Operation Market Garden had been planned as the largest airborne operation in military history: 40,000 paratroopers and glider troops were dropped in the Netherlands, tasked with capturing and securing six bridges over the River Rhine, easing the way for Allied tanks to quickly push into Germany. But when the Operation went ahead, British and American forces encountered unexpectedly heavy resistance from the Germans, including from two SS Panzer Divisions. German reinforcements also rapidly flooded in. Bitter fighting ensued, leading to more than 17,000 Allied casualties and to the eventual surrender of many troops that were not able to escape back to Allied lines. The defeat was portrayed memorably in the popular box-office hit A Bridge Too Far (1977), directed by Richard Attenborough.

Somebody, it seemed, had tipped off the Germans about the Operation. While it has long been accepted that a Dutch double-agent, Christiaan Lindemans, was the culprit, it is also known that Berlin had received a second and more accurate briefing about the Operation from a spy code-named ‘Josephine’. This had led to major panic in Allied senior Intelligence ranks, as it was feared the Nazis had managed to infiltrate a deep ‘mole’ at the heart of Allied military planning.

A traitor within

Concern about such a mole had apparently been growing for some time. Blunt, as a highly-regarded and senior member of MI5 (and even seen by some, or so Verkaik contends, as a potential future Director-General of the Security Service), had been given the task of tracking down ‘Josephine’ a year earlier. But – in a supreme twist – he may have been investigating himself! According to Verkaik, Blunt had ‘the means, the motive and the opportunity’ to betray what eventually became Operation Market Garden, and he was ‘the only person who could fit the profile of who Josephine had to be’. While Verkaik is unable to prove conclusively that Blunt was ‘Josephine’, he nevertheless feels the balance of probabilities points to Blunt. It is difficult to know to what extent this new theory holds water, though, and historians have to tread very carefully, but it’s certainly an interesting thesis.

Why would his Soviet controllers have instructed Anthony Blunt to pass the information to the Nazis? Sabotaging Operation Market Garden would have suited Stalin and the USSR, mainly because the Soviet leader did not want the British and Americans to reach Berlin while Russian forces were still engaged in heavy fighting against the Germans on the Eastern Front. Stalin had already drawn up secret plans to create a new ‘Empire’ in Eastern Europe, and a British and American presence in Berlin and elsewhere in Germany would have constituted a possible hindrance to those plans. Moreover, Stalin was determined his forces would reach and capture Berlin before his British and American Allies.

There is much more to the story and I, for one, am very much looking forward to reading the full book by Verkaik. As he notes, by 1944, Blunt, as a top MI5 officer, was even writing Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s security briefings, was liaison officer for intelligence sharing between MI5 and MI6, and had roles in various other top secret committees and operations. Yet he was not only a Soviet spy, but may have given information to the Nazis which led to the deaths of tens of thousands of Allied servicemen and women as a result of a prolonged war. Much more research is needed, however, to establish the full truths and untruths of the matter.

The Traitor of Arnhem (2024), by Robert Verkaik, is published by Headline publishers.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics.

Images: Wikimedia commons.

Subverting the Subversives: Did MI5 infiltrate the British entertainment industry?

Back in 2018 new claims were put forward that the British domestic Security Service, MI5, was not just involved with monitoring and collecting intelligence on political movements and individuals deemed as potential threats to the state in the post-war period, but was also involved in the ‘policing’ of moral standards at the cultural level.

MI5 seemingly infiltrated the UK’s entertainment industry in the 1960s, with the objective of sabotaging and undermining Leftwing theatre and movie productions, and causing Communist and Trotskyite groups to lose substantial sums of money in the process.

According to The Times newspaper (February 27th, 2018), the daughter of one of MI5’s most renowned spies had pointed to evidence that the Security Service was keen to target not just political activists, such as communists, Trotskyists and the peace movement, in the usual way, but also sought to counter what was regarded as Leftwing propaganda in the theatre and movie entertainment world.

MI5 operations

Charlotte Bingham, whose father John Bingham (1908-1988) was a leading MI5 officer (and reputedly the model for John Le Carre’s famous fictional spy George Smiley), had written her memoirs, MI5 and Me (2018), and in these she revealed that her father forced her to join MI5 when she was a teenager (see photo). Moreover, she provided some fascinating new details on the operational tactics of  the Security Service, including on how her father allowed various theatre actors to lodge at the Bingham family home in the 1960s.

There was a secret purpose to this apparent generosity. Bingham revealed that her father had told her that the actors could help them know ‘what kind of communist propaganda is going to be pushed at the general public… this is most important for maintaining standards’. John Bingham also apparently added: ‘A country can lose its way overnight after seeing the wrong play or film’.

Charlotte Bingham, who is herself a bestselling novelist and has also written for numerous television productions (such as the very popular Upstairs, Downstairs), claimed in her memoirs that MI5 even helped bring about the closure of a West End theatre production, a play which featured a ‘common man, rich capitalist and poor woman’. One of John Bingham’s actor lodgers had apparently been persuaded to ‘sabotage’ the opening night of the new play by forgetting his lines and coughing throughout the performance. Charlotte Bingham’s father then revealed to his daughter that, because of the ‘political’ nature of the play, Trotskyists had put ‘rather a large amount of party funds in it – and now of course they’ve lost the lot’. Bingham also claimed that her father also later began to target the movie world: he and MI5 became interested in ‘sabotaging’ a film made by a ‘famously up-and-coming film director’, whom she called Leslie Robertson.

‘Loyal’ theatrical agencies provided actors for the new production and then, during the shooting of the movie, two of the actors lodging at the Bingham home were persuaded to be ‘intransigent… about their interpretation of their roles’ in the movie. Bingham revealed that she realised that her father, in his capacity as an MI5 officer, ‘must be using the same tactics the commmunists were adopting to cause strikes in factories’, and was ‘getting at the target from the inside…’. She also noted that the car journeys each morning which ferried the two lodgers to their work on the film set ‘were lightened by the sound of their laughter as they planned yet more fiendish tactics destined to throw Leslie Robertson into chaos and confusion’.

Research challenges

As the Times Arts Correspondent noted, the Security Service files from this period have yet to be released to the National Archives at Kew, so it is difficult to obtain further information or confirmation on MI5’s apparent campaign to counter ‘cultural’ forms of Marxist subversion in the 1960s.

Similarly, the official authorised history of MI5 by Christopher Andrew, Defence of the Realm (published in 2009), does not have any discussion of the Service’s apparent attempt to infiltrate and manipulate the entertainment industry.

However, historians might find further evidence of such strategies in future releases of MI5 files to the National Archives.

If the claims made by Bingham are true, it certainly throws significant new light on how the state and its agencies were determined to counter what they regarded as the dangerous propaganda of the ‘cultural’ Left in the Swinging Sixties. More research on this by scholars is required.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics 

(All images: WikiMedia Commons)

Note: This is a slightly updated version of a blog first published here in March, 2018.

History as conspiracy theory: The case of David Icke and the ‘Protocols’

Just prior to the Covid-19 medical emergency and lockdown, I embarked on the delivery of a module on the role of conspiracy theory in history, and recently had the opportunity to run the module again. The course sought to address the very difficult question of why so many people appear to believe that ‘secret’ forces are at work in the world and allow themselves to be seduced and conned by the claim that there is no such thing as ‘accident’ in history. One of the conspiracy theorists I covered on the module was the former footballer and Green activist David Icke, author of books such as And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995) and Alice in Wonderland and the World Trade Center Disaster (2002).

A recent typical example of Icke’s output was The Trap: What it is, how it works, and how we escape its illusions, which was published in September, 2022. The book regurgitated some familiar Icke obsessions and nonsense. He claimed that there is a ‘Global Cult’ at work, which operates across frontiers and is pursuing a long-term ‘plan’ for total human control. Depressingly, one only has to have a quick glance at the many reviews of the book on the Amazon Books UK website and you can see that his army of supporters came out in force, heaping praise on the book and treating Icke as some kind of ultra-wise guru.

By coincidence, while I was undertaking some background research and developing my course materials for the conspiracy module, Icke (pictured right) was touring the UK with a special stage show, where he presented his controversial theories about the past and the present. This tour, which also functioned as a book-launch, had included a session in Edinburgh and a big event at the Troxy Theatre in London’s East End.

However, his tour/book launch did not go as smoothly as he had hoped. Two days after the London event, Icke was banned by Manchester United football team from holding ‘An Evening with David Icke’ at their Old Trafford stadium in Manchester. In a statement issued that the time, Manchester United had said: ‘The booking was made by a junior member of staff who was unaware of Icke and his objectionable views. The event has been cancelled’.

The decision to cancel Icke’s event came after complaints had been made by the UK’s Campaign Against Anti-Semitism and also from a Labour MP, Kate Green. Predictably, in comments made on his own Twitter account, Icke had said Manchester United was ‘a disgrace’ for cancelling his show ‘on the say-so of ultra-Zionist hate group and freedom-destroying Labour MP’. The reference to Zionism was telling, and I will explain why.

Icke’s Ideology

For those unfamiliar with Icke and his work, there is quite a disturbing history attached to him. Icke (b. 1952) is infamous for writing a series of long and turgid conspiratorial books which have become best-sellers among those drawn to such views. Each book ranges across a variety of topics and there is considerable use of a very selective version of history and key historical events. Coincidence in history is radically downgraded, and replaced instead with purpose, design and ‘plots’ as the most important factors in interpreting the major events of the past. Some of this ‘history’ has become notably strange. In particular, Icke has claimed that ‘interdimensional reptilian aliens’ operate behind the scenes, brainwashing and controlling the world’s governing elites and shaping history for particular ends.

Icke’s obsession with ‘reptiles’, however, as I explained to students in my module on conspiracy theory, was the result of a more coded language that he subsequently adopted when there was an outcry over one of his earliest books. In The Robots Rebellion (1994), Icke had made uncritical use of the Czarist anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (1903), which claims that the world is subject to manipulation and control by a secret ‘cabal’ of Jewish elders who meet annually. In the second edition of Robots Rebellion, this material was carefully edited out, but Icke’s general claim of a grand conspiracy at work across the globe remained. His books and sell-out talks have repeated this ‘global’ thesis ever since, in ever more bizzare and elaborate ways. In particular, the Covid-19 pandemic gave him even more opportunities to claim that a ‘global elite’ was deliberately using the mass vaccination programme to further their quest for world dominance.

Indeed, in recent years Icke has returned back to his earlier obsession with the Protocols, and now talks more boldly and explicitly about the book and about ‘Rothschild Zionists’ more generally. He has evidently decided that sufficient time has now elapsed since the huge row caused by The Robots Rebellion in 1994, and that it is now ‘safe’ again to push some classic conspiracy ideas about ‘Zionist’ puppet-masters and ‘secret’ forces operating behind the scenes. In one radio interview, for example (still available on YouTube), Icke put forward a detailed ‘history’ about the role of the Protocols and even linked the book to Allen Dulles and the American CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). Dulles was supposedly a ‘front man of the House of Rothschild’. Icke’s version of the history of the Middle East would also have left a professional historian tearing their hair out.

A Brief History of Falsehood

As I pointed out in the sessions on my module, conspiracy theory, or ‘conspiracism’, has had a long and ugly history, with roots that can be traced right back to at least the time of the French Revolution, and to extravagant ideas about Freemasons and the Bavarian Illuminati. But it was during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that conspiracy theory really began to grow and gain ground, spreading major falsehoods about how the world works, and the Protocols was a classic example of such thinking.

In the early 1920s, the book was printed and distributed widely by the ‘Britons Publishing Society’, an extreme rightwing and highly anti-Semitic publishing group in the UK, created by Henry Hamilton Beamish (1873-1948). The Britons Society also exported many copies to other countries, and Hamilton, along with sympathisers and supporters of the Britons, helped translate and promote the Protocols in all corners of the world, including in the Middle East and Africa. The book was also taken up by the famous American motor manufacturer Henry Ford (1863-1947) in the USA, and by Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany, especially by the Nazi movement’s main ideologue of ‘race’, Alfred Rosenberg (1893-1946).

And the book did not disappear after the Second World War and the Holocaust. In fact, it has been reprinted on many occasions ever since, and there are now numerous versions available today on the internet. In fact, in recent years, the Protocols has been used by conspiracy theorists to ‘explain’ a diverse number of historical events, ranging from the death of Lady Diana in 1997 to ‘9/11’ in 2001 and the Iraq War in 2003. The Financial Crash of 2008 was also (apparently) deliberately engineered by the secretive Elders of Zion to undermine the West and bring about a ‘New World Order’, with a ‘One World’ dictatorship policed by the United Nations from New York.

Inevitably, conspiracy theorists such as Icke have employed the Protocols to make a whole series of bizarre assertions about the recent Covid pandemic, alleging that ‘global financiers’ have made huge profits out of the ‘vax’ programmes, and that it has all been part of the sinister plot to eventually brainwash everybody and take over the world. Frankly, the fact that David Icke has himself been utilising the basic tenets of the Protocols once again speaks volumes about the man.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earler version of this blog was published here in October, 2022

Racist Revisionism: Arnold Leese and early Holocaust Denial in Britain

Some brief exploration of the extent to which crude and racist historical revisionism has moved from the margins into the cultural mainstream of society can be a truly shocking experience. It is no exaggeration to say that conspiracy theory and its ugly child Holocaust Denial have taken on industrial-scale proportions in the early 21st Century. What many people still don’t seem to appreciate is the degree to which British conspiracists played a key role in this, beginning to sow the seeds almost immediately after the end of the War in 1945.

Indeed, the early origins of the extremist attempt to undermine, censor and selectively re-write the historical record for vulgar ideological purposes can be traced back to notorious far right activists such as Arnold Leese in Britain. Leese (1878-1956) had been arguably one of the most palpable examples of a British version of Hitler to have appeared in the country during the 1930s, having created the rabidly anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi ‘Imperial Fascist League’ (IFL) in 1929. He had even advocated mass extermination of Jews by gas chambers as early as 1935. 

Arnold Leese in IFL uniform

Regarded by British State Home Office and by the domestic security service MI5 as a potential collaborator in the event of a German invasion of Britain, Leese had been arrested in 1940 and spent much of the war interned in Brixton prison.

However, when he was released in 1944 on grounds of ill-health, it soon became clear that he remained obstinately devoted to his beliefs. Far from having changed his mind about Nazism, Leese emerged from incarceration even more convinced that his ‘racial fascist’ views of the world were still as relevant as ever. Returning to his home in Guildford in Surrey, Leese was soon back at his writing desk and exploring publication possibilities, despite the continued rationing of paper supplies.

In fact, in June, 1945, within just a few months of the shocking discovery by Allied troops of the full scale and sheer horrors of the German Nazi extermination camps, and very shortly after the conclusion of the War in Europe, Leese announced to readers of his new monthly publication Gothic Ripples that he had written a book on the conflict entitled The Jewish War of Survival. As far as Leese was concerned, the War had been in reality a ‘Jewish’ endeavour, fought for Jewish interests. Just a month later, evidently with the Hitlerite Third Reich in mind, Leese revealed in Gothic Ripples that he believed that ‘the finest civilisation that Europe ever had has been wiped out of existence by the Allies in a Jewish war’.

Leese’s Obsessions

During the course of the remaining months of 1945, Leese went on to pen further inflammatory and racist views by criticising the War as the product of what he called the ‘Revenge Instinct’ of the Jews. Furthermore, as damning evidence was gathered for the official commencement of the Nuremberg Trials in November, 1945, Leese labelled some of the witness statements as ‘Belsen Bunkum’. He also dismissed the Nuremberg hearings more generally as ‘purely a Jewish and Masonic’ affair, which was, in his estimation, ‘only explicable by the Jewish control of “Democracy” and Bolshevism’. In essence, as Leese viewed it, the trial was being conducted ‘without the slightest legal authority’.

Tellingly, though, Leese appears to have shifted his stance somewhat during the course of the Nuremberg hearings. While he had initially referred to ‘Belsen Bunkum’ and also to ‘hate-propaganda’ against the Germans, his attempts to undermine and dismiss the trial did not take the form of outright denial of the mass murder of Jewish inmates in the camps, but began to increasingly take the shape of a more ambitious and elaborate conspiracy theory, whereby his early claim that it was the product of Jewish ‘revenge’ was given more and more emphasis. Significantly, Leese did not try to deny that mass extermination by the Nazis had taken place, mainly because (as he admitted) he plainly approved of Hitler’s attempt to deal with the so-called ‘Jewish Menace’. Rather, Leese sought to undermine the credibility of the trial by portraying it as ‘unjust’, not neutral and as an act of ‘naked Jewish Revenge’.

This conspiracy theory involved rewriting and distorting the nature of the Second World War, an undertaking which Leese had begun before the Nuremberg trials had started and which was set out in considerable detail in The Jewish War of Survival, a copy of which Leese even managed to send to the Defence Counsel for Hermann Goring, which they accepted. In Leese’s warped interpretation of the key wartime events, the conflict had allegedly been fought in the interests of ‘Jewish Money Power’ and the ‘Dictatorship of the Jew’, while Hitler had actually wanted ‘Peace with Britain’.

This zealous pursuit of a conspiratorial interpretation of history was continued in tedious and repetitive form in many of Leese’s post-Nuremberg writings, firmly rooted in an ideological crusade to persuade his supporters, and other gullible citizens, that the official Allied version of the War had been the product of fraud and ‘propaganda’, all the while manipulated by Jewish puppet-masters operating behind the scenes. Revealingly, by the early 1950s, Leese had reverted back to his ‘Belsen Bunkum’ approach and adopted a more explicit version of what we would clearly recognise today as outright Holocaust Denial.

In a 1953 edition of Gothic Ripples, for example, Leese referred to what he called the ‘fable of the slaughter of six million Jews by Hitler’, and denied the truth of the Holocaust. This was music to the ears of other far right anti-Semites, especially those who would go on to form the backbone of the emerging neo-Nazi movement in Britain. The late Colin Jordan (1923-2009) was a good example of such activists.

It is important to note that Arnold Leese’s writings remained for many years banished to the disreputable margins of the world of fringe conspiracy theory and far right politics. Depressingly, though, in recent times – especially with the emergence of the internet from the mid-1990s onwards – Leese’s early versions of Holocaust revisionism and Denial have re-emerged into the light of day once again and, unfortunately, have been ‘re-discovered’ by a new and younger generation of extreme rightwing activists. In particular, The Jewish War of Survival has been reprinted on a number of occasions by far right publishing houses (see the image above, for example), while Leese’s other writings have become readily available in numerous forms across the internet. His IFL leaflets from the 1930s have been reprinted in hard-copy form and, disturbingly, some of the racist cartoons and images from these have been utilized by anti-Vax and ‘anti-Zionist’ campaigners. Positive profiles and appraisals of Leese have also appeared in a number of recent neo-Nazi publications in Britain.

This is why it remains essential, in the service of historical truth, to continue the task of educating the general public about the realities of the Holocaust and the consequences of intolerance and racism.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics.

Note: The above is based on a blog I put together in February, 2020, for the British Association for Holocaust Studies (BAHS). This is now the British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies (BIAHS).

Images: Wikipedia Commons.

Exploring the Nazi Career of Otto Skorzeny, the ‘Devil’s Disciple’

Although studies of Otto Skorzeny, said to be Hitler’s ‘favourite commando’, tended to be limited and were often of highly questionable quality for much of the post-war period, this situation appears to have changed in more recent years. Some qualitatively better research material has become available and, thus, serious historians of Nazi Germany have becoming increasingly interested in demythologizing and unpacking Skorzeny’s career and reputation. One such contribution to the growing historiography came in 2018, with Stuart Smith’s Otto Skorzeny: The Devil’s Disciple (Osprey publishers).

Austrian-born Otto Skorzeny (1908-1975) was, as Smith notes, a highly controversial figure, with a complex personality. Smith had to draw on years of in-depth research to put together a ‘warts and all’ biographical study of a man who had loyally served Hitler and, significantly, had also continued his far right activities post-1945. Skorzeny joined the Nazi party in 1932 and, later, the SS in 1934, quickly rising through the ranks. During World War Two he was decorated for bravery for his military service on the Eastern Front.

He became familiar to non-German audiences for his part in a daring mission undertaken in Italy. Skorzeny had been personally selected and entrusted by Hitler with the task of rescuing incarcerated Italian dictator Benito Mussolini from a mountain-top hotel. Mussolini had been deposed in 1943, removed from power by his own Fascist Grand Council. The mission to rescue Mussolini, using a dangerous glider-borne landing for Skorzeny’s commandos, had been a complete success. Unsurprisingly, the Nazi regime’s propagandists had milked the operation for all its worth, presenting Skorzeny as a great ‘hero’ and Germanic warrior. Skorzeny himself was only too happy to take full advantage of this sudden propaganda fame, and it is from this point onwards that the ‘Skorzeny legend’ began to grow.

This was reinforced by his involvement in the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ in 1944, a last gamble by Hitler to turn the war in the West in his favour through a surprise attack on American forces in the Ardennes. Skorzeny’s SS troops had operated behind Allied lines, wearing U.S. army uniforms to sow confusion and engage in sabotage.

Indeed, an especially important section in Smith’s book is the Epilogue (pp. 319-325), in which the author deftly explores the ‘Man and Myth’ at the heart of the Skorzeny story, including the origins of distorted and a romanticised version of Skorzeny’s life and career that was helped considerably by Skorzeny himself, who devoted time during his first 18 months on the run to writing some comprehensive memoirs. A cut-down version of these were published in 1950 as Secret Commando Skorzeny, selling over 10,000 copies. Skorzeny also sold serialization rights to various French and German media outlets and, subsequently, to a U.S. publisher in 1951.

In Britain, the Daily Express also ran a series of ‘exclusive’ and rather uncritical interviews with Skorzeny that, to use Smith’s words, helped ‘cement his reputation’ with Anglo-Saxon readers. By 1958, he had appeared on BBC radio and on ITV television, and in the following year he was included in a BBC TV series titled Men of Action. Looking back on this now, it is evident that Skorzeny was given far too much leeway to craft a ‘soft’ and highly dubious version of his own life and career. It was not until much later that critics began to slowly challenge this and unpick it bit by bit. Yet, even today, some military historians appear to remain in awe of Skorzeny’s exploits and prefer to ignore his ‘politics’.

Skorzeny and Transnational Neo-Nazism

However, an arguably even more important part of Smith’s book, and a topic that is still ripe for further research by historians, is the extent to which Otto Skorzeny remained a devoted Nazi, and was involved in the attempted ideological revival of Nazism via international neo-Nazi networks after 1945. Arrested and interrogated by the Americans in 1945, Skorzeny was imprisoned but not prosecuted. Although the Americans were keen to convict him for his illegal activities during the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ in 1944 and he was tried in 1947, he was acquitted when a British military witness at the trial pointed out that the Allies themselves had also used Skorzeny-style subterfuge during the War. Ironically, while still waiting to be fully ‘de-Nazified’, in 1948 he escaped from a detention camp and fled to Franco’s Spain, where he arrived in Madrid in 1950. The Spanish capital had become something of a safe haven for numerous former fascists. With monetary help from sympathetic friends, Skorzeny built up a considerable financial fortune in Spain’s capital and, at the same time, he became an attractive draw for neo-Nazis from across the globe.

Although he denied to the British press that he was still a Nazi, in truth he remained devoted to the National Socialist creed and the evidence suggests that he was involved in helping various Nazi war criminals to escape from Europe to South America (although not on the scale that some accounts have claimed). Furthermore, Skorzeny did his utmost to encourage like-minded far right activists to re-engage in politics. In the early 1950s, for example, he forged links with the Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands (SRP) – at the time West Germany’s most successful neo-Nazi party, until it was outlawed in October, 1952. Perhaps utilizing lessons absorbed from some of his infamous and deceitful wartime strategies, Skorzeny also encouraged post-war ‘entryism’ (infiltration) by neo-Nazis into private businesses, veteran’s associations and more mainstream political parties.

Interestingly, he also developed some close links with the former British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, who was himself regularly travelling across Europe and the world seeking to build a new neo-fascist network and, ultimately, a new ‘European’ far right party and movement.

As Smith points out, however, attempts at transnationalism by far right leaders in the 1950s did not lead to any new or significant extreme right movements, and Skorzeny mainly turned his attention to building up a career as a successful businessman (and arms dealer) in Spain, although the ex-SS man never abandoned his strong Nazi beliefs. In fact, in 1966, he set up a supposedly ‘cultural’ organisation dedicated to the music of Wagner; in reality, this was a front for a neo-Nazi organisation and publishing house, CEDADE, which helped print and reprint Nazi and general far right material for distribution across Europe. Indeed, as a founder and advisor to the leadership of CEDADE (the ‘Spanish Circle of Friends of Europe’), Skorzeny was able to act as an arms-length ‘godfather’ to a neo-Nazi organisation which was ambitiously designed to co-ordinate extreme right international links across Europe and to print and disseminate far right pamphlets and books across all parts of the continent and other corners of the globe.

In the 1970s, in a number of interviews he gave in Madrid, Skorzeny also strongly defended the Third Reich and claimed that the regime had been brought down by a ‘conspiracy of traitors’.

Posthumous Reputation

When he died in 1975, a Nazi flag was draped across his coffin and it is estimated that 500 Nazi sympathisers attended his funeral, where the Nazi salute was made. At the time of his death, Skorzeny was a very wealthy man, and had bank accounts in Spain, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States. It is difficult to know to what extent Skorzeny had used some of his wealth to give direct financial help to far right movements or activists across the globe. More research is required. But what is undoubtedly the case is that Skorzeny helped some of his former Nazi comrades in the post-war period, particularly some of those who were being hunted by anti-fascists and war crimes experts. And, during the 1960s and early 1970s, there is evidence that a number of the new younger generation of neo-Nazis made their way to Spain to meet a man they still regarded as a great ‘hero’ and father-figure to the international fascist cause.

The real challenge for the historian remains the need to disentangle the myth and reality that surrounds Skorzeny’s life and career, not helped by the lies and narcissistic distortions spun by Skorzeny himself when he was still alive. A certain type of glamour appears to have become attached to his life, with the more evil Nazi aspects of his activities downplayed or dismissed in some quarters.

Depressingly, Skorzeny’s own writings remain very popular both with military history enthusiasts and far right audiences today. In October, 2023, a new edition of Skorzeny’s memoirs became available in Britain, entitled Skorzeny’s Special Missions: The Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Daring Commando, published by Greenhill Books. Moreover, some hardline neo-Nazi social media forums regularly praise Skorzeny as a ‘heroic’ example of the Third Reich’s vision of the European ‘New Man’. Conspiracy theory literature has also increasingly appropriated Skorzeny and claimed that he was sent on special missions to retrieve lost ‘Nazi Gold’ and so on.

The last word should go to Stuart Smith again, who points out that the ‘myth’ that surrounds Skorzeny has eclipsed the man and taken on a life of its own.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: This is an updated version of a blog that was first published here in July, 2023.

Radicalism in Richmond-on-Thames: The influence of the Left Book Club of the 1930s

Back in 2018-2019, using a variety of sources, I conducted some research into the local impact of the famous Left Book Club (LBC) of the 1930s, focusing in particular on the town of Richmond-on-Thames in the outer suburbs of London.

My findings were published in an issue of the Richmond History journal (no.40, May, 2019). The article, entitled ‘Radical Readers’, briefly set out the history and impact of an active branch of the LBC in leafy Richmond-on-Thames in the late 1930s.

Some people were surprised that Richmond saw such leftwing activities during the interwar period, given the town’s reputation as a very middle-class district located in the Thames Valley area of South-West London. Yet, it is important to appreciate that Richmond saw a fairly wide range of politics during the 1930s, ranging right across the political spectrum from Right to Left, and I continue to come across references to the local LBC in my research into the town’s political scene.

The nature of the LBC

What was the LBC? The Club was one of the first national book clubs in Britain. Founded in May, 1936, by the leftwing sympathiser and well-known publisher Victor Gollancz (pictured), the Club was designed to help spread knowledge and progressive ideas among the general public, via accessible and reasonably-priced volumes specially produced under the distinctive LBC colour design and imprint.

Gollancz (1893-1967), born in Maida Vale, London, to Jewish parents of German and Polish background, had joined the Labour Party in 1931 but, over the course of the next few years, came to feel that the Left in Britain had lost its intellectual direction. In his estimation, it required a new ‘Popular Front’ kind of unity in the face of the rise of fascism in Germany, threats to democracy elsewhere in Europe and the outbreak of civil war in Spain. He was also concerned at the apparent sympathy shown by Britain’s aristocratic and governing elites towards authoritarian regimes.

Educating the public

One way Gollancz felt that he could help the leftwing cause in Britain was to try and educate people about the value of democracy, participation and free debate, and provide them with access to cheap editions of suitable books, all written from a leftwing perspective, but covering a wide range of topics and issues. As well as books by new authors (such as George Orwell), there would also be occasional reprints of ‘classic’ leftwing texts.

Speaking at an early rally of the LBC held at the Albert Hall in central London in February, 1937, Gollancz – who was one of the main speakers – told the 7,000-strong audience that the Club had three objectives: 1. To inculcate ‘a sense of political responsibility’; 2. To impart knowledge; and 3. To establish ‘unity among thinking people’ in combatting ‘reactionary forces’.

The LBC also began to publish The Left News, a monthly newsletter which was posted to all Club members. Taken by surprise at the rapid growth and success of the LBC (membership rocketed to 35,000 in the first nine months alone), Gollancz also decided that the LBC should give people the opportunity to meet and share ideas about what they had read via a network of local discusson groups.

The LBC in Richmond

One such discussion group was founded in Richmond in November, 1936, which became known as the ‘Richmond and Kew Left Book Club’. An early mention of the Richmond LBC came in the local press in February, 1937, when it was reported that the group had held a meeting to discuss the LBC’s January, 1937, book choice, Stephen Spender’s Forward From Liberalism.

Over the course of 1937-1940, other LBC activities in the Richmond area included, for example, a ‘summer party and dance’ held at the Princes Hall in Richmond, which also doubled-up as a political meeting and cultural festival, together with various public meetings in the town on the big issues of war and peace, especially as the clouds of conflict increasingly loomed on the horizon.

In September, 1938, for example, the local LBC helped stimulate some vigorous debate on the topic of Air Raid Precautions (ARP), which had become something of a hot political potato for many citizens (some were in favour, but others firmly against). An LBC book on the subject by Professor J.B.S. Haldane had also provided some stark insights into the potential effects of mass bombing from the air, based upon what the author had witnessed in Spain’s civil war. This had given local people in Richmond much food for thought about how Britain was possibly also very vulnerable to this type of indiscriminate warfare. Calls were made for more provision of ‘deep’ shelters.

Another fascinating development came with the foundation of a local LBC theatre group, which mounted various productions of ‘political theatre’ to try and get the Club’s message across. The LBC was also able to borrow films from Kino Films Ltd, a number of which were shown to subscribers and other interested members of the public at community halls in Richmond and Barnes. It also interesting to note that, locally, LBC discussion groups began to spring up in other parts of the South-West London suburbs, including one run by a woman in Avenue Elmers in Surbiton.

Monitoring the LBC

Unsurprisingly, the activities of the broader LBC at national level began to attract the attention of the Government, who were concerned about Communist infiltration of the Club. Home Office officials asked the domestic Security Service, MI5, to keep a regular watch on the LBC and to produce monthly intelligence reports on the key personalities involved, especially if they were Communists or other ‘subversives’.

This secret surveillance work was carried out by the Metropolitan police’s Special Branch, whose officers collated detailed information on the LBC from across London and elsewhere in the provinces.

Interestingly, files held in the National Archives at Kew indicate that the Richmond LBC was occasionally included in this secret monitoring, and it is only in recent years that historians have come to realise the full extent of such surveillance at both national and local levels.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics. 

Note: This is an updated version of a blog first published here in August, 2021.

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

A model for Trump? The authoritarian nature of Viktor Orban’s ‘illiberal democracy’

If anybody still entertains any doubts about the extremely worrying authoritarian ambitions of former U.S. president Donald Trump, then it is important to consider what he said on the evening of Friday, 8th March, 2024.

Holding a meeting and concert at his luxury residence at Mar-a-Lago, where he played host to the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (pictured), Trump was full of praise for his guest: ‘There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orban… He’s a non-controversial figure because he says, “This is the way it’s going to be”, and that’s the end of it… He’s the boss’. Trump also called Orban a ‘fantastic’ leader.

To critics, the event was reminiscent of a reunion of two Mafia Dons, and Trump once again seemed in complete awe of a leader who he clearly feels can get things done because he is not held back by that annoying thing known as democracy. Trump explained that, since he had left the White House in 2021, he had kept in touch with Orban. One can only imagine what kind of conversations the two men have had, but in his 2024 campaign for the Republican nomination and re-election as president, Trump has name-checked Orban on a number of occasions in his rally speeches, admiring the Hungarian leader’s ‘strong’ Christian values and firm stance on immigration.

Orban seems to have first captured Trump’s close attention not long after ‘The Donald’ became American president in 2017. Hungary held a General Election on 8th April, 2018, which saw Prime Minister Viktor Orban win a landslide victory, giving him his third consecutive term in office. It was a major, but also very disturbing, achievement, which also created all sorts of difficulties for the European Union (Hungary has been a member of the EU since May, 2004) and how they should respond to Orban’s government.

Moreover, international observers from the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had pointed to the ‘intimidating and xenophobic rhetoric’ and ‘media bias’ seen during the 2018 election campaign.

Despite facing a six-party opposition alliance in 2021-22, Orban and his Fidesz party won another landslide victory in the April, 2022, General Election, giving him his fourth consecutive term in office, and the now ex-President Trump was quick to congratulate him, undoubtedly impressed with Orban’s political longevity. Tellingly, Trump has hinted in recent speeches that he would like to revise the two-term restriction on holders of the U.S. presidency.

Although the Clean Vote Coalition (a group of four Hungarian NGOs) said it received numerous complaints of vote irregularities in Hungary’s 2022 election, including electors being bribed for their vote, this was predictably ignored by Orban. Indeed, flushed with victory, Orban proclaimed that: ‘The whole world can see that our brand of Christian democratic, conservative patriotic politics has won’. The victory had been achieved, claimed Orban, despite opposition from the ‘Left at home, the international Left, the bureaucrats in Brussels, the money of the Soros Empire, the international media and the Ukrainian president’.

This kind of nationalist rhetoric could have come straight out of Trump’s songbook and, significantly, there have been regular visits by members of the Republican party to Hungary, eager to absorb ‘lessons’ from Orban’s ideology, tactics and exercise of power.

A Historian’s Perspective 

As a historian with a research interest in all forms of authoritarianism, dictatorship and the far right, I have watched Orban’s political rise over the years with grim fascination. It came as no surprise to see, for example, that populist and far right leaders from across western Europe queued up to warmly congratulate Orban on his re-election victory in 2018. Thus, Gert Wilders, leader of the anti-Muslim ‘Party for Freedom’ in the Netherlands, tweeted his congratulations to Orban on ‘this excellent result’. Similarly, Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National (now ‘National Rally’) in France, expressed her satisfaction at the success of Orban and his Fidesz party. Le Pen tweeted: ‘The inversion of values and the mass immigration that is propagated by the EU has been rejected once again’.

Furthermore, extreme right activists on social media forums in Britain, Italy and Germany also proclaimed their delight at both the Hungarian 2018 result and the 2022 victory, and still see Orban today as a ‘heroic’ figure. This is an assessment also shared by leading bloggers for the ‘alt.right’ and those who inhabit the ‘grey zone’ between the far and mainstream right. Moreover, the last few years have also seen positive appraisals of Orban and his ideas from ‘mainstream’ western politicians who have blatantly used or flirted with populist ideas. In late 2018, for example, Steve Bannon, the former political strategist for Donald Trump, revealed that he had been to Budapest to speak to Orban and his aides to find ‘common cause’ against liberalism. Similarly, just a month after the 2022 election triumph of the Fidesz party, Republicans flocked to Budapest for a meeting of the U.S. Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). The conference saw Orban deliver a key speech in which he outlined a 12-point plan that, he claimed, would enable fellow rightwingers across the globe to gain and retain power. Revealingly, the 12 points included ‘playing by our own rules’ and also establishing their ‘own media’.

Critics of Orban have regularly highlighted the way he has undermined or manipulated the constitution and rule of law in Hungary, assaulting or watering down judicial checks and balances, or creating laws that seek to quash civil liberties or dissent. A whole range of groups, including LGBTQ+ activists, have been classed as ‘unpatriotic’ and the playthings of external ‘enemies’. The media and journalists have been especially targeted during Orban’s time in power. The Hungarian state, for example, has deployed some of the world’s most invasive spyware against independent investigative journalists, and has sought to engage in its own version of a cultural war against the free media.

But none of this has really bothered Trump and his close inner circle of GOP supporters. It is worth remembering that when Orban was welcomed to the White House by the then U.S. President Trump in May, 2019 (see photo), the President, when asked if he had any concerns about ‘democratic backsliding’ in Orban’s country, drew much criticism when he said of the Hungarian leader: ‘People have a lot of respect for this prime minister, he is a respected man. I know he is a tough man but he is a respected man and he has done the right thing according to many people on immigration’. The President seemed especially impressed with Orban’s hard-line immigration policies, and praised the ‘tremendous job’ made by the Hungarian PM in defence of ‘Christian communities’.

Since (reluctantly) leaving office in 2021, Trump has very much doubled-down on his own version of ‘strong’ politics, clearly likes the idea of playing by his own rules, and – in order to counter what he sees as the dominance of the ‘liberal’ mainstream media – has gone all out to bypass such hindrances by seeking to directly communicate with the public via tools such as ‘Truth Social’, his alt-tech social media platform.

Fellow-Travellers

As those with an interest in history will know, there have often been those on the political Left and Right who have been in thrall to authoritarian dictators in the past or have admired aspects of autocratic rule. The concept of ‘Fellow-Travellers’ has been a useful way of describing past apologists for dictatorship or, indeed, more recent defenders of authoritarian regimes.

Not only has the Hungarian PM seen quite a fan club for him develop in the USA, Orban has certainly had fans and admirers in Britain. In February, 2020, for example, when Daniel Kawczynski, the Conservative MP for Shrewsbury (pictured), spoke at the ‘National Conservatism’ conference in Rome, an event which brought together Viktor Orban, the Italian League leader Matteo Salvini and assorted other populist and far right leaders from across Europe. Kawczynski tried to justify this by claiming that Orban represented ‘serious ideas and concerns, some of which are shared by many citizens of the UK’.

Writing in the Spectator, he also called critics of such people as Orban and Salvini ‘offence archaeologists’ who had ‘done a thorough job in finding historic remarks from some of the participants that jar with the liberal world view’.

But what is it about Viktor Orban and his approach to power that so pleases Conservative MPs, like-minded populists, Donald Trump, rightwing extremists and other elements of the right in western Europe and across the globe? A brief (‘archaeological’!) exploration of Orban’s key governing ideas and policies can perhaps offer some important clues.

Orban’s Rise

When he studied law and political science as a student at University in Budapest in the early 1980s, Orban could plausibly be described at that stage as a liberal who merely wanted free elections and to see Soviet troops leave his beloved country. Over the years, however, he has increasingly moved further and further to the right, has become markedly nationalist and extremely Eurosceptic in the process, and some commentators now suspect him of having worryingly autocratic inclinations.

In fact, Viktor Orban appears to be the latest example of a new type of populist ‘semi-dictator’ in central and eastern Europe who have emerged since the collapse of communism in 1989-91, pugnacious figures who present themselves both as ‘strongmen’ and dedicated patriots (Vladimir Putin in Russia, pictured, is something of a role model for them here). They are mainly nationalist politicians who have often exploited an ill-defined notion that their country is somehow being ‘short-changed’ and treated unfairly; often, this grievance translates into a form of conservative, anti-immigrant populism – a xenophobic form of politics which flirts dangerously with fascist-style ideas but, at the same time, retains a surface image of democratic legitimacy, with plenty of references to ‘the people’ and the will of the ‘majority’.

Such leaders present historians with a major challenge: how should we label and categorize this new autocratic brand of populist politician? These men are not straightforward ‘fascist’ dictators as such, but neither can they be seen as ‘democratic’ in the usual and conventional meaning of the term. Orban himself has referred to his approach as ‘illiberal democracy’. A parliamentary institutional framework, plurality, opposition parties and the trappings of a constitution are all retained in Hungary but, at the same time, signs of authoritarian behaviour by the Prime Minister and his government can clearly be detected.

Signs of Dictatorship?

Much of Hungary’s public media, for example, has in recent years come under the direct control of Orban’s government, while what is left of Hungary’s free media, especially any independent newspapers, have been subjected to harassment campaigns, intimidation, and other hostile pressures from the ruling party. Independent institutions and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) in civil society have been targeted and seriously devalued.

Indeed, from 2010 onwards, Orban persuaded the Hungarian parliament to accept a new constitution, which he said would be based on Christian Conservatism and give priority to ‘family’ and ‘nation’. The new arrangements arguably weakened the country’s Constitutional Court and its ability to check the government’s growing powers, and serious questions have been asked by commentators about the rule of law and whether Hungary today still has a genuinely free judiciary. Human rights have also been denigrated as ‘liberal’ and a tool of outsiders.

Equally alarming, and this is what has probably been especially attractive to western far right leaders, Orban has also appropriated some of the language and ideas of the more explicit form of fascism found in Hungary’s ‘Jobbik’ movement (the ‘Movement for a Better Hungary’), the country’s main far right party. While this strategy has clearly undermined the growth and appeal of Jobbik, it has been a highly dangerous and risky move by the Prime Minister: it has brought some of Jobbik’s ideas very much into the mainstream of the nation’s politics and has, frankly, legitimised them. Thus, Orban has emphasised the need for a ‘Hungarian’ Hungary, and has vowed to defend the country and its core Christian values from (to use his words) the ‘threat’ of a ‘mixed population’ with no sense of ‘identity’.

Race and Identity

Especially disturbing has been Orban’s focus on ‘identity’ and ethnicity. He has regularly played the ‘race’ card, stating that he seeks to protect Hungary (and Europe more generally) from an ‘invasion’ of ‘Muslim immigrants’ and ‘terrorists’ (he has often conflated the two), and the only way to do this is to close borders and shut out ‘migrants’. The idea that Hungary is under ‘siege’ from ‘outsiders’ has evidently helped Orban create a sense of crisis in the nation, and enabled him to portray himself as a ‘strong’ and assertive leader who will steer his country through such an emergency situation.

As far as Orban is concerned, the EU itself has been too ‘soft’ on immigration, so he has been forced to seize the initiative and show other EU states what needs to be done. Significantly, the 2018 General Election saw Orban’s party make extensive use of giant billboards (see photo), with an eerily familiar image on an anti-immigration poster: a long and wide queue of migrants. This was a poster that was undoubtedly influenced by the now infamous and controversial ‘Breaking Point’ poster used by Britain’s eurosceptic United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) during the 2016 Brexit campaign. Much of this anti-migrant language was again very much in evidence during the 2022 General Election.

In addition, although he has denied this in interviews, Orban has resurrected a form of ugly racism which many commentators hoped had disappeared from modern Hungary: anti-Semitism. In 2017, the philanthropist George Soros became a particular target in Fidesz propaganda, and this was notably evident again in the 2018 and 2022 election campaigns. In 2018, for example, Soros was portrayed by Fidesz as a puppet-master, secretly pulling the strings of other people and organisations from behind the scenes (a classic anti-Semitic and conspiratorial idea).

Another manifestation of this racist theme in Orban’s 2018 campaign was to associate George Soros with a deliberate ‘plot’ to cut border fences and encourage more immigration into Hungary (see photo). There was also a sustained campaign by the government to de-legitimize the Central European University (CEU), an institution set up in Budapest in 1991, which partly benefited from finance provided by Soros.

Tellingly, within days of his 2018 re-election, an emboldened Orban announced that he would push through new ‘Stop Soros’ laws. This soon resulted in the Soros-affiliated CEU announcing that it would leave Budapest, and it has since found a new home in Vienna. It was a depressing sign that academic freedom in Hungary was being seriously undermined.

If anybody is in any doubt that Orban harbours anti-Semitic prejudices towards Soros and the liberal institutions he supports, one only has to take a careful look at some of Orban’s speeches he has made on the topic over the years, and the ‘coded’ (and not so coded) language he has often employed: ‘They do not fight directly, but by stealth’, he said in a speech in 2018: ‘They are not honourable, but unprincipled; they are not national, but international; they do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs. They are not generous, but vengeful, and always attack the heart – especially if it is red, white and green’ (i.e. the colours of the Hungarian national flag).

Viktator or Dictator?

Some commentators in recent years have taken to calling Viktor Orban ‘The Viktator’ and, despite his vigorous anti-Communism, he has been able to tap into a kind of nostalgia on the part of many Hungarians for the old pre-1989 Communist days of ‘social order’ and a strong dictatorial single-party state. It may even be the case that some of Orban’s older voters look back fondly to the days of Miklos Horthy (1868-1957), who adopted the title ‘Regent’ and ruled Hungary as a rightwing dictatorship from 1920-1944.

For Donald Trump, who has a highly selective reading of history, much of this is irrelevant. What he evidently admires most about Orban and his ‘illiberal democracy’ is the emphasis on ‘strongman’ politics – the combination of nationalism, family values, control of the media narrative, rejection of ‘outsiders’,  and the reframing and ‘reinterpretation’ of the constitution, all things that Trump feels he can adopt for his own exercise of power if he is re-elected in 2024.

There is every indication that Viktor Orban himself will continue to be watched with utmost apprehension by other EU members, especially because he is viewed as sympathetic to Vladimir Putin and his so-called  ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine, but with evident relish by a whole range of extreme right movements, populists and assorted dictators across Europe and the globe. In particular, both Trump and the Russian president, Putin, have common interests in ensuring Orban remains in power in Hungary. For those ordinary Hungarians who still prize civil liberties, however, it is no exaggeration to say that the country faces some very dark days ahead.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Photos: WikiMedia Commons)

Note: This is an updated version of a blog first published here in April, 2020

Dangerous Delusions: Trump and the politics of populism

Historians will have much to write about when they look back on current political affairs in America, and analysis of the rightwing brand of ‘populist’ politics will be a major aspect of this. When it comes to his desperate desire to move back into the White House, the former U.S. President Donald Trump has made some dangerously deluded claims, including that he is a ‘victim’ of ‘fake news’ put out by his political opponents. He has attacked the MSM (mainstream media) in particular, arguing that it is ‘liberal’ and ‘socialist’ and out to ‘get’ him through ‘political persecution’.

Trump has also been highly critical of the Washington ‘elites’ and the so-called ‘Deep State’. When it was announced that he was to be indited over alleged hush money paid to ‘Stormy’ Daniels, he quickly called this a ‘witchhunt’ and claimed that justice in America had been ‘weaponised’. Similarly, the absurd idea that he lost the last presidential election to Joe Biden because of widespread fraud has been repeated over and over in his speeches. Nothing, it seems, no matter how spurious the claim, is off limits to Trump.

In a sense, Trump has always enjoyed being in the news headlines. Despite his love/hate relationship with the media, Trump has embraced the new forms of media that have become available in the last 20 years, and he has often ‘dumbed down’ and indulged in the populist over-simplification of complex issues, reaching out to people’s hearts rather than their heads. In truth, the former President has had a long history of saying just about anything that comes into his head at any given moment – whether accurate or not – if he calculates there will be some kind of electoral advantage in doing so.

Take the question of race and ethnicity, for example, often a major part of ‘populist’ discourse. Trump’s past attempts to exploit ‘race’ to mobilise his core base of supporters (with attendees at one rally even chanting ‘send her back, send her back’ about a Muslim congresswoman), and his behaviour and comments during the Black Lives Matter protests in the USA, undoubtedly increased divisions and tensions in American society to unprecedented levels, further inspiring those who see the answer to all the country’s problems as being through explicit xenophobia or, in some cases, simply via the barrel of a gun.

But Trump evidently felt that this was a gamble worth taking, and, ever since he announced that he would bid for the White House in 2024, it has appeared that he will do or say whatever it takes to secure a second term as President. The temptation to be ‘populist’ in all he says has remained an essential part of his political makeup. Psychologically, Trump has an enormous ego and a narcissistic self-regard for his own over-inflated abilities, qualities which appeared to fit well with the new age of ‘selfie’ politics and Twitter-style sound-bites.

More importantly, though, Trump has been been viewed as an out-and-out ‘populist’ by his critics. In fact, the word ‘populism’ has become one of the major academic concepts of recent years. It has increasingly been taken up by historians and political scientists, and is used regularly by various media commentators to try to capture the essence of what they believe has been happening to liberal democracies across the globe, particularly in Europe and the USA. But what does ‘populism’ actually mean? Can it be pinned down?

The Nature of ‘Populist’ Politics

It is no exaggeration to say that former President Trump and his controversial style of politics has exemplified what most observers have in mind when they employ the term ‘populist’.

However, at the same time, there has also been much debate among political science scholars about the actual meaning of the word ‘populist’. It constitutes what the Dutch academic Cas Mudde has called an ‘essentially contested concept’. Indeed, there has been little consensus in the political science literature as to the precise meaning of the term.

Helpfully, though, Mudde and other like-minded scholars have gone to considerable lengths to try to clarify what ‘populism’ actually is. Unlike some creeds, populism is not a coherent ideology, with a clear or logical set of principles or policies. Instead, it is what some political scientists refer to as a ‘thin ideology’, and tends to make use of ’emotional’ heartfelt appeal rather than considered intellectual reflection.

Nevertheless, populism can still be described as an ideology; it is one that (to quote Mudde) ‘considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups’ i.e. the ‘pure people’ versus the ‘corrupt elite’. It argues that politics should be an expression of the ‘general will’ of the people. While a charismatic leader is not essential to such an approach, the typical populist leader will often claim to represent the virtuous ‘people’ against the scheming and greedy ‘elites’.

Importantly, in their book Populism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2017), Casse Mudde and Cristobel Rovira Kaltwasser also noted that populism is fundamentally a ‘Manichean’ view of the political world, a simplistic binary approach where everything is divided into ‘good’ or ‘bad’, black or white, mass or elite.

‘Trumpism’

With his incendiary populist rhetoric and the highly stage-managed mass rallies held during his first Presidential campaign in 2016, Donald Trump often promised to ‘drain the swamp’ of ‘corrupt’ Washington politics and directly confront the ‘self-serving elites’ in the name of ‘the people’. In other words, he said he would represent the masses against the ‘dishonest’ elites. It was a classic populist and Manichean approach, rooted in emotion rather than logic, and has already characterised many of his rally appearances during 2024.

Even the wider world has often been divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’ in Trump’s mind. When he became President, Trump regularly self-identified as a ‘nationalist’ and labelled his opponents as ‘globalists’ in press conferences. Using highly emotive rhetoric about protecting ‘hard-working Americans’, he promised to ‘Build a Wall’ and close the borders to illegal Mexicans; he also restricted the travelling rights of Muslims into the country, and proclaimed that his overall objective was to ‘make America Great Again’. The ‘elitist’ Democrats in Congress, he claimed, were really ‘Marxists’ and anarchists who were out to subvert and block such policies, and were thus ‘out of touch’. Again, this was a nakedly populist version of politics, and all the evidence has indicated that ‘The Donald’ has been seeking to use these very same messages and tactics while campaigning for a second term in the White House.

The Language of ‘Outsiders’

All in all, Trump has regularly sought to portray himself as an anti-establishment ‘disrupter’ or rebel – an ‘outsider’ who, in the name of ‘ordinary’ American people, has been determined to take on both the political elites and the dreaded mainstream media, and in the process restore democratic direct power to the masses. In line with this, Trump has regarded elected rival politicians, along with the media and journalists, as problems standing in the way of his ‘historic’ mission and message; tellingly, he has not been been keen on spontaneous questions being fired at him, or being quizzed or held to account by opposition politicians or journalists.

Notoriously, when he was running for President the first time round, Trump even turned the spotlight (so to speak) on journalists at his rallies, and encouraged his supporters to boo and jeer at media commentators, sometimes to chilling effect. There was an echo of this tactic once again at his March, 2023, election rally in Waco, Texas. Similarly, when he was President, Trump on occasion simply refused to answer certain questions at his press conferences, or petulantly boycotted selected newspaper representatives in revenge for what he claimed was their ‘Fake News’.

Moreover, the former President cut out the media ‘middle man’ as far as possible and clearly much preferred to announce policy directly to the public through his social media account. He has been been a frequent user of this form of communication, to the point where some commentators have seen his regular employment of this powerful digital tool as heralding a new form of populist ‘Tweetocracy’.

There is persuasive evidence that other ‘populist’ leaders around the globe, such as the new president of Argentina, Javier Milei, have also borrowed this strategy and sought to directly communicate with the ‘masses’ in Trumpian fashion, enabling them to disseminate what they see as ‘undiluted’ messages.

Trump has emphasised that a major part of his 2024 campaign is about ‘revenge’ – he wants ‘revenge’ against all of his enemies on behalf of the mass of hard-working Americans, who have been let down (he alleges) by a huge ‘conspiracy’ against democracy perpetrated by President Biden. Whether this vulgar hyper-populism will be enough to secure Trump a second term in the White House is very much open to question.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics 

(All images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was published here in August, 2019.

The Two Vlads: Putin’s ideological debt to the late ultra-nationalist Zhirinovsky

There has inevitably been much speculation in the last two years about the ideological sources that have possibly influenced President Vladimir Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine and his seeming desire to reconstruct a pre-1989 Soviet Union, or even a mythologized version of an older Russian empire. One source of inspiration for Putin has undoubtedly been the ‘Greater Russia’ ideas of Aleksandr Dugin. However, I suspect that another, perhaps more indirect, influence on Putin was the late Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultra-nationalist politician who died of Covid-19 on 6th April, 2022, aged 75.

Putin with Zhirinovsky

Significantly, Putin attended Zhirinovsky’s funeral in a Moscow cathedral on April 8th, 2022, where he placed a bunch of red roses at the foot of Zhirinovsky’s coffin and made the sign of the cross. In one sense, this was Putin just playing to his public, and also to Russian nationalist sentiment and to the Russian Orthodox Church.

He was also paying public tribute to a man who had been both a Kremlin loyalist and a supportive member of the Russian Parliament for many years.

On the other hand, while I do not want to exaggerate the part Zhrinovsky’s ideas have played in Putin’s world-view, there were a number of interesting and highly controversial themes voiced by Zhirinovsky that have arguably contributed to Putin’s vision of a bolder and more assertive Russia. In 2022, for example, Putin described the war in Ukraine and its objectives as ‘absolutely clear and noble’, and one could almost hear Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s voice in those highly dubious assertions.

Fascistic?

I have long taken an interest in Zhirinovsky (1946-2022). Way back in 1994, when I was a postgraduate student, I gave a paper on the Extreme Right in Eastern Europe to a seminar of (what was then called) the European Research Centre at Kingston University, and Zhirinovsky featured heavily in my presentation.

As a scholar with research interests in the European extreme right, I had been inspired into turning my attention to Eastern Europe by a comment made by Vaclav Havel in 1992: ‘Society has freed itself, but in some ways behaves worse than when it was still in chains’. At the time, with all the increased political and economic volatility that appeared to be creating ‘Weimar’ conditions in Russia and elsewhere in the former Eastern Bloc, there was much interest in the new forms of extreme nationalism and neo-fascism that were emerging in various parts of the East, including in Russia. And the out-spoken figure of Zhirinovsky seemed to exemplify these patterns, with Western media commentators in particular expressing major worries about Zhirinovsky’s apparent appeal.

A common question posed at the time was ‘will Russia slip into a form of fascism?’

Many of these concerns appeared to be confirmed in the minds of Western journalists when Zhirinovsky’s mis-named ‘Liberal Democratic’ party picked up significant support in 1991, and again in the 1993 parliamentary elections in Russia, when he won the largest number of votes, with 22 per cent of the vote (in hindsight, this was to be the peak of his electoral success). Such questions back in the 1990s seemed, in the minds of some, to be over-the-top and paranoid. Yet, given the nature of what has become ‘Putinism’ in present-day Russia, perhaps they held more water than we were prepared to credit?

Zhirinovsky’s Creed

For me, the question of ‘fascism’ weighed heavily on my mind. As I noted back in 1994, Zhirinovsky was a xenophobe and an imperialist, and regularly called for ‘strong’ leadership and social order. Since the December, 1993, elections, he had been anxious to reassure journalists that ‘I am not a fascist’. He had also denied he was anti-Semitic (other far right elements in Russia at the time had expressed very public anti-Semitic sentiments).

Zhirinovsky campaigning

Post-1993, he also watered down some of his more outrageous pronouncements of the previous three years or so. Ever since the formation of the Liberal Democratic party in 1989-91, Zhirinovsky had been the master of the shocking comment, the sarcastic jibe and the veiled threat. But, after 1993, he appeared to promote a milder version of the illiberal ideas he had expressed on numerous occasions.

Yet, as I argued back then, Zhirinovsky’s new, seemingly conciliatory, tones were something of a deliberate front, behind which still lurked a number of hardline rightwing ultra-nationalist ideas, some of which had roots that were evidently neo-fascist in nature and, moreover, partly drew upon certain themes that could be traced back to interwar fascist and Nazi ideas. Although Zhirinovsky much preferred in public to employ the terms ‘patriot’ and ‘nationalist’, in my estimation this was to disguise the fact that he had derived a number of his core beliefs and tactics from interwar fascist parties.

Thuggery

Protestors at Liberal Democratic party meetings were often dealt with in a very physical and thuggish way by the party’s supporters, reminiscent of the tactics of the Brownshirts of the 1930s, and Zhirinovsky seemed completely relaxed about this, and even encouraged such behaviour. In addition, as with some of the more successful neo-fascist parties in Western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, Zhirinovsky was anxious to present his radical right ideas and policies as ‘mainstream’ and electorally ‘respectable’ in the new conditions of post-Soviet Russia.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky, in his Russian army uniform, in Moscow, May 8, 1995.

Hence his rhetoric was designed to appeal to a number of audiences, such as disillusioned members of the former Soviet state security and military elites, including former KGB officers (indeed, there is persuasive evidence that KGB elements helped finance the creation of the Liberal Democratic party in the first place). Although he denied he had KGB connections, and controversy over possible KGB links led at one point to a serious split in his party, there is some tantalising evidence that Zhirinovsky retained close friendships with a number of former KGB and key army officers. He loved nothing better than to dress up in military clothes in the early 1990s. And Zhirinovsky’s oft-stated desire to make Russian ‘great’ again certainly appealed to those who still had an aching nationalistic nostalgia for the ‘glorious’ days of the former USSR.

Although it is difficult to determine when Zhirinovsky first encountered Vladimir Putin, or when Putin had his first contact with the Liberal Democratic party leader, it is surely significant that Putin was himself an ex-KGB officer, who had served in the former Communist East Germany, and obviously felt that the collapse of Communism in the East had been a disaster, something he has stated on a number of occasions over the years. In April, 2005, for example, in his state of the nation annual address to the Russian parliament and people, Putin had claimed that the collapse of the Soviet Union ‘was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’.

‘Strongman’ Politics

One can certainly see how Zhirinovsky’s ideas and assertions may have appealed to Putin’s own evolving sentiments. Zhirinovsky once said that Russians were the most insulted, disgraced and abused nation in the former Soviet Union, and in the crises of the 1990s many Russians clearly liked this message and appreciated its populist and highly simplistic themes. Zhirinovsky’s brand of ultra-nationalism was a creed nourished on the economic, social and political discontent that had swept Russia since perestroika. In particular, Zhirinovsky, always with an eye on what captured media headlines, presented himself as a potential ‘strongman’ and demagogue who would ‘save’ Russia and restore what he saw as its former glories. Many Russians had increasingly lost faith in the ‘experiment’ with Western-style liberal democracy and the promises of their political leaders. Zhirinovsky claimed that he understood the ordinary concerns of the ‘man in the street’ more than the extravagantly rich and semi-detached new liberal elites who were now running the country.

Vladimir Zhirinovsky in portrait pose

Zhirinovsky became adept at the quick sound-bite, and the media seemed to lap this up. One of his favourite sayings was ‘Less Democracy, More Economy’, and he regularly asserted that Russia had become a nation of ‘155 million street-cleaners and dustbinmen’. Some of this took on near-absurd levels; he threatened, for example, to dump nuclear waste in the Baltic states if he came to power, and to ‘nuke’ Germany and Japan. However, during the course of the 1990s, he became a household name in Russia, and often stirred up controversy, and thus headlines, at every opportunity. He became a regular guest on Russian TV shows.

But, more significantly, Zhirinovsky frequently returned to an emphasis on the ideas of ‘Empire’ and ‘strong’ leadership. He called over and over for the restoration and indeed expansion of the Russian Empire, and often argued that Russia was in need of a new dictator. He also promoted the idea of ‘protecting’ Russians outside Russian borders. Interestingly, Zhirinovsky could back up his campaigns with strong financial resources; he was able to buy expensive broadcast time on Russian TV during elections and had some wealthy, if anonymous, backers.

His semi-autobiographical book on foreign policy, The Last Push to the South (published in 1993) read disturbingly like Hitler’s Mein Kampf in its sections on the need for aggressive territorial expansion. Only 143 pages long, it was nevertheless full of odd geopolitical theories and contained a notably apocalyptic vision of the future of the world and the need to strongly defend Russian culture. Although he toned down his language after 1993, the ‘real’ Zhirinovsky would often still slip out. When on a tour of Europe and the Balkans in 1994, there was much ranting and raving from Zhirinovsky about the need to ‘deal’ with Russia’s enemies and to re-draw the map of Europe. He also attempted to play the ‘pan-Slavic’ card.

Although that particular tour rapidly turned into a public relations disaster for Zhirinovsky in Western media coverage, very little of this filtered back to the press on his home-ground in Russia, and he remained a popular ‘character’ in Russian politics. In fact, during the rest of the 1990s and into the early 21st Century, Zhirinovsky’s ‘extreme’ version of ultra-nationalist Russian politics increasingly provided a kind of role-model for other ambitious Russian politicians, and became part of the mainstream in the country’s politics. New and younger voters were especially targeted. The Liberal Democratic party, for example, opened a ‘Rock’ shop which sold rock music memorabilia to Russian youths, and Zhirinovsky himself regularly emphasised his vision of a future Russia in the hands of the ‘young’. This is a refrain that has been eagerly adopted by other more recent Russian political parties and candidates, including those backed by the Kremlin.

Xenophobia

Furthermore, Zhirinovsky frequently complained about the influence of ‘outsiders’ and ‘foreigners’ in the Russian media, declared that ‘the defence of white Europe is a mission of the Russian people’, and asserted that mixing cultures ‘is genocide’. He was very critical, in a conspiratorial way, of what he saw as the West’s interference in Russian affairs. Again, much of this found a sympathetic ear in Putin’s Kremlin.

In one sense, Zhirinovsky remained on the margins of Russian politics for a long time and was often dismissed as a ‘clown’ by his critics. But, despite this, he carved out a long career as an MP, and one can argue that his once extreme ideas were adopted more and more by younger and very ambitious Russian politicians, including (I would suggest) Vladimir Putin. Putin’s deliberate cultivation of an image of himself as a ‘strongman’ and ‘saviour’ for Russia has many parallels with Zhirinovsky’s approach. And, clearly, both men shared delusions of Russian imperial conquest. Significantly, in one of his last appearances before MPs, Zhirinovsky predicted Russia would invade Ukraine and said 2022 would be a year ‘when Russia once again becomes great’.

Tellingly, if one reads Putin’s speeches and pronouncements on his vision of a ‘reborn’ Russia, with his claims that the country should ‘liberate’ peoples who are really ‘Russian’, there are some striking echoes of Zhirinovsky’s ideas at work in Putin’s stance. While it would be foolish to portray Putin as solely reliant on the late Zhirinovsky’s ideas (he clearly draws on a range of other ultra-nationalists and their writings), one can still see some very interesting similarities between the ideas of the two Vlads.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(All images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier draft of this blog was first published here in April, 2022.

Trump and the ‘Deep State’: The Politics of Paranoia

Speaking at the 2023 CPAC (Conservative Political Action) conference, Donald Trump referred to the ‘epic battle’ he said he has always been engaged in against the ‘special interests’ who are out to destroy America. It was vintage Trump. The 2024 CPAC conference saw such obsessions fully on display again, with numerous speakers indulging in blatantly Trump-style conspiracy theory about the ‘deep state’, including former British PM Liz Truss and former UKIP leader Nigel Farage.

An obsession with the supposed ‘secret’ forces who are out to ‘get’ him and weaken America runs deep in Trump’s psychological outlook as well as his politics. Ever since he lost the presidency, Trump has acted like a man who has lost all sense of reality. He has obstinately refused to let go of his highly questionable claims that the election was ‘stolen’ from him, and that there was massive voter ‘fraud’ across America. He has constructed an elaborate and notably paranoid conspiracy theory that the Washington ‘elite’ was out to get him and to prevent the ‘most successful’ president in American history from having the chance to ‘finish the job’ he had started in his first term of office.

Since announcing his 2024 presidential campaign, this conspiratorial theme has been at the heart of all his speeches, and often involves him listing all the ‘special interests’ that are allegedly out to stop him again. It is a long list.

Donald Trump

But we should not be surprised. Donald Trump’s conspiratorial conviction is rooted in a theme that he has pursued relentlessly since he took office in January, 2017 – the idea of the ‘Deep State’. This is a belief, bordering on an obsession, which both he and his closest supporters have restated again and again, and it is linked to the populist elite-bashing promise he had made during his 2016 electoral campaign that he would ‘drain the swamp’ of Washington. Indeed, it is an idea which, alongside the ‘America First’ emphasis he placed in his foreign policy, was one of the only consistent domestic policy themes of Trump’s presidency; and it will arguably come to mark the Trump administration out ideologically when historians look back on his four years, and begin to weigh up and try and make sense of the core nature of ‘Trumpism’.

But what exactly is the ‘Deep State’? Frankly, it is ill-defined and rather vague. In Trump’s paranoid mind, and in the minds of his most loyal supporters, the ‘Deep State’ is a ‘state within the state’, a highly-organized secret or ‘shadow’ government which has supposedly opposed and tried to sabotage everything Trump has sought to do in the domestic sphere. In 2018, for example, when an anonymous editorial appeared in the New York Times, apparently written by a disgruntled senior Trump official from ‘inside’ the White House to reassure people that Trump’s wilder initiatives were being opposed, an angry then-president Trump blamed the ‘unelected deep state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas’. There have been numerous other dramatic statements along the same lines. In 2020, for example, speaking in an interview given to Fox News, Trump argued that Joe Biden was having his strings pulled by ‘people that are in the dark shadows’.

‘Trumpism’: Plots and Paranoia

Trump and his (now dwindling) band of close advisers have variously described the secret ‘alliance’ which makes up the alleged shadow government as being made up of ‘bureaucrats’, judges, lawyers, financiers, ‘liberals’, ‘leftists’, ‘anarchists’, intelligence officers, ‘Democrats’, and even members of the ‘Republican party establishment’, all of whom have supposedly worked with the ‘leftwing’ mainstream media in order to undermine Trump’s policies, smear his presidency and subvert his campaign to return to office.

Trying to pin down precisely what Trump means by the ‘Deep State’ is no easy task, though. In many ways, it has appeared to be something of a ‘catch-all’ phrase, designed to describe anybody who opposed his presidency and remain sceptical about his new presidential bid.

During his time at the White House, the campaign manager and close strategy adviser Steve Bannon, who eventually fell out of favor with his boss, was arguably one of the key figures helping to reinforce Trump’s paranoia – his suspicion of and obsession with the ‘shadow’ state. Bannon claimed the ‘Deep State’ was made up of both outsiders and ‘traitors’ within, and it was especially driving the investigations into Trump and his team’s Russian connections. Trump lapped this up, as it reinforced his own convictions about what was really going on.

Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon

Bannon once described himself in the past as a ‘Leninist’ and stated he wanted to destroy the American establishment; indeed, he sought to present himself as a kind of rightwing Leninist who wanted a ‘permanent revolution’ to dismantle the state and replace it with a new era of libertarianism. Speaking in 2011 to the Liberty Restoration Foundation, for example, Bannon used his speech to describe the crisis and ‘challenge’ that he felt now faced America, and claimed the country was then at a turning-point in its history.

And, in many ways, Bannon went on to become one of the key ideological players at the heart of what became Trumpism when ‘The Donald’ entered the White House in 2017, a moment many fervent ‘Trumpists’ saw as a genuine turning-point in the nation’s fortunes. A determination to take on the establishment and the ‘Deep State’ that was allegedly behind it became a regular theme in both Bannon’s statements and in Trump’s rhetoric. Although Bannon was fired from his role and humiliated (Trump began to refer to him as ‘Sloppy Steve’), the notion of the ‘Deep State’ remained a core theme in Bannon’s outlook, and he has since said that he still firmly believes in the Trump project and the former president’s crusade to ‘free’ America. And Trump and Bannon appear to have become ideological friends again.

A Deep Obsession

Paranoia about the machinations of the ‘Deep State’ is something that informed much of Trump’s outlook during his term in office, especially towards the end of his presidency. As his administration increasingly fell into turmoil and bitter infighting broke out between rival factions, Trump’s response was to hit out at the agents of the ‘Deep State’ and blame them for leaking ‘stories’ to a ‘hostile’ liberal media. He also became convinced that he was under constant surveillance and was being secretly monitored by elements within the U.S. intelligence community, and even that the ‘Deep State’ was planning a coup against his presidency. It was all very reminiscent of the worse kind of conspiracy theory, a mind-set that saw ‘plots’ lurking around every corner and displayed deep distrust of even those closest to him.

‘The Donald’ has regularly referred to shadowy forces in his speeches

Since his defeat, Donald Trump has sought to construct a highly dubious version of history and to portray the election he lost to Joe Biden as a huge ‘fraud’, an election that was ‘stolen’ from the ‘American people’ (in other words, from him).

For example, on 2nd December, 2020, Trump made the longest public speech he had given since his election defeat, and it conveyed yet further evidence that he would not let go of his ‘Deep State’ obsessions. In what he described as ‘maybe the most important speech’ he had ever made, Trump said he wanted to provide an ‘update’ on his ‘ongoing efforts’ to expose the ‘tremendous voter fraud and irregularities’ which had taken place. He claimed that the U.S. electoral system, which he was ‘determined’ to protect, was ‘now under coordinated assault and siege’. No precise detail was given on who was behind this, but during the course of the speech there were dark hints from Trump that ‘they’ had ensured that the election had been fixed: ‘they were acting like they already knew what the outcome was going to be’, he said, and it was ‘all very strange’.

It was typically ‘Trumpian’ in tone: as far as he was concerned, ‘they’ (in other words, the ‘Deep State’) had unjustly denied him a second term in office. Tellingly, this allegation has gradually become an ever-present theme in his speeches, and was on display once again in the long speech he gave to the 2023 CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) rally. And the paranoid ‘list’ of enemies was very much on display again. He claimed that he had been fighting the ‘most important battle’ in American history, an ‘epic struggle’ against the ‘sinister forces’ that are trying to ‘kill America’ and turn the nation into a ‘Socialist dumping ground for criminals, junkies, Marxists, thugs, radicals and dangerous refugees that no other countries want’.

He criticised the ‘militant Leftwing media’ and promised he would put ‘America First’ every single day when he regains office. Significantly, his paranoid version of politics seems to be even more acute and extreme, with references to the ‘rotten special interests’ and ‘Big money special interests’ that are allegedly out to stop him.

Added to this, there also appeared to be some disturbing and classic anti-Semitic tropes emerging in his outlook, as there were some less than subtle hints that what he called ‘the George Soros money machine’ was part of the network that now opposed him.

Tellingly, Trump’s decision to hold the first major campaign rally of his 2024 presidential bid in Waco, Texas, was loaded with deliberate symbolism. It was held on the 30th anniversary of the FBI’s infamous raid on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, an event that has been regularly used ever since by conspiracy theorists and the far right to defend the idea that violence is justified against the U.S. central government in Washington. Trump was undoubtedly sending out the message that conspiracy theorists have been right all along, and that any means may be justified in the impending battles with the ‘Deep State’ that controls Washington. Indeed, such ideas have become a regular theme in his 2024 presidential campaign and, in many ways, he has managed to ‘mainstream’ ideas that in the past would have been dismissed as fringe and beyond the pale.

Trump’s paranoid version of politics is not only deeply irrational, but irresponsibly dangerous.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(All images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was published here in March, 2023.

Amazons against the Nazis: Women’s Home Defence in Wartime Britain

At the height of invasion fears in the summer of 1940, the British government asked for civilian volunteers ‘to go on duty against airborne invasion’ and be ‘entrusted with certain vital duties’ for which a knowledge of firearms would be necessary.

Many people in Britain expected some kind of attempt by the Nazis to land in the country, either by an invasion from the sea or mass parachute landings, or both. But Britain’s citizens responded in various ways, depending upon their age, class, occupation, and gender.

There were certainly serious concerns on the part of key British intellectuals that they were on Nazi target lists, and would be some of the first individuals to be rounded up and incarcerated in any post-invasion occupation. The writer Vita Sackville-West and the politician Harold Nicolson, for example, apparently talked about the ‘bare bodkin’ – a lethal dose – which they intended to use to avoid the possibility of torture in the event of capture by the Germans.

Both were members of the ‘Bloomsbury set’, a rather incestuous elite circle of artists, writers and thinkers. There were mixed responses by intellectuals to the possibility of German occupation in that long, hot summer of 1940, ranging from (in some cases) fairly open enthusiasm, through to resigned apathy and, in other cases, outright defiance.

Suicide as an option was not just an idea voiced by members of privileged circles, however. There is also interesting evidence from the ground-breaking Mass Observation studies (set up for the collection of information on everyday life in Britain) that some female factory workers were thinking of taking their own lives (and those of their children) if Hitler’s troops had appeared on the streets.

Women and the War

Another response, of course, was for people to express their open defiance of the enemy by joining the newly-formed Local Defence Volunteers (LDV), known later as the ‘Home Guard’. But did you know that women were not allowed to join the LDV? In fact, officially, women in Britain were unable to sign up to the Home Guard until 1943.

In 1940, however, despite the official government rules, and especially with widespread fears about sabotage by ‘Fifth Columnists’ and some quite wild rumours about German parachutists dropping out of the skies, many women were still determined to defend their homes and workplaces, using violence if necessary. One strategy to subvert the official discrimination against women was to form Women’s Home Defence groups. In essence, these groups were female private armies, often with their own uniforms. Members of such groups would train in unarmed combat and receive arms-training from experienced markswomen.

In 2013, the British press ran some rare vintage photos of life on the Home Front in the War, including this one (below) of female volunteers receiving arms training:

Despite some important work by the historian and writer Midge Gillies (Waiting for Hitler: Voices from Britain on the Brink of Invasion, Hodder & Stoughton, 2006)*, and research by one or two other academic authors, the topic remains surprisingly under-researched by historians.

In my own investigations of ‘Fifth Column’ fears at local level in London, I sometimes came across intriguing indications of the unofficial extent of women’s participation in particular defence activities or as part of the general women’s defence network. There was, for example, an Upper Thames Patrol established in June, 1940, where the male officers, experiencing shortages of male volunteers, started to recruit women to provide water-borne and shore patrols along key stretches of the River Thames.

But there were also what can only be described as female combat groups, led by women and consisting largely of female volunteers who were prepared to engage, if it came to an invasion, in full physical and military confrontation with the enemy.

Defending Britain

One such group – one of the earliest to be established – was the ‘Amazon Defence Corps’, which was set up in London. The title was clearly chosen to tap into cultural myths about the strong fighting women of ancient legend. Very little research has been conducted on the group, but one member in 1940 was Marjorie Foster who, ten years previously, had become the first woman to win the King’s prize for shooting.

Another similar group, called the ‘Much Marcle Watchers’, was set up by Lady Helene Gleichen (a grand-niece of Queen Victoria), on her country estate near Much Marcle, in Herefordshire. According to Gillies and some other available but limited information, the ‘Much Marcle Watchers’ were mainly recruited from Lady Gleichen’s staff and tenants at her large stately home, and the 80 or so members wore armbands with the words ‘Much Marcle Watcher’ displayed on them. Gleichen, who had served in the Red Cross in Italy and France during the First World War, also played an active part in training her small ‘army’, with evening lectures on military tactics and shooting. There is also some tantalising evidence of other women’s home defence activities occurring elsewhere in England, sometimes through the (still male-dominated) Parish Invasion Committees.

Some while later, a more organised – but still unofficial – strategy was adopted by women, when Dr. Edith Summerskill, Labour MP for Fulham West, founded the ‘Women’s Home Defence Force’ (WHD) in December, 1941, and various WHD groups formed across the country. No uniform was worn, but an enamel WHD badge was issued and women members underwent weapons training. Indeed, Summerskill was nicknamed ‘Flossie Bang Bang’ by some bemused observers. Interestingly, the Imperial War Museum in London has some examples of the badge worn by this network of groups.

It is estimated that, by late 1942, up to 50,000 women were unofficially serving within the Home Guard itself. In April, 1943, when the government finally relented and allowed female enrolment in the Home Guard, it was still on the understanding that women’s participation would be confined to ‘traditional’ female support roles, and not as combatants.

It is a topic that remains ripe for further research, and I suspect there is much more information to be found in both public and private archives.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History

Note: An earlier version of this blog was published here in August, 2015

*You can also read an article on this fascinating topic by Midge Gillies at:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/jun/19/secondworldwar.gender

(Images: Wikimedia Commons and Getty Images)

Decadence and Decline: Looking back on the gloomy world of Dean Inge

There has been some interesting coverage on social media in recent months of the views of William Ralph Inge (1860-1954), who was known as the ‘Gloomy Dean’ or the ‘Gloomy Philosopher’, and was Dean of St. Pauls Cathedral in London for 23 years.

Why was he ‘Gloomy’? This was a description first pinned on him by the Daily Mail newspaper, and it is a label that remained with him for the rest of his career. A Mail reporter had apparently attended some lectures Inge had delivered, and was shocked when Inge had called democracy ‘a superstition and a fetish’ and had argued that the Church should not cooperate with the Spirit of the Age – in other words, with the new social and other changes in society.

The idea of ‘progress’ was dangerous and misleading. Inge (pictured) also feared that the population was increasing far too quickly, which would lead to ‘decadence’ and the ‘decline’ of Britain’s cultural fabric and core institutions.

Above all, Inge morbidly felt that there was a general ‘crisis of civilization’ and society was in a state of ‘decay’, views which appear very similar to the ideas of the controversial German philosopher Oswald Spengler.

The rise of Inge

Inge was approached to become Dean of St. Pauls Cathedral in 1911, when the British Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, wrote to Inge, who was at that time a Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University. Asquith told Inge that he wanted to ‘restore the tradition of scholarship and culture’ that had been associated with the Deanery in the past. Inge seemed the perfect candidate. He was well-read, intellectually talented, and the author of numerous books and articles.

However, when Inge became Dean, it became very apparent to others that the new man was hardly a quiet scholar in the sense that many possibly expected. Indeed, Inge held a range of very strong, outspoken and controversial views, and used his position as Dean to engage in regular journalism on a huge variety of topics, to the point where he arguably gained ‘celebrity’ status during the interwar period. While parts of the Church gave him sympathetic support, other clergymen were evidently uneasy at his ‘antics’. Inge was undoubtedly seen as a great preacher, who could draw in large and enthusiastic audiences, whether he was speaking at St. Pauls or in other cathedrals around the country. Yet, there was also the suspicion that Inge enjoyed deliberately provoking his listeners and causing uproar, which he often more than succeeded in doing.

In fact, Inge was not just a man of the cloth but was also very ‘political’ – he loved to network with the leading politicians of the day, and had many contacts in the leading professions, as well as in banking, the arts, literary circles, and many other walks of life.

Inge and his wife loved to entertain famous people at their dinner parties at home. He also became notorious for his biting wit, and was often sought out by newspapers for his thoughts on the prominent topics of the day, delivering short articles and commentaries at short notice.

However, both his sermons and journalism were strongly and uncompromisingly shaped by his deep pessimism and his clear discomfort with ‘modernity’. In 1919 he had some major publishing success with the first volume of his Outspoken Essays (which included a whole chapter devoted to a defence of eugenics) and, shortly afterwards, was invited by Lord Beaverbrook to pen a weekly column for the Evening Standard newspaper. Inge also contributed to the Morning Post and numerous other newspapers.

The ‘breakdown’ of society

Many of the ideas expressed in these writings were culturally conservative and, at times, notably reactionary. He was, for example, very pro-capital punishment and wanted it extended to include all ‘anti-social offenders’. Similarly, he said that human beings are ‘born unequal’, and expressed scepticism that women should have equal voting rights with men. Modern society, he argued, was heading in the wrong direction and was ‘breaking down’ in both its morality and the quality of population.

There were regular complaints from angry readers about Inge’s views, and if one engages in a quick survey of this extensive material it is clear why he became such a figure of controversy. Inge was a member, for example, of the Eugenics Society, and his views on ‘race’ and the quality of the population often featured in his articles. Although Darwinism had challenged the very essence of Christian faith, Inge apeared to see no contradiction in marrying his faith with a perverted form of evolutionary philosophy. He was thus a Social Darwinist and regularly warned that when ‘natural selection’ is not allowed to operate, the result is inevitably a ‘C3’ population. Too much social welfare, he warned, ‘penalized the successful while susidising the weak and feckless’.

The state, he felt, should instead intervene in matters of population for a clear and single purpose – to engage in engineering the quality of the ‘race’. He said that, ideally, the British population should consist of no more than ’20 million’, all with ‘certificates of bodily and mental fitness’.

Although Inge stepped down from his role as Dean in 1934, and retired to a house called Brightwell Manor, near Oxford, he remained active and vocal. He clearly admired aspects of the Hitler regime, especially its policy of eugenics and rejection of democracy. Remaining gloomy, though, he feared war was inevitable between Germany and Britain. Although his hopes that war could be avoided were briefly raised by Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement towards Germany, it is apparent that by June, 1940, Inge believed Britain had definitely lost the war. Controversially, by 1942, he was advocating that Britain should open peace negotiations with Germany, which, understandably, did not go down well at all with his critics, and embarrassed some in the Church.

This idea was possibly reinforced by a personal tragedy: one of his sons, Richard Inge, had resigned from the clergy to become an RAF pilot and was killed in action.

All in all, the ‘Gloomy Dean’ was a significant figure in Britain during the interwar period who, despite being highly critical of ‘modernity’, was only too happy to exploit the new mass media to communicate his ideas and become something of a modern ‘celebrity’ in the process.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(All images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of the above was first published here in July, 2023.

.

Captivating memories: New ‘Great Escapes’ exhibition at the National Archives, London

What was life like for the many individuals who found themselves being held as wartime prisoners or internees? This is certainly a growing area of research for historians and, I suspect, is also of great interest to anybody who has a fascination with family, social or general military history.

I paid a visit to a new exhibition, Great Escapes, which has just opened at the National Archives (TNA), Kew, in south-west London, and runs from 2nd February to 21st July, 2024. The exhibition is subtitled ‘Remarkable Second World War Captives’, and is devoted to three main categories of captive held in the 1939-45 War by Britain, Germany and Japan.

These were, firstly, the ‘Prisoners of War’ (POWs), military personnel captured by the opposing sides during the conflict; secondly, the ‘Civilian Internees’, who were civilians residing in, or passing through, a country which was at war with their country of nationality, and who were placed in internment camps; and, thirdly, ‘the ‘Enemy Aliens’, who were people whose country of nationality was at war with their country of residence.

The free exhibition, which is being held on the ground-floor, not far from the main entrance to TNA, helps one to explore some of the incredible stories of captives held during the five-year conflict, ranging from the famous escape attempts made by British officers soldiers (such as Airey Neave’s famous escape from Colditz Castle) to the remarkable stories of individuals who sought to escape the tedium and restrictions of their captivity through using their creative imaginations via art, music, singing, acting, poetry, letter-writing or learning languages.

At one stage in the exhibition there is a quilt on display, which was made up of patterned hexagonal patches created and sown by Girl Guides, who were captured with their families by the Japanese and held in Changi Camp. Remarkably, this quilt, which was created as a birthday present for Elizabeth Ennis, the captain of the local Girl Guides, had to be created in secret. This was even more astonishing when you consider that punishment for breaking camp rules could be severe.

However, using one’s imagination or creative talents to pass the time and defy the authorities appears to have been a regular pschological coping feature of life in the camps, whether you were a civilan internee or POW. One POW, Guy ‘Griff’ Griffiths, a Royal Marine pilot who was captured early in the War, even put his drawing talents to good use by feeding false intelligence to the Germans; he did this by creating sketches of fake British aircraft, which he deliberately left around his camp for guards to find. No doubt this wasted many man-hours for Nazi intelligence officers back in Berlin, who probably spent long periods trying to find out more about the strange but highly detailed craft sketched out in the drawings!

The role of MI9

I was especially interested in some never previously displayed records from MI9, the top secret agency set up by the British government in 1939 to help military personnel evade and escape capture. The agency even sent a range of hidden escape aids to POW camps, such as secret maps and compasses, enabling prisoners to make use of the gadgets and plan escape attempts. MI9 also interviewed and debriefed the few POWs who, against all the odds, did manage to escape.

Another intriguing dimension to the TNA exhibition is coverage of life in the Japanese camps and how internees coped with the grim conditions, something that, for various reasons, seems to be less known about by the public. For example, a selection of the sketches of Ronald Searle (who was captured when Singapore fell to Japanes forces) are on display. Searle, who was forced to help build a jungle railway, suffered numerous illnesses and faced terrible camp conditions, but was still able to draw (in secret) a significant number of images which documented the cruelty of the Japanese camp guards and the awful conditions prisoners faced daily.

The exhibition also seeks to throw light on life for German officers in the British-run camps. Interestingly, there is coverage of Steffi Ehlert, who was one of the 70 German officers who managed to escape from Camp 198 in Brigend in Wales. This escape occurre don 10th March, 1945, via a secret tunnel, and became the largest mass escape of German prisoner sin the UK during the Second World War.

As you emerge from the TNA exhibition there is a range of books and other material on sale, including the official companion book to the exhibition, Captives: Prisoners of War and Internees 1939-1945. This highly readable book contains eye-witness accounts of life in captivity and attempted escapes, as well as maps, drawings and a series of unique photographs.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed this exhibition, which conveys so much about the tenacity of the human spirit under terrible conditions of incarceration. I was left feeling much more knowledgeable about the mental and physical endurance of some very brave individuals who, in many cases, were held for years in circumstances that would severely test even the strongest individual.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Image: The National Archives)

Ronald Ray Gun? ‘Star Wars’ and Reagan’s U.S. Presidency in historical perspective

Did American Republican President Ronald Reagan allow his deep love of movies to shape his perceptions of domestic and world politics? During his time in the White House, Reagan often peppered his speeches with references to the ‘Rambo’ and ‘Dirty Harry’ movies. He was also a big fan of Star Wars. As with a number of other Presidents, Reagan also regularly enjoyed special private screenings at the White House of the latest cinema releases.

Since the original George Lucas Star Wars film hit the big screen back in 1977, there has been much interest on the part of historians in the cultural impact and possible wider political meanings of the Star Wars franchise.

One dimension to this has been some fascinating theories put forward by scholars of American history about the world-view of President Reagan (who was in office 1981-89).

These theories raise the tantalising possibility that the Star Wars series – as bizarre as this may sound – was a key influence on Reagan and, in particular, on his views of defence and foreign policy. Reagan’s decision to develop what became known as the ‘Strategic Defence Initiative’ (SDI), for example, a project unveiled in his first term of office (and even dubbed by the press at the time as ‘Star Wars’), together with his wider rhetoric about the Communist ‘evil empire’, may have been partly drawn from his love of the George Lucas movies.

So, what is the evidence? Is it really the case that a man who reached the very top in U.S. politics (and arguably the most powerful position in the world), viewed the globe rather like a blockbuster space movie, perhaps blurring science fiction with geopolitical reality? The evidence is rather mixed. However, as strange as it might be, some of it is indeed quite compelling.

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004), of course, was a former film and TV actor himself, and it has been suggested by some of his biographers that he tended to blur fiction and fact even before he formally entered the national political arena. In the 1940s, Reagan had played a Secret Service agent in the Warner Brothers B-movie Murder in the Air, which saw his character preventing an enemy spy from stealing plans for a top-secret new defence weapon, a weapon which could blast any missile out of the sky and make the USA ‘invincible’. Did this film sow the seeds of Reagan’s future outlook, even if unconsciously?

Anti-Communism

As President of the Screen Actor’s Guild in Hollywood, Reagan had also worked enthusiastically to publicly identify and remove all ‘Communists’, joining with those who tended to see ‘Reds’ nearly everywhere in U.S. society and elsewhere in the 1950s.

There did appear to be a rather Manichean strand in Reagan’s outlook, whereby things were often seen in terms of the forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the world. Perhaps Star Wars merely encapsulated how Reagan already viewed the moral Universe? Similarly, when he ran as Republican candidate for the Presidency against Democrat Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, Reagan’s notably populist ‘Morning in America’ campaign looked back with nostalgia to a supposely simpler time when there were ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, and no shades of complex political grey or nuance. Some commentators have claimed that this campaign deliberately tapped into the ‘feel good’ optimism so much on display in 1977’s Star Wars. Again, it is difficult to know for certain.

When he took office as President in January, 1981, Reagan initiated what he and Republicans more generally regarded as a necessary and major ‘modernisation’ of U.S. conventional and nuclear forces. This culminated in his announcement on March 23rd, 1983, of the SDI programme.

Interestingly, it has been suggested that Reagan had been persuaded to opt for the SDI programme partly because of the impressive footage put together by the key defence corporations to illustrate what they claimed was possible in terms of building a ‘defence shield’ over America: this included glossy SFX-style filmed images of missile-laden satellites circling the earth and ‘zapping’ enemy missiles out of the sky. Perhaps all this reminded the President of Murder in the Air, or the hi-tech vision laid out in Star Wars? Again, one can only speculate.

The first politician to actually employ the term ‘Stars Wars’ to describe Reagan’s ambitious new defence vision was the Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy (in the Senate, the day after Reagan’s speech), and this was quickly taken up by headline writers in the media. But far from seeing this as a criticism, Reagan’s supporters actually embraced the term ‘Star Wars’ as a captivating and memorable label, perfect for their boss, who was already known as the ‘Great Communicator’.

Religious dimension?

Significantly, in the very same month, just two weeks before he announced the SDI programme, Reagan had also made a speech to the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals, where he had declared the Soviet Union to be ‘the focus of evil in the modern world’, and also used the phrase ‘evil empire’ for the first time. Almost imediately, commentators made links between Reagan’s moralistic rhetoric and the grand battles against evil and the ‘dark side’ on display in the Star Wars movies (the second film, The Empire Strikes Back, had been released in May, 1980).

A combination of Reagan’s faith in the possibility of space-based weapons systems and his near-Evangelical views of the role of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ in the world made for a potent mix, and one can certainly see why so many historians have made links between Reagan’s politics and the Star Wars franchise. Reagan’s general habit of borrowing movie terminology for his speeches also reinforced this perception.

The politics of ‘space’

Trying to appropriate the appeal of the blockbuster entries in the Star Wars series is something that undoubtedly continued in U.S. politics post-Reagan, and signs of this could be discerned in the first decade or so of the 21st century. At the Democratic Presidential debate held on December 19th, 2015, for example, Hillary Clinton livened things up for the audience by signing off with the words: ‘Thank you, good night, and may the force be with you’. Perhaps she was also paying a tribute to J.J. Abrams, the director of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Abrams and his wife had donated $1 million to Clinton’s campaign to be President in June, 2015. 

More recently, Republican President Donald Trump, when he was in the White House, appeared to develop an interest in space as an arena of future warfare; in March, 2018, for example, Trump gave a (rather rambling) speech in which he stated that he saw space as ‘a war-fighting domain’. Intriguingly, although it proved very challenging for historians and other analysts to discern the precise roots and nature of Trump’s foreign policy outlook, Trump’s determination to massively increase U.S. defence spending, and his apparent recognition of ‘space’ as a future domain of military competition with rival nations, reminded some commentators of Reagan-style philosophy.

It is perhaps worth noting that Trump himself had been very fond of displaying photos of the occasions he had met Reagan, including this one (see image), which Trump had tweeted via his personal twitter account.

Although Trump did not use Star Wars rhetoric directly, his Manichean way of viewing the globe, and his fondness for populist imagery when communicating with his supporters, was (and still is) very reminiscent of the Reagan years.

Although he has wisely avoided the appropriation of Star Wars style rhetoric and simplistic ‘us and them’ analyses, there is no doubt that the current holder of the White House, President Biden, has recognised the importance of having a clear policy for ‘outer space’ in the near future. Tellingly, in June, 2023, Biden approved some classified Space Security Guidance, which has directed America’s military planners to increase cooperation with allies and partners on space activities and capabilities, including in response to the growing use of space for hostile purposes by the USA’s rivals.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: A previous version of this blog was published here on December 23rd, 2015

The Spy Who Lied: Another look at the Kim Philby story

A recent television drama series about the life of Kim Philby, the British Intelligence officer who engaged in treachery, attracted good reviews and enthusiastic viewers when it was screened, but contained few surprises for historians of the secret state. The production, A Spy Among Friends, first shown in 2022 and aired again since then, was based on the bestselling book of the same name by the newspaper journalist and respected historian Ben Macintyre, and starred Guy Pearce as Philby.

Interest in Philby’s life and career remains as lively as ever, and Macintyre’s book contained all the classic ingredients that helped translate this fascinating true-life story into entertaining drama.

The screening of the TV mini-series came in the wake of some intriguing new primary source evidence on Philby that became available back in 2019. A two-page confession made by Philby, who was a double-agent and one of the most infamous British traitors of the Cold War, was made public for the first time. It was part of a round of MI5 (Security Service) files released to The National Archives (TNA) at Kew, south-west London, in 2019, and the new material on Philby created considerable media and scholarly interest.

In the document, Philby (pictured) described the moment he was recruited by Russian Intelligence in 1934 and some of the subsequent ‘spycraft’ techniques he used as he rose through the ranks to become a top British Intelligence officer. The confession has helped historians of the Cold War fill a major gap in the story of Philby’s career as a Russian Intelligence spy, who was recruited as a young Cambridge University graduate and, functioning as a deep ‘mole’ for Moscow, ended up at the very heart of the British establishment, working for MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) – until he defected to the Soviet Union in 1963.

The revelation that Philby was a Soviet spy was hugely embarrassing for MI6 in 1963, and was yet another major scandal which served to undermine the then-Conservative government, which had seemingly become beset with sleaze and spy scandals. It also raised questions at the time about how Philby had managed to exploit his public school and class connections as a ‘gentleman’ in order to stay one step ahead (he was an Old Etonian, as were a number of other key officers in both MI5 and MI6).

Before he fled to Moscow in 1963, Philby handed his confession to MI6 officer and old friend Nicholas Elliot, who had been sent to Beirut to confront Philby with MI6’s growing suspicions that he was part of the Cambridge spy ring, a secret network that had included Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean (who had both defected to the Soviet Union in 1951).

MI6 Policy

The release of an MI6 document to the National Archives as part of an MI5 batch of files was highly unusual as, in contrast to MI5, MI6 have had a policy of not releasing secret ‘historical’ information into the public domain. This made the new material even more interesting for scholars.

In the confession, Philby listed the names of Communist friends at Cambridge that he was asked to ‘target’ as possible recruits for the OGPU (Soviet Intelligence), and also described where he would meet his ‘handler’ to pass on secrets: ‘Our meetings always took place in outlying districts of London, such as Ealing, Acton, Park Royal etc, and almost always in the open air’. Careful precautions were taken by both men, which often involved taking ‘at least three taxis both to and from the rendevouz to ensure that nobody followed’.

However, what also particularly interested historians was the information that Philby deliberately left out of his ‘confession’, such as the names of two members of the spy ring who had not yet been exposed: Anthony Blunt, who had become surveyor of the Queen’s pictures, and John Cairncross, who worked at the Treasury in Whitehall. In fact, Philby claimed in his confession that ‘Guy and Donald’ were the only two he had actually recruited, but this was evidently a deliberate lie on his part in order to mislead MI6 about the size of the spy ring and the extent to which the ring had operated successfully at the very heart of Whitehall.

Philby’s Revisionism

Interestingly, and possibly as another way of downplaying his own importance as a Russian spy, Philby also wrote that none of the (Soviet) officials with whom he had dealings ‘ever attempted to win my total acceptance of the party line’. He claimed: ‘All they required was rigid adherence to instructions on the technical level. In short, I joined the OGPU as one joined the army’.

Apparently, according to biographers of Philby such as the historian Ben Macintyre, Philby also claimed to Elliot that he had stopped working for Russia after the end of the Second World War, after he had ‘seen the error of his ways’. Yet, historians now know this was another of Philby’s blatant lies.

Indeed, it is worth remembering that, during his 30-year career as a Soviet spy deep at the heart of the British establishment, and especially after 1945, Philby was only too happy to betray his close friends and colleagues, as well as members of his own family. Moreover, while working as a top MI6 officer for the organisation’s East European desk, he betrayed numerous secrets that led to the deaths of hundreds and hundreds of anti-Communist agents, especially in Albania and elsewhere.

In 1968, Philby published a memoir, My Silent War, in which he sought to justify his treachery, but the book inevitably contained a selective and revisionist version of his career, and was treated with utmost care by historians. Philby also worked for the KGB as an instructor, teaching budding young Russian spies about the West and about the lessons of spycraft. In fact, Philby, who died in 1988, became a heroic figure for Russian Intelligence and was given a special funeral with full KGB honours in Moscow.

With an ex-KGB officer as president in Russia today, and the country’s continued and extensive use of espionage as a key arm of the state, interest in the historical dimension to this remains as important as ever. As far as I was concerned, the recent TV drama on Philby did full justice to Ben Macintyre’s meticulously researched book.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was first published here in September, 2019.

The Holocaust and Hate: When the late Zigi Shipper recalled Auschwitz

We were very sad to learn of the passing of Zigi Shipper, aged 93, in 2023. He came to Kingston University to deliver a talk on his experiences of the Holocaust and it was a truly moving experience for all who came to listen. As a tribute, and to help commemorate the 2024 Holocaust Memorial Day (27th January), we republish this blog first published here on 18th March, 2015.

Why do people hate? This was one of the central questions asked by Holocaust survivor Zigi Shipper when he spoke to students and staff at Kingston University about his early childhood in Poland and experiences of the Nazi ‘Final Solution’ during World War Two.

Zigi Speaking to the Crowd (Photo: Kate Stevens)

The talk, held on Thursday, 12th March, 2015, was arranged through the Kingston University History Society in conjunction with the Holocaust Educational Trust. It was given to a packed audience in one of the best-attended history events held at Kingston for many years. At one point there was standing room only, and one could hear a pin drop in the room.

Zigi’s powerful and very moving talk was particularly poignant for me as I had just given a lecture to my 3rd year Undergraduate History students on ‘Holocaust Denial’ and the strategies pursued by those on the extreme right today who seek to destroy the memory of Nazi crimes for ideological purposes. Direct witness testimony provided by those who survived the Holocaust remains one of the most effective barriers against the revival of extreme right ideas, but contemporary neo-Nazis remain determined to ‘break down’ or destroy such memories, or even deny the Holocaust ever took place.

As I pointed out to my students, as recently as November, 2014, for example, a section of the wrought-iron gate at the former Dachau concentration camp, bearing the infamous Nazi slogan “Work Sets You Free”, was stolen. In 2009, a similar sign spanning the main gate at Auschwitz was also stolen at the behest of extreme right activists. Physical evidence of the camps remains a target for neo-Nazis today, who somehow believe that removing it will help rehabilitate the old interwar racist ideas.

Zigi Shipper with organisers Kate Stevens and Josh Whatsize (Photo: Kate Stevens)

This makes the oral testimony of survivors such as Zigi Shipper even more important in today’s world. Zigi’s determination to talk about his experiences to a new generation of young people is part of the powerful response that all citizens should surely adopt when faced with such acts. Keeping the memory alive is one of the most important things that both the surviving victims and professional historians can help to do to educate people about what ‘civilised’ individuals are capable of doing given certain circumstances.

Significantly, at one point, Mr. Shipper, who is now 85-years old,  said he was often asked how he could still recall his memories of those horrrific times in such vivid detail. He said his response is always, ‘How could I forget?’

Zigi was introduced to his Kingston University audience by Josh Whatsize, a 2nd year Drama and International Relations student here at Kingston, who also serves as a national youth ambassador for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Born on 18th January, 1930, to a Jewish family in Lodz, Poland, Zigi attended a Jewish school. When he was 5 years old, his parents divorced but, because his family were Orthodox Jews, Zigi was told his mother had died. Following his parents divorce, Zigi lived with his father (briefly) and with his grandparents. He had a very happy childhood.

In 1939, however, after the German invasion of Poland, and the entry of the Nazis into his home city, ‘everything changed’. No Jewish child was allowed to attend school anymore, no Jewish teachers were allowed to teach, and no Jews were allowed to travel on public transport. As with other Jews, the 9-year old Zigi was also required to wear a yellow Star of David. Zigi recalled that new anti-Jewish decrees were issued nearly every day. The worst thing for Zigi, though, was the terrible shortage of food and the constant pain of hunger.

In 1940, Zigi and his grandparents were forced to live in a ghetto. In 1944, when the ghetto was liquidated, Zigi and his grandparents were then ordered to ‘relocate’ to the east by rail, transported in cattle trucks under terrible conditions. And, upon arrival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, people were brutally divided up (known as ‘Selektion’) into those who were to be taken to the ‘showers’ (gas chambers) for extermination, and those who were ‘fit for work’ and would carry out hard physical labour until they died (usually within just 3 months). As Zigi pointed out, many of those he arrived with at Auschwitz were dead within just one hour of arriving at the camp.

Train tracks leading to Auschwitz (Photo: Stanislaw Mucha, German Federal Archives/WikiCommons)

Zigi, now all alone, said he lost all sense of his own identity, and merely became prisoner number 84,303. Above all, he asked himself over and over, and still asks himself even today, ‘what kind of people could do this to other people?’ How could educated and apparently civilized German officers carry out such crimes during the day, and then go home and play with their children and listen to classical music in the evening?

Zigi saw truly horrific things in Auschwitz, experienced regular beatings and suffered extreme hunger. But he was determined to survive and, after further transportation and forced marches, he was finally liberated by the British Army. Incredibly, when he was in a ‘Displaced Persons Camp’, he discovered his mother was alive and well and living in Britain, to where Zigi moved in 1947 to build a whole new life.

It was a real privilege and honour to listen to Zigi’s life-story, and to witness his drive to keep the memories of the Holocaust fully alive for a new generation.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge, Kingston University, London

Die Hard Days: The British Home Secretary nicknamed ‘Mussolini Minor’

Britain recently had a Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, who appeared to relish her media reputation as a very rightwing and hardline Cabinet Minister, especially when it came to questions of migration and asylum, ‘race’ and British identity. Braverman argued that many asylum seekers do not share ‘British values’ and she seemed to think that many problems can be blaimed on the ‘outsider’ or the ‘other’. In many ways, Braverman reminded me of another explicitly rightwing Home Secretary who also delighted in his reputation as an outspoken critic of ‘aliens’ and foreigners, and as a defender of all things ‘British’, Sir William Joynson-Hicks (1865-1932).

Joynson-Hicks served as Conservative Home Secretary from 1924-1929, under the Premiership of Stanley Baldwin. Often known as ‘Jix’ by both his allies and opponents, Joynson-Hicks (see photo) was also nicknamed ‘Mussolini Minor’. Although there is no evidence that he was a fascist, he is a good example of a political figure who arguably bathed in the murky grey waters that lay between ‘Die Hard’ Toryism and extreme rightwing politics in the 1920s. Braverman appeared to be fishing in those same waters, in the sense that her controversial rhetoric about so-called ‘floods’ of ‘illegal’ asylum-seekers and the distinctiveness of British ‘values’ would not look out of place in extreme rightwing publications, and was clearly designed to appeal to the pro-Brexit NatCons (‘National Conservatives’) who have come to dominate the right of Rishi Sunak’s party.

Although one must be very careful not to push historical comparisons too far, nevertheless there are some striking echoes and similarities in Braverman’s attitude and stance as Home Secretary when one explores the ideas and policies Joynson-Hicks espoused during his time as holder of the same office.

The rise of ‘Jix’

Born in London, William Hicks was the son of a merchant and became involved in Conservative Party politics from an early age. After working as a solicitor, in 1894 he married into a well-off family in Manchester, the Joynsons, and added their name to his own. The family had strong connections to local Conservative politics in Manchester and, in 1898, Joynson-Hicks was adopted as the Conservative parliamentary candidate for North Manchester.

However, it was not an automatic ticket to high office; he unsuccessfully contested seats in Manchester in the General Elections of 1900 and 1906. To maximise his appeal in the party, appears to have adopted an increasingly hard stance on immigration to pander to what became known as the ‘Die Hards’ on the right of the Tory party in Edwardian politics. In the 1906 campaign, in particular, Joynson-Hicks made a series of what can only be described as anti-Semitic speeches, which clearly antagonized Manchester’s Jewish community but made him something of a rising ‘star’ on the Die Hard wing of his party.

He was finally elected to Parliament in 1908, in a by-election, and his nickname ‘Jix’ dates from this election. During his campaign he voiced notably strong support for the Aliens Act of 1905, which had introduced tight controls on Jewish immigration. Although he lost his seat in the January, 1010, General Election, he became MP for Brentford, near London, at a by-election in March, 1911, and in 1918 he became MP for Twickenham, a seat he held until 1929.

In many ways, Joynson-Hicks exemplified what had become known as the ‘Die Hard’ stance on all the big issues of politics, and became especially associated with campaigns against ‘aliens’. Along with other ‘Die Hards’ on the right of the Conservative Party, he had regularly criticised the government for allowing, as he saw it, thousands of Bolshevik Jews to gain entry to Palestine. Perhaps as part of an attempt to water down or even massage the egos of the hard right of his party, Stanley Baldwin decided he could make use of ‘Jix’. Much to the surprise of some in the centre of the party, Joynson-Hicks became Home Secretary in Stanley Baldwin’s second Conservative government in November, 1924, to the evident alarm of Britain’s Jewish community.

However, it is worth noting that the Conservative campaign in the General Election had included a strong anti-alien message, helped considerably by the notorious Zinoviev Letter and also by a series of anti-alien articles in newspapers such as The Times. Moreover, Baldwin himself, who is often portrayed by historians as a mild-mannered conciliator, had also clearly dipped into the well of suspicion of ‘aliens’ and foreigners in his own campaign speeches.

Dangers from within

Not long after be became Home Secretary, Jix was visited by a delegation from the ‘National Citizens Union’ (NCU) (formerly the Middle Classes Union), which urged him to take strong action on ‘aliens’. He confirmed that he would do so, and was soon making a public show of visiting ports to urge immigration officials to adopt a tough line on ‘aliens’. When this very public grand-standing by Jix was challenged by the Labour MP John Scurr, the Home Secretary responded by claiming that Scurr ‘would like to see England flooded with the whole of the alien refuse from every country in the world’.

Indeed, ‘Jix’ appeared to enjoy baiting and shocking his opponents with controversial headline-grabbing rhetoric; he was an example of a savvy politician who had realised the value of carving out a distinct image in the new media politics of the early 20th Century. He enjoyed his regular mentions in the comment columns and editorials of the day, and liked to package his policies up with what we would call today ‘sound-bites’ and memorable phrases.

Joynson-Hicks thus increasingly dwelled on the image of ‘aliens’ as outsiders who were burrowing their way into British society in order to spread Bolshevism, ‘subversion’ and non-British values. Indeed, as industrial relations deteriorated across the country, Joynson-Hicks made a number of speeches during the autumn of 1925 warning that there was a distinct attempt being made by the Communist Party to ‘get inside’ the Trade Unions and to turn them from their legitimate objects to the ‘revolutionary’ objects of ‘subverting the Constitution’.

Tellingly, in November, 1925, the press reported comments made by Joynson-Hicks to some hecklers at a meeting he was addressing in Isleworth. When Jix spoke of ‘interference’ in the British constitution by Soviet Russia, somebody commented from the crowd: ‘And adopt the Mussolini constitution’. Joynson-Hicks responded: ‘Some of you might be better for a little touch of Mussolini’. Reacting to an observation from a heckler that castor oil had been used on people in Italy, Jix also joked: ‘Yes, but it made them work’.

It was no surprise, then, that in December, 1925, the Labour-supporting Daily Herald newspaper carried a satirical cartoon of the Home Secretary as a theatre agent recruiting artists for ‘Jix’s Great Christmas Pantomine’; a queue waiting to audition for roles in the show included a ‘Pseudo Special’, an O.M.S. volunteer, a British Fascist, a ‘Strikebreaker’, a ‘Thug’, and a little girl called ‘Common Sense’. Jix was shown saying to the little girl ‘Run away Missy, we don’t want you’.

Dangers from without

Another notable and recurrent theme in the politics of Jix was the image of political ‘disease’ undermining Britain from dangerous and illegal elements coming in from beyond the country’s borders. In late May, 1927, when Jix addressed a meeting of over 3,000 at Bristol, he claimed that ‘during the last few years there had crept in a kind of infection or poison, coming largely from without’, and which was against the best interests of ‘real’ trade unionists in the country. Similarly, in September, 1927, he devoted part of a speech at a Conservative fete to ‘the machinations of the Moscow-controlled Communists in this country’ and their attempt to undermine the loyalty of the fighting forces.

Such critiques of ‘outsiders’ and the ‘foreign’ nature of Socialism and trade unionism continued well into 1928. A determination to engage in the over-simplification and distortion of politics, together with the us eof smear tactics, can also be detected in Jix’s diatribes. Speaking in September, 1928, for example, and referring to Bernard Shaw’s latest book on Socialism, the Home Secretary argued: ‘Communism is not dead yet… Communism is being propagated insidiously throughout our land today’. Jix said that, although Shaw was not a Communist, Shaw’s Socialism was not very different from Communism. He added that he found it ‘extraordinary’ that doctrines of that kind were taught by ‘learned men’ as well as by ‘scatterbrains’. Similarly, in September, 1927, devoted part of a speech at a Conservative fete to ‘the machinations of the Moscow-controlled Communists in this country’ and their attempt to undermine the loyalty of the fighting forces.

Just two months later, in a public appearance in Twickenham, Jix said that his government had ‘certainly’ made it impossible for another General Strike to take place, and warned trade unionists that if they tried to ‘hold up the country to ransom’ again, they had been given ‘one thundering good thrashing’ and they would get another: ‘This great country is not going to be bullied by a few disloyal Communists’.

Defending the Empire

Another feature of his Die-Hard credentials was Jix’s strong commitment to the British Empire and to the ‘special’ British imperial project. A good example of this came in May, 1925, when he spoke on ‘A Menace to Empire’ at a meeting in Queen’s Hall in London, and warned darkly that Communism and Bolshevism was ‘a great black pall spread like a great upas tree stretched out over Europe and the British Isles. He proclaimed: ‘We do not intend that this country shall degenerate into a Communist republic’.

8th December 1924: Sir William Joynson-Hicks arriving at the Home Office while Home Secretary.

He said that he had seen the necessary steps had been taken to in face of ‘this great menace’ and, clearly playing the anti-alien card again, he said he was ‘tired’ of the ‘influx’ of men who were only in the United Kingdom to stir up class hatred and destroy the Constitution. Just a few months later, in November, 1925, speaking at Bournemotuh, he claimed that he could trace ‘the hand of Moscow’ in India, in China, in persia, in Afghanistan, in Africa, ‘and in nearly every country in Europe’.

Similarly, in 1930, Viscount Brentford (as he was now titled) penned an article in the Daily Mail on India, in which he adamantly defended British rule and was highly critical of what he saw as the treachery and rebellion being pushed by Indian nationalists and the Congress party. He argued: ‘India was conquered by our predecessors; we have kept it and protected it with our Army and navy, and we have given to it every conceivable benefit – with a resultant prosperity compared with which the thousands of years prior to the British rule was as a miserable desert’. He warned nationalists that tinkering with rebellion ‘leads to successful revolution, and rebellion, if successful, has always been considered the greatest of crimes and punishable in the most severe manner’.

Some reflections on ‘Jix’

William Joynson-Hicks was a typical example of the ‘Die Hard’ philosophy that held parts of the right of the Conservative Party in its grip in the Edwardian period and into the post-World War One ‘new democracy’ of the 1920s. Die-Hard MPs such as ‘Jix’ remained deeply suspicious of the dramatic changes that had taken place via the Representation of the People Act of 1918. They were very uncomfortable and worried about the rise of Labour and Socialism, and they feared the Empire was witnessing ‘dangerous’ new and ungrateful nationalisms which could be exploited by the enemies of Britain, such as Soviet Russia.

Moreover, Die Hard MPs and their supporters, and Joynson-Hicks in particular, were perfectly willing to play the ‘race card’ in British politics, and arguably exploited ‘anti-alien’ sentiments for nakedly political gain. This commitment to using suspicion about ‘foreigners’ in a highly questionable way remained a feature throughout Jix’s time as Home Secretary, and this made him one of the most rightwing holders of that office in the 20th Century.

Some one hundred years later, it appeared that Braverman, the recent holder of the same high office, was seeking to blatantly gain political capital out of the employment of very similar chauvinist and intolerant discourse about ‘floods’ of foreigners, ‘illegal’ migrants who supposedly do not share ‘British’ values. Overly-fond of her own media image, and always on the lookout for a dramatic headline, Braverman seemingly wanted to carve out a reputation as a modern-day ‘Jix’ who would appeal to the pro-Brexit hard right of her party and keep British culture pure and untainted. Since her dismissal from office in a Cabinet reshuffle in November, 2023, Braverman has maintained her determination to be as outspoken as possible on questions of identity and migration.

The ‘Jix’ thread in British politics has never really gone away.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Notorious in Northampton: The anti-Semitic career of Walter Crick

When historians dig deeply, many towns and cities often have at least some notorious skeletons in their historical cupboards, individuals who represent the darker side of the past, usually people who current-day citizens would rather forget. In March, 1925, a number of local and regional newspapers in Britain gave some coverage to the racist claims of a boot manufacturer in Northampton, who had claimed that the British Empire was ‘in danger’ from Jews. These claims were also given some publicity by national newspapers, of the kind that Northampton’s inhabitants would rather had not appeared.

The man in question was Walter Crick (1885-1958), a wealthy local industrialist. Along with his brother, Crick was a partner in, but now effectively ran, a boot manufacturing company, Crick and Co., which had been founded by his father, Walter Drawbridge Crick, in St. Giles Street in the town of Northampton, located in the Midlands area of England. Walter Crick had been speaking to a meeting of local Northampton business men, and stirred up a furore when he shared some extremely controversial views with the attendees.

At one stage Crick posed a question to his audience: ‘Can we end our industrial troubles and unemployment by getting rid of the Jews?’ He went on to develop themes and ideas which were clearly rooted in conspiracy theory: ‘We are’, he claimed, ‘absolutely in the hands of a number of financiers. It is the biggest danger the British Empire has ever had to face, and I’m afraid most of the money is in the hands of the Jew’.

Warming to his theme, Crick also alleged that the credits of Britain were being lent to the Germans by ‘these Jews’ so that the recently defeated nation could manufacture things ‘to the detriment of our British employees’. He then warned: ‘The more you look at it the worse it is. It is a bigger danger than we faced in 1914’. Crick added ominously: ‘These Jews are international. You don’t know what nationality a Jew is. Jews can destroy empires by means of finance, and all depends on whether we Britons are strong enough to rise to the point of tackling them’.

Quite what the other businessmen present made of all this is difficult to discern, but there is evidence that some locals in Northampton were very unhappy at the seeming damage Crick’s views were having on the reputation of the area. Local civic leaders would have much preferred Crick to have kept his views firmly to himself, and to have concentrated solely on boot production during the somewhat stormy economic times of the 1920s, where stable employment was crucial to the locality. They pointed to the negative national publicity for the town that had resulted from reports about Crick’s talk. The national Jewish World journal, for example, in response to Crick’s views, called on Jewish citizens in Britain to boycott any footwear manufactured by Crick and Co.

Although Crick has received some brief attention from specialist historians such as Colin Holmes, Richard Thurlow, Gisela Lebzelter and, more recently, Nick Toczek, much of this coverage has been sketchy and very little is known about Northampton’s notorious anti-Semite and conspiracy theorist. On the other hand, perhaps we should not be too surprised. He was hardly a man celebrated in local culture and memory, and a number of Northamptonians clearly felt that Crick was, to use local parlance, ’round the bend’ or ‘up the pole’. Although employees of Crick and Co. were naturally grateful to be in work, the probability is that the obsessions of their boss were best avoided and not discussed too much in public.

Crick was the eldest one of five children born between 1885 and 1898 (four brothers and a sister, but his sister did not survive). His father, Walter Drawbridge Crick (1857-1903), from whom he inherited the family boot-making business, had been a keen and respected palaeontologist who collaborated closely with Charles Darwin on biological and fossil research. Interestingly, Walter Crick was also uncle to the famous Nobel Prize-winning molecular biologist and DNA researcher Francis Crick (1916-2004), who is much better known in Northampton’s local history and remains something of a national hero in broader scientific circles (despite having some controversial views himself on ‘breeding’ and ‘positive eugenics’).

The Britons and ‘race’

Where did Walter Crick’s racism come from? Much of it had been shaped by his involvement with one of Britain’s leading anti-Semitic pressure groups of the 1920s, ‘The Britons’. Indeed, shortly after his Northampton speech, Crick was invited into the high leadership circle of the group, and subsequently served as a vice-president of The Britons from 1925 to 1936. As an industrialist, Walter Crick was evidently seen as quite a ‘catch’ for The Britons, and may have possibly given some financial support to the organisation.

The Britons, based in central London, had been founded in July, 1919, by Henry Hamilton Beamish (1873-1948), and was a group which Lebzelter has described as the first organisation in England ‘set up for the expressed purpose of disseminating anti-Semitic propaganda’. Beamish was a fanatical anti-Semite who has sometimes been likened to a ‘travelling salesman’ of bigotry, given the number of talking tours he made to various countries and the inevitable ‘racial’ messages that littered his speeches concerning the ‘Christian White Races’.

Beamish was convinced that there was a ‘worldwide Jewish plot’ and became a big admirer of the new National Socialist (Nazi) party in Germany in the early 1920s. In fact, as early as 1923, he had addressed a meeting of the ‘Bavarian Fascisti’ in Munich. Later, he revisited the country in 1936-37 to conduct another speaking tour and express his ideological solidarity with Hitler’s ‘crusade’ against ‘international finance’, and praised the Nazi regime’s promotion of the alleged superiority of the White Race.

The Britons organisation held fairly regular monthly meetings in London in the 1920s, although attendance was usually small. These secretive meetings were devoted to all things racist, emphasising British birthright and the need for ‘purity’ of race, and speakers were highly critical of ‘aliens’ and the so-called ‘hidden hand’ at work in politics. Typical topics for the talks and discussions included ‘The Jew Control of Our Industries’, ‘Jewish Methods’ and ‘Who is the Jew?’

Starting in February, 1920, the group also published an in-house monthly journal for members, which appeared at first under the title Jewry Uber Alles, and later became The Hidden Hand and then The British Guardian. The journal carried detailed articles on all aspects of the ‘alien’ peril and the supposed threat of parasitic ‘Jewish’ Bolshevism. It was discontinued in July, 1925, due to lack of funds.

However, The Britons also set up a literary arm, which became a leading anti-Semitic publishing house in the interwar period, producing, selling and distributing a large number of leaflets, pamphlets and books, including numerous reprints of the notorious conspiratorial forgery The Protocols of the Leading Elders of Zion.

A number of Britain’s leading interwar fascists, racists and pro-Nazis were involved with, or had been influenced by, the ideas of The Britons, such as Arnold Leese of the Imperial Fascist League. Moreover, the new, younger generation of anti-Semites and racists who emerged immediately after the Second World War (such as Colin Jordan) also absorbed many of the ideas found in the publications of The Britons. Disturbingly, the organisation managed to continue its publishing activities well into the post-1945 years, only finally closing down around 1975.

Crick’s changing fortunes

Northampton’s boot manufacturer was, it seems, not a good industrialist or imaginative entrepreneur. Although his company Crick and Co. survived the 1920s, managing to resist the worst impacts of the Great Depression against all the odds, by the mid-1930s it was increasingly apparent that the company was in trouble. It simply could not sell enough shoes or boots to continue.

Northampton, which had carved out a long historical reputation as a major centre for shoe and boot manufacturing in Britain, was experiencing relative overall decline in footwear sales and their markets, especially given the cheaper footwear coming in from abroad. But the Midlands town still contained a number of successful shoe and boot firms in the interwar period, and Crick and Co. found itself increasingly uncompetitive in a tough local and national market.

Refusing to accept that the firm’s decline was down to him personally, Crick co-authored with Frederick Soddy (another man with decidely anti-Semitic ideas, who had claimed that there was a ‘financial conspiracy to enslave the world’) a short book entitled Abolish Private Money, or Drown in Debt (1939). With this publication, Crick seems to have been dabbling with Social Credit theory, an unorthodox and highly contentious economic doctrine that often attracted anti-Semites, and which espoused an alternative to mainstream laissez-faire capitalism. Tellingly, the publication was decorated with an image of what appears to be a stereotypical Jewish banker on the front cover.

With the outbreak of war in 1939, Crick – aware that his family still held him personally responsible for the collapse of the firm – decided to emigrate to the United States. Ironically, he managed to secure employment as a sales agent for another shoe manufacturer, and – according to the historian Nick Toczek – eventually retired to an orange farm in California.

But there the trail seems to go cold, and there is much more room for further research into Crick’s career and dubious activities. If anybody out there has any additional information on Walter Crick and his life, I would be very interested to learn more.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(All images: Wikimedia Commons)

The Great War’s Christmas Truce of 1914: not unique?

Speaking in 1963 for a BBC series on the Great War, the late author Henry Williamson, whose best-known work probably remains Tarka the Otter, gave some fascinating details about what he witnessed in December, 1914, when he was serving as a private in the British Army on the Western Front.

Williamson recalled that, starting late on Christmas Eve, 1914, the guns fell silent and a strange calm fell over the battlefield. Williamson was also surprised to see a Christmas tree go up on the German trenches, and to then hear the enemy soldiers singing Christmas carols. British soldiers sang carols in return. Moreover, at first light the very next day, on a cold Christmas Day morning, soldiers from both sides emerged from their trenches and went out into the frozen areas of ‘No-Man’s Land’, which became, he said, ‘khaki and grey as far as the eye could see’.

Christmas Day, 1914 (photo: WikiMedia Commons)

According to Williamson, this Christmas truce actually lasted for four days, until strict orders to stop such ‘fraternisation’ were issued by exasperated Generals on the High Commands of both sides.

The ‘Christmas Truce of 1914’, as it is now usually called, where British and German soldiers left their trenches and went into ‘No-Man’s Land’ to meet, chat, exchange gifts, swop addresses and even play football, did receive some newspaper coverage at the time (see, for example, the image from the Daily Mirror), but it has often been seen as a unique moment amid all the terrible bloodshed of the First World War, never to be repeated. It has certainly become an iconic and startling image in modern popular culture when used as an anti-war message in various war films, and has featured in some pop ballads and also, at one stage, was seen in a large UK retailer’s Christmas advert.

However, in 2016, new research for a book by the historian Thomas Weber suggested that the truce may not have been as unique as we thought. The British media, including The Times and the Daily Telegraph, together with a number of news websites, gave extensive coverage in December, 2016, to intriguing evidence uncovered by Professor Weber which indicated that smaller-scale truces of the same nature as the 1914 one in fact occurred at other points in the Great War, despite the growing brutality and enormous loss of life on both sides.

Professor Weber is a historian at the University of Aberdeen and is also the author of some ground-breaking work on the early military career of Hitler, which helped to puncture and de-mythologize the Nazi leader’s own highly-selective autobiographical version of his time in the trenches.

Weber’s new research retained its focus on the Western Front and raised some important points about the official records of the army regiments and also those of senior officers. Using a range of private correspondence and soldiers’ letters to their families, Weber’s careful investigation of the testimony of ordinary soldiers found that ‘fraternisation’ (i.e. peaceful and friendly interactions) between the rival sides did not just occur in 1914, but also during other key moments in the conflict, a pattern that was ‘purged’ from the official military records. Weber said that, as he worked through the large number of private letters, he came across ‘a surprising number’ of references to truces beyond 1914.

According to Prof. Weber: ‘When officers failed to prevent fraternisation from happening, they rarely reported those cases up the chain of command for fear of being court-marshalled. In the few cases that were officially reported, they tended to be written out of the story after the event. There is strong evidence that instances of fraternisation were purged from the official regimental war diaries before they were published in book form in the interwar years’.

Examples of further Christmas truces occurred in 1915, and also at Vimy Ridge and on the Somme in 1916. At Vimy Ridge, for example, Weber found evidence of a truce struck between Canadian and German troops. The official version of events as recorded by the Canadian regiment stated that the Germans tried to reach out and interact, but that no Canadian troops responded to this. However, Weber found that letters written by soldiers contradict this. In one letter by a Scottish soldier who witnessed such events, he wrote: ‘We had a truce on Xmas day and our German friends were quite friendly. They came over to see us and we traded bully beef for cigars. Xmas was “tray bon” which means very good’. Weber also found other similar letters written by soldiers.

Weber said: ‘The general view is that after the first Christmas there was no repeat because of the circle of violence and its ensuing bitterness that then set in. In fact, what we see is that despite the difficulties they endured, soldiers never tried to stop fraternising’. Indeed, the top-brass in the British military became so determined to stamp such behaviour out that officers were instructed to start using snipers against any friendly German soldiers when men met between the lines of trenches during any locally-arranged truces. Soldiers in the lower ranks of the British Army, however, were not happy about this and sometimes recorded their disgust at such ‘un-British’ tactics.

When he heard of Weber’s findings, Dan Snow, the BBC broadcaster and historian – who has himself become something of an expert on the First World War – commented to the UK’s media that he thought this topic was clearly one of the big ‘untold stories’ of the Great War. It is difficult to disagree. Moreover, interest in Weber’s findings remains as strong as ever.

On December 22nd, 2021, the Times newspaper, for example, carried a piece entitled ‘Truces weren’t just for 1914 Christmas’, in which it noted that, since Thomas Weber first revealed his findings on the truces, ‘he has been inundated with letters about tens of thousands of soldiers mixing at other times’. Weber told the newspaper that he has fresh details about the truces from the ‘avalanche’ of accounts in soldiers’ letters and regimental diaries.

In addition, referring to the Great War more generally, Weber has found evidence of friendly encounters not just on the Western Front but also on the Eastern Front (between Russian and Austrian forces), at Gallipoli in 1915 and in East Africa.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a specialist in British and European History

(Images: Wikimedia Commons and Press Association)

Please note: Helmets for British soldiers were not widely issued until 1916; the two later images used here are employed to capture a sense of the winter conditions faced by men in the trenches.

Note: An earlier version of this blog was published here in December, 2020.

The dangerous world of Marine Le Pen: a research note

Marine Le Pen

Worrying opinion polls in France in recent months have indicated that Marine Le Pen and her ‘National Rally’ (NR) have become more popular than many of the mainstream French political parties and, indeed, indicate that the NR leader herself has a more favourable image with the country’s voters than President Emmanuel Macron.

Using the term ‘leader’ in relation to Marine Le Pen may now be something of a misnomer, though, as Le Pen – who was leader (president) of the party from 2011 to 2022 – stepped aside from that position in November, 2022, and was succeeded by Jordan Bardella. She currently now serves as the Parliamentary leader of the NR in the National Assembly, and is clearly gearing up to concentrate on the upcoming presidential elections of 2027 in pursuit of her continuing ambition to one day become President of France.

Despite the presence of Bardella as the new leader, Le Pen still remains the dominant figure in the NR and is certainly more high-profile with the French public. Her presidential ambitions remain very much at the core of her politics.

This ambition, frightening as it is to commentators (including myself), is not beyond the realms of possibility. In fact, the NR itself is now viewed as part of the mainstream of French politics by a considerable number of voters. An extreme rightwing party, founded in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen, but which only first came to real national attention in the early 1980s, has seemingly managed to position itself in 2023 as a law-abiding friend of French democracy, much to the dismay of its many critics. How did this happen?

There are a complex mixture of reasons, but part of this is undoubtedly down to the sheer drive of Marine Le Pen, Jean-Marie Le Pen’s daughter. After inheriting the crown from her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marine Le Pen has spent the last ten years or so campaigning to ‘detoxify’ the former National Front (FN), which included changing the party’s name to the Rassemblement National (‘National Rally’) in June, 2018. She even expelled her own father, Jean-Marie, from the party in May, 2015, after he had repeated his earlier claim from the 1980s that the Holocaust was a ‘mere detail’ in history.

In consequence, Marine Le Pen has, in many ways, made the former FN one of the most successful extreme right parties in Europe. Moreover, there is strong evidence that many people who voted for Emmanuel Macron in the presidential elections in both 2017 and 2022 did so not because they were strongly in favour of seeing him become president, but rather because they still feared the prospect of a Le Pen presidency more, and just held their noses in the polling booths. But this concern about Le Pen may no longer hold for those voters, and disillusionment with Macron seems to be a big factor now in opinion polls.

Macron, as he himself has openly acknowledged, still has much work to do to try and unite people of all classes across French society, and to undermine and reverse the intolerant nationalism that has appeared to make serious inroads throughout the country in recent years. Some of Le Pen’s strongest support has come from disillusioned working-class people in the French equivalent of the ‘rust-belt’ areas, regions which have suffered from widespread de-industrialisation in recent decades.

On the other hand, as I have argued before, a fight-back against Le Pen’s ‘cuddly’ version of rightwing extremism could be easier than perhaps people imagine. And ‘memory’ and history can still be a big part of this. Awareness of the past is arguably still on the side of anti-fascists, especially a good understanding of the ‘history’ of the FN/NR and the movement’s regular manipulation of the past for ideological purposes. While ‘history’ has sometimes worked in the FN/NR’s favour (Le Pen has ruthlessly exploited the iconic image of Joan of Arc as a defender of France against ‘foreigners’, for example), the past has had a habit of coming back to haunt and seriously undermine Le Pen and the FN/NR. Despite her determination to ‘de-toxify’ the party and remove the anti-Semitic, Vichyite and racist legacy of her father’s time as leader, history has regularly helped reveal what is still arguably the core extremist nature of the movement.

The Nazi factor

A good example of this came in 2017. It concerned the people around Le Pen. As the New York Times at one stage noted, Le Pen had worked hard to sanitize the image of her party and to distance it from the uglier and more extreme parts of the wider European extreme right. But Le Pen’s inner circle has tended to fuel serious doubts about her bid to ‘un-demonize’ the FN. Two men in her inner circle, who were key policy advisors to her and also remained very close friends of the FN/NR leader – Frederic Chatillou and Axel Loustau – were well-known members of a violent extreme right student group that fought street battles with Leftwing activists in the 1960s, and also displayed open nostalgia for Hitler in the 1990s.

Embarrassingly for Le Pen, French TV broadcast video footage from the early 1990s of Loustau visiting Leon Degrelle, a Belgian former Waffen-SS officer and collaborator and (until his death in 1994) one of the most notorious neo-Nazis of the post-war period.  Moreover, further footage also showed Le Pen’s other advisor, Chatillou, speaking very fondly of his own visit to see Degrelle.

Leon Degrelle (1906-1994) is very familiar to experts on the history of the European far right (see photo). As founder of the interwar fascist Rex party, he went on to raise a force of thousands of Belgian volunteers to fight for the German war effort in an anti-Bolshevik ‘crusade’ on the Eastern Front during the war. 

He was personally decorated by Hitler for his efforts, and claimed that Hitler had personally told him that if he (Hitler) had fathered a son, it would have been someone like Degrelle. Moreover, in 1945, Degrelle managed to escape to Franco’s Spain, where he was given sanctuary by the regime and spent much of the rest of his career. His home in authoritarian Spain became something of a ‘must visit’ shrine for a wide variety of dedicated European neo-Nazis, and Degrelle’s continued praise of all things ‘Nazi’ saw him espousing a highly selective version of history: the SS volunteers in the wartime ‘European anti-Communist struggle’ had been examples of the new ‘European Man’, while racism was perfectly ‘natural’. Degrelle was also a strong supporter of Holocaust Denial, raising funds for the distribution of such material across the world. All this made him a major ‘hero’ to many extreme right activists.

Tellingly, Marine Le Pen appeared to downplay and be unconcerned about these revelations about two of her key advisors. It was difficult to measure her real thoughts on the controversy, or the impact of such things on the opinion polls, but this example of some of the FN’s historical ‘skeletons in the cupboard’ was undoubtedly unwelcome to her and very damaging to her campaign strategy. When it emerged on 28th April, 2017, that Jean-Francois Jalkh, her choice of interim FN/NR leader (she had stepped aside temporarily as leader to fight the 2017 campaign) had appeared to deny the Holocaust in a 2005 interview, he was quickly forced to resign.

But it raised further strong doubts about the whole Le Pen project to remove the FN/NR’s historical demons and its links to neo-Nazism. When all this was combined with some comments that Le Pen had made herself in early April, 2017, claiming that France had no responsibility for the forced deportation of French Jews to the Nazi death camps (an astonishing assertion, which flew in the face of all the available evidence from historians), then it was clear that the ‘respectable’ image so carefully cultivated by the FN/NR in recent years should be taken with a huge dose of salt.

Toxic tendencies

It is also important to grasp that Marine Le Pen’s leadership itself has come under intense pressure at times from within her party. Some members have felt that she is no longer authentically ‘rightwing’. In November, 2020, for example, Jean Messiha, who was seen as the top intellectual in the FN/NR, quit the party partly because he felt Le Pen had watered down the party’s traditional hard line on immigration and defence of French ‘identity’. The incident reminded people that there was still considerable nostalgia for Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and his hard line on such matters within the party.

Moreover, in June, 2021, some further revelations supplied yet more evidence to potential supporters of the party just how ‘toxic’ some of its key officers and candidates still are. Marta Le Nair, for example, who was standing for a council seat in Bordeau in the regional elections, was removed from the party because of a series of offensive tweets, including one that was clearly anti-Semitic in nature. Similarly, Thierry Morin, an election candidate in the central Creuse departement, was removed after he was imprisoned for beating his wife. And in the very same district, Genevieve Veslin was removed from the party for a past social media post which had said: ‘The supposed gas chambers of Hitler and the supposed genocide of the Jews are part of the same historic lie’.

Recent events

And damaging revelations keep on coming, much to Le Pen’s evident frustration. During 2023, the degree to which Le Pen was keen to put further distance between her NR party and the more hardline National Front image of her father saw her condemn anti-Semitism outright. Le Pen and her closest NR supporters even joined a march against anti-Semitism in Paris in November, an act that stirred up huge controversy and was very unwelcome to the organizers of the march.

Le Pen sitting in the National Assembly

Yet, attempts to cultivate new levels of ‘respectability’ have not always gone to plan for Marine Le Pen. Hardline activists within the NR, many of whom still have a strong nostalgia for the days of Jean-Marie Le Pen, continued to deliberately embarrass Marine Le Pen in late 2023 through expressions of racism and hostility to global ‘cosmopolitism’, sentiments that could have come straight out of her father’s playbook. Moreover, Jordan Bardella, the man who succeeded Marine Le Pen as NR president, seemed notably keen to signal that he is very much his own man and is not too deferential to his predecessor. Significantly, Bardella even gave an interview on 5th November, 2023, where he said that he did not believe Jean-Marie Le Pen was anti-Semitic, despite the FN founder’s previous history of Holocaust scepticism and brushes with the law on the topic.

Marine Le Pen, who still has her hopes very much pinned on a vigorous personal campaign for the presidential elections of 2027, must have been privately fuming over Bardella’s seeming deviation from the NR’s more ‘moderate’ party line and the de-toxification strategy she has carefully cultivated over the years.

It is essential for historians and other commentators, both in France and more widely, to continually scrutinise the NR, discern its ideological contradictions and tensions, and to point out the uglier realities of the nature of the party.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Nesta Webster and her ideas: a case study in conspiracy theory

With the seeming surge in conspiracy theories during the recent coronavirus crisis, it is important to be aware of the dangerous history of such views, and understand the claims of some of the ‘classic’ advocates of these paranoid and distorted interpretations of the way the world works.

A case in point is the arch-conspiracy theorist Nesta Webster (1876-1960), a British author of eight ‘history’ books, together with an autobiography and numerous articles and speeches. Webster (pictured) was arguably one of the most influential conspiracy theorists of the last century, and a number of her books remain in print today. There is also intense interest in her ideas on certain internet sites, especially those of the far right, religious cults and New Age ‘alternative’ thinkers.

While Nesta Helen Webster produced three novels, it is her prolific non-fiction historical work that remains alarmingly popular today, although critics (including me) would point out that much of her ‘non-fiction’ work seriously blurred fiction and fact. Conspiracy theorists, however, are not interested in historical truths as such, but only in how the work of Webster and other like-minded writers can be weaponized for ideological and often irrational purposes.

Life and career

What was Webster’s background? Born Nesta Helen Bevan in August, 1876, on her wealthy family’s estate, Trent Park, in Hertfordshire, Nesta was the youngest of eight children, whose parents were strongly religious. In childhood, she split her time between the family estate and their London residence, which overlooked Hyde Park. Although Nesta had ambitions to go to Cambridge or Oxford University, her mother regarded both institutions as too ‘liberal’, and forced Nesta to attend Westfield College in Hampstead instead, where she studied classics and mental and moral science.

In 1903, while on a tour, Nesta met Arthur Webster, a District Superintendent of Police, and married him in 1904, soon giving birth to two daughters. In the immediate years prior to World War One, Nesta Webster decided to pursue a writing career and her first novel, The Sheep Track, appeared in 1914. Although Webster was of a conservative disposition, the novel appeared to show some strong sympathy for the plight of women and their lack of rights, and it had an underlying message: that women should have the freedom to develop their own independent careers.

In the same year, Webster also published what was to be her first ‘political’ text, Britain’s Call to Arms: An Appeal to our Women. This urged the women of Britain to encourage their men to join the war effort against Germany, and warned gravely that a German victory would result in an ‘iron government’ which would do away with all personal liberty. Overall, Webster adopted a markedly patriotic stance, intolerant of anybody who appeared to be insufficiently loyal.

During the course of the 1914-18 Great War, Webster also continued to develop her own research interests in history, especially the French Revolution. She decided that much that had previously been written on the revolution was ‘false’ and that she would present the ‘truth’ to the world. This resulted in The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy (1920).

It is in this book where the first signs of a conspiratorial mind-set are in evidence. Webster argued that it had been impossible for the masses to create such an all-encompassing revolution by themselves, and the ‘dark design’ of secret forces had been behind the events of 1789. In particular, the Lodges of German Freemasons and Illuminati had created the ‘anarchy’ which had led to ‘The Terror’, and this was all part of their plan to destroy ‘Christian civilization’.

Webster’s fixations

Although the book was widely reviewed, there was considerable scepticism from critics about its central thesis. However, Webster continued to develop such ideas in her subsequent writings, linking Freemasons, Illuminati and the new creed of Bolshevism, and suggesting they were all part of the ‘design’ of secret societies at the heart of all political events and historical occurrences. There was no room for accident or chance in history; rather, there was planning, manipulation and underhand purpose behind everything that occurred. Moreover, this ‘alien conspiracy’ had taken on international dimensions, and could be traced back over the course of a hundred or so years.

Unfortunately, the decade of the 1920s, with all its political and social upheavals, major economic difficulties, and a general sense of ‘crisis’ – and where many individuals sought firm and simple ‘answers’ with which to comprehend the world – was a period where there were plenty of people who were receptive to simplistic conspiratorial ideas of the type offered by Webster.

Webster was certainly convinced she had the right answers. Another work of ‘history’ from her pen soon followed: World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization (1921). In this lengthy volume, Webster claimed that her work was the first to fully comprehend the role of secret societies in fomenting revolution in history, which she referred to as ‘a deep-laid conspiracy’ that uses ‘the people to their own undoing’.

An important point to grasp is that Webster also saw herself not just as an interpreter of the past: she also saw her task as ‘educational’. In particular, looking at her own country (Britain), she wished to educate her fellow citizens in the ways that she believed the world really worked, in contrast to the mainstream ‘narrative’ they were being given in the press, in history texts and by governments. This book, and her other subsequent writings, also contained a warning about the future: it was essential to grasp the ‘real’ nature of history in order to protect Britain and its Empire from these threats in the coming years, protecting and securing ‘Christian Civilization’ in the process.

Many of these themes were on full display in a book that arguably became her most influential work of conspiracy: Secret Societies and Subversive Movements (1924). In this deluded tome, Webster claimed that it was her ‘duty’ as a historian to trace the origins of the current ‘revolutionary movement’, which was out not just to overthrow Christianity but ‘all social and moral order’. In her estimation, the tools of this grand design included Freemasonry, the Illuminati, Pan-Germanism, Socialist Revolutionary thought, and International Jewry. Indeed, the last chapter of Webster’s book was entitled ‘The Jewish Peril’. The latter theme, especially, has appealed to the anti-Semitic obsessions of the far right over the decades, and continues to do so today.

Plenty of other such writings followed during the course of the 1920s and 1930s, and – despite the apparent crushing of irrational ideology during World War Two – Webster still continued to pen the occasional article for the rightwing journal The Patriot in the immediate years after the World War, still convinced a conspiratorial stance offered the real key to unlocking both the past and present. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that Webster came to be seen by her readers and supporters as one of the leading authorities on the conspiratorial role of ‘hidden’ or secret forces at work in history and global politics.

Webster’s web of influence

Since her death in 1960, Mrs. Webster’s malign influence has been regularly detected by academic observers in the works of other conspiracy theorists and like-minded networks and lobby groups. More worryingly, while much of this material remained for many years on the margins of society, the current explosion in conspiracy theory in the early 21st century appears to suggest that the appeal of Webster-style ideas about how history works is very much on the rise again.

The first signs of this occurred in the 1990s, when Militia movements in the USA and critics of the ‘New World Order’ became increasingly vocal. The late Jim Keith, for example, alleged that ‘Black Helicopters’ spotted by the public flying over the USA were signs that UNO was plotting a ‘world government’, while others claimed that the Rothschilds or the Bilderberg Group were manipulating politics, ‘secret’ forces were ‘implanting’ microchips in people, mass brainwashing was being undertaken, and so on.

A good example of this mind-set was the work of the British conspiracy theorist David Icke (pictured), whose books The Robots’ Rebellion (1994) and its rapid follow-up And the Truth Shall Set You Free (1995) echoed and repackaged for a modern audience many of the bizarre allegations about the role of the Illuminati and other ‘secret’ forces at work in the world originally contained in Nesta Webster’s work. In And the Truth Shall Set You Free, for instance, Icke’s views on the French Revolution were strikingly similar to Webster’s. Icke wrote: ‘The French Revolution of 1789 was an Illuminati coup d’état, the methods of which have been repeated over and over…’.

Many of his subsequent books and talks have re-visited these allegations and put forward an ever more detailed and bizarre version of the plots of the ‘Brotherhood Elite’. As Icke himself likes to remind us, he has devoted the last 20 years or so to further elaborating on the ‘Grand Designs’ at work in history and across the globe today, and he and his network of sympathisers – together with plenty of other conspiracy-minded individuals – have created something of an ‘industry’ of conspiracy theories of all kinds and stripes, with many websites devoted to these ideas and numerous films and interviews on the topic available on YouTube.

A pandemic such as the recent coronavirus emergency provides conspiracy peddlers such as Icke with plenty of tempting opportunities to spread his irrational obsessions and disseminate falsehoods about public health or the machinations of ‘secret’ forces. Icke claimed in 2021, for example, that Covid-19 simply ‘doesn’t exist’ and was a typical piece of propaganda from what he termed the ‘global cult’ that wishes to control the world.

Although I do not wish to push the analogy too far, the 2020s already contain intriguing and alarming parallels with the wave of conspiratorial paranoia that gripped the 1920s. In this sense, the ghost of Nesta Webster still casts an unwelcome shadow.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was first published here in July, 2021.

Superb new issue of Richmond History journal includes article on Bertrand Russell’s childhood

Do you have a passion for local history? The latest issue of the annual and award-winning Richmond History (no.44, November, 2023), the journal of the Richmond Local History Society, has just been published and, in my estimation, it contains another fascinating range of articles, including an exploration of how the famous philosopher Bertrand Russell spent his childhood years at Pembroke Lodge in Richmond Park.

The article, written by Rachel Hirschler, explains how Bertrand Russell’s upbringing in Richmond Park had a profound and lasting effect on him.

Russell was aged three when he came to live at Pembroke Lodge, accompanied by his brother, Frank, who was seven years older than him. It became Russell’s home from 1876 until he went up to Cambridge in 1890, and it is clear from Rachel’s article that living at the Lodge was a very happy experience for him, providing him with a set of memories that remained with him for the rest of his life.

As his brother Frank was away being educated at Winchester College during term time, Russell was often a solitary child, but he found plenty of solace in nature and in the opportunities to explore and play in the 11 acres of gardens at the Lodge or in the surrounding Richmond Park. In particular, long early morning walks gave him great pleasure. Interestingly, in his later life, the famous philosopher was drawn back to his childhood home, but was extremely disappointed to find that the Lodge had been converted into a tea shop and flats for park employees.

In addition to this new perspective on the life of Bertrand Russell and his local connections, there is plenty of other material to read in the new edition of Richmond History, especially if you are interested in the history and characteristics of Richmond Park. An article by Max Lankester on Pembroke Lodge and Lady Pembroke (Elizabeth, Countess of Pembroke, who gave her name to the Lodge), throws further light on the fascinating people who have been associated with the long history of Richmond Park. Similarly, an article by Robert Wood explains to readers how ‘Bog Lodge’ in Richmond Park became ‘Holly Lodge’, which is now a Grade-II listed building. And, in a ground-breaking piece of research, John McM Moore examines the historical water sources in and around the Park.

Turning to the wider local history of the area, the new Richmond History also offers articles on, for example, Sudbrook Park in Petersham; a discussion of how the explorer George Vancouver is connected with Petersham, Kew and Richmond; a description of the Duke of Lauderdale’s library at Ham House; a very moving account of the tragic deaths of five members of one Richmond family; and an article on the response of local Richmond people to the emergence of the new German Reich in 1933. Finally, if you love visiting Kew Gardens, you can enhance your historical knowledge of the popular grounds even further by reading an article on King William’s Temple, which was built in 1837.

The new issue of Richmond History also has some very helpful detail for local historians on the latest acquisitions placed in the Local Studies collection at the Local Studies Library and Archive, based at the Old Town Hall in Richmond. The Richmond Local History Society’s journal has been judged London’s best local history journal by LAMAS (the London and Middlesex Archaeological Society) for three years running, and issue no.44 more than maintains this excellent reputation.

The Cult of Speed: Adulation of Racing Motorists in Britain during the 1920s

It has often been remarked by historians that, during the decade or so after the First World War, a number of European countries saw the growth of a cultural fascination with speed and movement, and the dynamism offered by fast machines and new inventions. In Italy, for example, a number of aeroplane pilots found themselves celebrated as the new ‘warriors’ of the air, men who had the freedom to speed across the skies. Indeed, a number of members of the Futurist art movement also sought to reflect this in their paintings.

Interestingly, the 1920s in Britain also saw its own version of this cultural pattern. Parts of the British Isles saw a growing public and newspaper fascination with speed and with breaking motorcar, motorcycle, aeroplane and speedboat records. Just as the daring adventurers of powered flight in the air found themselves increasingly the objects of a kind of cultish (and very masculine) hero worship, those who pursued adventure on the ground also found favour with an enthusiastic and adoring public.

This was especially the case with racing motorists and their attempts to secure or break ever greater speeding records, and this was often attempted at Brooklands racing track in Surrey, England, which was also one of the country’s main arenas for competitive motor-racing tournaments.

Despite complaints from some of the nearby local residents about the noise from these competitions, the Brooklands racing track saw large crowds in regular attendance, as the public became ever more beguiled with the ‘heroes’ of the world of competitive motorcar racing and the risky thrills and spills they offered.

The Welsh ‘Daredevil’

One such road racer was John Godfrey Parry-Thomas (1884-1927), a Welsh engineer who, by the mid-1920s, had become quite a cult figure in the world of motor-racing and drew regular and excitable crowds of fans at Brooklands. He was even given the nickname ‘Daredevil’ Parry-Thomas. But he was not just content with being a famous and popular driver at Brooklands. In 1926 he achieved the Land Speed record on Pendine Sands, Carmarthenshire, in Wales, a 170 m.p.h. record that stood for almost a year, until it was broken by Malcolm Campbell at the same location.

Despite his public fame, Wrexham-born Parry-Thomas was something of a loner, completed dedicated to his work and to designing and maintaining his motor-racing cars, which earned him the press moniker ‘The Welsh Wizard of the Wheel’. A bachelor, with just two alsation dogs for company, he lived in a modest small bungalow in the centre of the Brooklands motor-racing complex, a home which also doubled-up as his workshop. Here he spent many hours under the bonnet or testing or oiling his vehicles, especially his favourite car, which he had christened ‘Babs’. The car, constructed by Parry-Thomas, had become a ‘star’ in itself, equally as famous as its driver. Parry-Thomas was also a keep-fit fanatic, who kept himself in top condition for his sport.

When his Land Speed record had been broken by Malcolm Campbell, Parry-Thomas became determined to win the record back. In fact, he became so determined to do this that it quickly bordered on an obsession, such was his highly competive nature. Although he was on warm and friendly terms with Campbell, it was pretty clear to his close friends that Parry-Thomas was set on winning his speed crown back; psychologically, the ‘dare-devil’ was adamant that his reputation as the ‘King of Speed’ needed to be reinforced to his army of loyal fans.

Just a few weeks after Campbell’s achievement, Parry-Thomas was back at Pendine Sands. On 3rd March, 1927, sitting in ‘Babs’, the car he had designed himself and was so proud of, and on what commentators described as a ‘perfect day’, Parry-Thomas sped off along the Sands, seeking to regain the Land Speed record. He soon reached 170 m.p.h., but clearly needed to go even faster.

However, on his fourth attempt of the day, which was also filmed by British Pathe news cameras, disaster struck. Parry-Thomas had almost reached the far end of the course, travelling at a speed of about 170 m.p.h., when one of the driving chains on the car snapped. According to newspaper reports of the tragedy, the chain had whistled through the air and struck Parry-Thomas’s head, ‘inflicting terrible injuries’. The chain then apparently crashed ‘with tremendous force’ on to one of the car’s front wheels, smashing it right off the vehicle. Parry-Thomas was killed instantly, and the car, now out of control, did a complete circle, turned over sideways, then righted itself and burst into flames. Parry-Thomas’s body was found still sitting in the car.

The ‘Speed King‘

Speaking to the press after the tragic news had broken, Malcolm Campbell described his rival as probably the finest driver that Brooklands had ever known: Parry-Thomas had ‘lapped the track faster than anyone else had ever done’. The news was a huge blow not just to his admiring public, but also to the newspapers, who had lost a ‘heroic’ figure who they could portray as a glamorous and daring risk-taker.

The Daily Sketch newspaper, for example, reporting on the Pendine Sands crash, noted that, although Parry-Thomas was 40-years old, ‘his ‘athletic figure’ was that of a man of 30 and: ‘He always kept himself in perfect condition’.

A few days later, the same newspaper reported on the Parry-Thomas funeral in Surrey, under the headline ‘His Last Lone Ride Where He Thrilled Thousands’. The paper told its readers: ‘At the Brooklands track, where in life he fascinated hosts by his daring, Parry-Thomas went on his last ride yesterday’. The famous motorists’ body had been brought back to his Brooklands bungalow from Pendine Sands and, after the funeral service, the hearse had traversed part of the Brooklands track on its way to the burial at Old Byfleet cemetery.

The silent black-and-while British Pathe news footage of the Pendine Sands tragedy, entitled ‘The Death Drive’, was soon released to British picture-houses, and Parry-Thomas joined the mini-pantheon of interwar motor-racing personalities, whose dedication to their sport was celebrated as representing all that was spartan and special about ‘heroic’ individualism and the elements that made up national identity. Britons were portrayed as brave risk-takers and pioneers, who would explore and often push frontiers to new and ever greater lengths.

In a sense, it was an idea taken up later in the post-war concept of the ‘New Elizabethans’. Such cultural myth-making can still be detected today.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikipedia Commons)

Kingston Uni History Professor’s young adult fantasy novel wins prestigious literary competition

Professor Marisa Linton, who is Professor Emerita in History, based in the department of Humanities at Kingston University, has won the prestigious Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition for 2023. Seven manuscripts were shortlisted, and Marisa’s exciting new young adult fantasy novel, The Pouka King – as the 2023 winner – will now be published by Chicken House.

The Times/Chicken House Competition judging panel consisted of chairman and publisher Barry Cunningham, The Times reporter and children’s book critic Lucy Bannerman, co-Head of Lime Picture’s Kids and Family Tim Compton, agent Davinia Andrew-Lynch, author Frances Hardinge, scout and festival organiser Jane Churchill, Bounce sales rep CJ Gajjar, and Waterstones Children’s team campaigner Lucy Jakes.

Interestingly, the Times/Chicken House Children’s Fiction Competition is one of the most long-lasting publishing initiatives that Chicken House has done in terms of getting people interested in their new titles overseas. In fact, Chicken House, as a company, has more than demonstrated how a small, creative publishing team based in England can make an impact on an international scale. Chair Barry Cunningham has commented: ‘Can we make a difference to children’s reading? Of course we can: by continuing to choose books we truly believe in and talking about them wherever we go! Stories still remain the most important currency of our lives’.

Chicken House books have found huge popularity with children, parents, teachers and librarians around the world, and has won praise from famous authors such as Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials. According to the industry publication the Bookseller, the company has garnered itself a reputation ‘for finding the quirky and original’.

Marisa, whose academic career as a historian has led to her becoming one of the UK’s leading experts on the French Revolution (an upcoming project is the editing of A Cambridge Companion to the French Revolution for Cambridge University Press), said that fiction writing ‘is something I have always wanted to do’. Her winning novel, The Pouka King, is a supernatural story which mixes Celtic folklore with a rural setting and some teenage protagonists, and will undoubtedly be very popular with teenage and other readers. Well done, Marisa.

Prof Marisa Linton

Responses to ‘Windrush generation’ newcomers in Kingston-on-Thames and its surrounding areas during the 1950s

Black History Month in 2023 included the 75th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks, London, in 1948. The now-famous ship brought some of the first black migrants to the capital in search of work after the end of World War Two.

As more people from the West Indies responded to the British government’s campaign to fill urgent vacancies in London’s economy, and members of the ‘Windrush generation’ began to appear in workplaces in parts of south-west London, there was a growing awareness of the need to overcome local suspicion of ‘outsiders’.

Various citizens and local organisations on Kingston-on-Thames and nearby districts became keen to help maintain good ‘race relations’ (as they were then called) and make newcomers to the area feel welcome and wanted.

The early 1950s

Churches and voluntary groups took the lead in encouraging greater tolerance and understanding of ‘foreign’ cultures. In July, 1953, for example, about 70 guests from 14 countries were among a company of 130 who attended an international party in Kingston Congregational Church hall. Attendees included people from the British Dominions, Africa, India and the West Indies. Similarly, in January, 1954, the local Surrey Comet newspaper reported that a Club For All Nationalities was being set up locally, sponsored by the Teddington Rotary Club and open to anybody from overseas: ‘The idea is to create relationship and make people from other countries feel at home’, explained Mr. A.E. Pakes, chair of the Rotary Club’s international service committee. The new Club in Teddington was inaugurated in March, 1954, and joined similar clubs operating in Surbiton and Wimbledon.

Black students were also encouraged by their college hosts to describe to the local Kingston community some of the background context which would help the Borough’s residents better understand why migrants were coming to Britain to take up work and to escape some of the poverty and difficulties of life experienced in the West Indies. In February, 1954, for example, the pleasures and problems of their island homes in the West Indies were described by two young women to Kingston’s branch of the Soroptimists, a volunteer movement out to transform the lives of women and girls, including those from abroad.

At a meeting held at the popular Zeeta Cafe in Kingston, Mrs. Rosita Scott, of Barbados, and Miss H. Charles, of Grenada, who were both students at Hillcroft College in Surbiton, explained to the audience the economic and social problems of their islands. Mrs. Scott said that the economy of Barbados very much depended upon sugar, its main crop, but employment could be precarious and the pay was low. Unemployment, poor housing and a low standard of living gave younger workers an incentive to leave Barbados. Most of the problems, she said, could be attributed to the very dense population of the island. Echoing this, her co-speaker Miss Charles said that, while Grenada was the ‘spice island’ of the West Indies, its economic and social problems were similar to those in Barbados.

Nevertheless, some suspicion and ambivalence, and occasional outright hostility, towards black workers could still be detected locally. Evidence of overt and covert ‘colour bars’ can be detected. In March, 1953, the Surrey Comet carried a letter penned by a writer in Kingston entitled ‘His colour was the bar’, which revealed that, late one Thursday evening, a West African man had rung the correspondent’s door bell and asked for shelter for the night: ‘Although the man had secured a job in Surbiton and was not without money, he had been quite unable to rent a room or get a bed simply because of his colour’. The man had been given a list of 14 recommended addresses by the police and from other sources, ‘but at each he had been abruptly turned away, at some, being told the reason quite frankly’.

In August, 1954, the Comet also carried some coverage of what it called a ‘Colour Bar on Ambulance Jobs’. Mr. B. Journeaux, secretary of the National Ambulance Services Association (an unofficial trade union), had sent to local members of Middlesex County Council a circular claiming that ‘Ambulance men do not want their ranks infiltrated by women or coloured immigrants to whom any conditions are acceptable’. He further alleged: ‘The public as a whole expects white ambulance staffs and we are with them’. Responding to the Surrey Comet‘s coverage on behalf of the Council, Alderman W.R.M. Chambers, instead of dismissing such racist and sexist attitudes, strongly denied that the County Council was considering employing ‘coloured men’ in the Ambulance Service, and he criticised the Ambulance Services Association for spreading ‘a series of calumnies’ (false statements). However, he added that ‘if a coloured man applied for a position he would be considered on his merits’.

Neverthelss, on balance, ‘race relations’ remained relatively harmonious in Kingston and the surrounding area, undoubtedly aided by a booming economy. In fact, by the mid-1950s, there were major shortages of people to fill the numerous vacancies at the local ‘Labour Exchanges’, and this created good opportunities for black workers newly arrived from the West Indies.

From 1954 onwards, the government’s Ministry of Labour remained keen to help meet such demand to fill vacancies by enabling 9,000 immigrants per year to leave the West Indies for Britain, and this included encouragng more black migrants in London to work or settle in the outer suburbs. In particular, there were evident needs for people to fill local vacancies in the National Health Service (NHS) as nurses or porters, and on public transport as bus drivers and conductors. There was also an acute shortage of workers in local authority refuse collection services, and a number of black applicants were taken on to undertake this back-breaking and unskilled work, which was often poorly paid.

In May, 1955, when it posed the question ‘Too Many Coloured Workers?’, and wondered whether ‘problems’ might arise as a result of what it called ‘the influx of cloured workers from Jamaica’, the Kingston and District Employment Committee struck an optimistic note. The Committee stated that, althought the ‘influx’ was causing ‘grave concern to many people and organisations’, the immigrants had been ‘absorbed into employment and the life of the community with much less difficulty than might have been expected’. The Committee’s secretary, Mr. P.R. Smith, said there were ‘no coloured workers unemployed at any of the exchanges in the committee’s area’, and the Committee ‘sought to get employers to engage coloured workers in order to ease the manpower shortage’.

The mid-1950s

One of the most determined efforts to demonstrate how Kingston-on-Thames was a place of racial tolerance and progress came in 1955 from the town’s Mayor, Councillor Mrs. Gladys Picton (who, coincidentally, shared her surname with that of Kingston’s famous 18th century black resident Cesar Picton). In August, 1955, Councillor Picton hosted a visit from the Mayor of Kingston in Jamaica, Councillor G.P. McFarlane, and entertained him at the Kingston Guildhall. The Jamaican Mayor was shown the Borough’s regalia in the Guildhall conference room and was able to learn about the Borough’s ancient charters.

This visit was designed to make stronger some links between the two towns which had been built up over several years through correspondence between the two Mayors. Councillor McFrarlane told the Surrey Comet: ‘We are charmed by the beauty of your little town. We came through all the hustle and bustle of London, but when we saw Kingston we thought that if we had to live in England this is where we should like to live’.

Significantly, in January, 1958, it was revealed that Councillor Mrs. Gladys Picton had received recognition for her work to forge strong ties between the two Kingstons when, on a special visit to Kingston in Jamaica in December, 1955, she was awarded the freedom of the Island’s capital. It was conferred upon her during a visit to the celebrations of ‘Jamaica 300’, which marked the tercentenary of the Island’s association with Britain. Only two other people had been given this special honour by Kingston in Jamaica: Princess Margaret and Sir Winston Churchill.

On her return to Kingston-on-Thames, Councillor Picton told the Surrey Comet that, in her speeches in Jamaica, she had spoken of the large numbers of Jamaicans who were coming to Britain: ‘I tried to impress on them the friendly attitude we felt towards them and that we could help them all we could’. She added: ‘There are all shades of colour among Jamaicans and I was glad to tell them that in our country we have no feeling against colour’.

The late 1950s

By the late 1950s, however, this atmostphere of local tolerance and warmth towards members of the Windrush generation was increasingly being challenged by ugly graffiti stunts carried out by extreme far right activists in the area, including Sir Oswald Mosley’s neo-fascists, and a rival group called the League of Empire Loyalists. Fortunately, Kingston’s Magistrates used the full force of the Law Courts to stamp out such racist activities. In 1958, for example, when a slogan 30 yards long and painted in letters three feet high appeared on a wall in Acacia Road in Malden, proclaiming ‘Empire Loyalists Say Stop Coloured Immigration’, Kingston County Magistrates found three members of the League guilty and imposed large fines.

Despite such attempts to stir up racial tension, these groups made very little headway in Kingston and nearby districts. Indeed, the available historical evidence from the decade suggests that, as the 1950s drew to a close, most members of the local black community had managed to find stable employment in the area and, in some cases, had settled into local rented accomodation to raise families. There appeared to very few problems between black and white families. A number of black residents had also managed to enter the teaching profession or offer their services to the local churches. In February, 1959, for example, it was reported that Mr. Edmund Dale, a Jamaican teacher who was teaching in London, would preach a sermon at Thames Ditton Congregational Church. He was one of a party of 25 overseas visitors to the area, a party who also paid a visit to Hampton Court and engaged socially with local young people. Some of the party were so impressed with the welcome they received that they decided to apply to stay on in Britain.

It was a further sign of how far the Windrush generation and members of the local black community had been successful at gaining broad tolerance and acceptance by Kingston’s population.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Humanites Lecturer at Kingston University

Note: A shorter version of the above blog was published on the main Kingston University website on 31st October, 2023.

Weaponising the Past: The British extreme right’s concept of history

From Alfred the Great to Wellington, via Nelson to Churchill, and from Francis Drake to Scott of the Antarctic, the extreme right in Britain have regularly sought to appropriate individuals who they claim were the ‘greatest’ Britons of the past. The original founder of the British National Party, John Tyndall (1934-2005), for example (pictured), espousing an ill-informed and seriously flawed reading of the past, regularly complained about ‘liberal’ neglect of Britain’s ‘great heroes’.

As a historian working on both the interwar fascist and contemporary far right, I have become more and more aware of how the myths and realities of past events, especially those associated with the Second World War, can be used and abused by people with an ideological agenda, especially members of the parties of the extreme right.

This has been particularly the case, for example, with the ‘Battle of Britain’, a highly selective version of which, rather shockingly, has appeared in recent years in some British far right propagandistic literature in their desperate attempts to make dubious political claims about the nature of UK society today. In fact, it is important to realise that the extreme right has always been alive to the usefulness of ‘history’ and other forms of culture for ideological purposes.

This use (and blatant abuse) of history is one of the themes I explored in a chapter I contributed to an edited collection published back in 2015 by Routledge: Cultures of Post-War British Fascism, edited by Nigel Copsey and John E. Richardson. Many of the points I made back then remain just as relevant today.

In my essay for the study, in a chapter entitled History and cultural heritage: the far right and the Battle for Britain, I explored and analysed the British far right’s general ideological landscape in the post-1945 period and up to the present, and the disturbing ways in which a variety of key extreme right writers and activists in this country have selectively appropriated ‘history’ and the past; ideas about culture, heritage, and tradition have regularly been utilized to try to give intellectual gravitas to some markedly intolerant and ugly ideas.

‘Philosophies’ about history

First, this has taken the form of grand, sweeping ‘philosophies’ about history, where extreme right ideologues have made claims about what they see as the profound underlying forces apparently at work in society and the world, both in the past and present.

Second, ‘history’ has also been used as part of the extreme right’s configuration of ideas and policies employed for ‘battles’ in the national political arena i.e. they have often sought to portray themselves as defenders of the country’s indigenous national traditions and ‘unique’ cultural heritage, pointing to past ‘great’ heroes who were supposedly doing the same thing, such as Alfred the Great or Hereward the Wake. A major theme has often been the idea of defending Britain from ‘invasion’. In 1998, for example, the British National Party’s Spearhead magazine referred to this self-appointed role in rather grandiose terms as ‘the battle to reclaim Britain’.

Admiral Domvile’s obsessions 

Interestingly, one important figure whose work was listed in BNP book sales lists, and who was discussed at one point in my chapter, was a former British Navy Admiral who had local Kingston and Richmond connections, Sir Barry Domvile (1878-1971). Domvile (pictured), who lived in a large house on the Roehampton Vale side of Kingston Hill, was one of the Governors of the Star and Garter Home for Ex-Servicemen in Richmond in the interwar period. Described by the Security Service, MI5, as ‘fanatically anti-Jewish’, Domvile had run a secretive pro-Nazi organisation called ‘The Link’, and had also upset people in the Star and Garter Home by openly predicting that Hitler was ‘going to win the war’ and would soon be in the country, but there was ‘no reason to worry about it’.

In the postwar period, Domvile re-emerged as a leading conspiracy theorist, far right ‘historian’, and early ‘historical revisionist’, claiming that the ‘Judeao-Masonic combination’ had, ‘for several centuries’, been behind most of the wars and revolutionary movements in Europe. His ideas about history and the ‘secret forces’ at work behind it are still being pedalled by the far right today.

Weaponizing the ‘Battle for Britain’

Returning back to the theme of the ‘Battle for Britain’, I also demonstrated in my chapter how the appropriation of ‘historic’ figures, glossy imagery and other historical iconography in their propagandistic literature has not always gone to plan for the far right. In 2009, for example, when the British National Party (BNP) used the famous wartime song ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ by Vera Lynn on one of its CD music compilations of ‘historic’ and ‘patriotic’ songs (without permission), there was understandable outrage on the part of veterans and from the singer herself.

Similarly, when the BNP employed images of Sir Winston Churchill and a Battle of Britain Spitfire fighter plane in European Election campaign leaflets (billed as ‘The NEW Battle for Britain’), and complained loudly about Britain being invaded and ‘taken over’ by ‘East European’ migrants, commentators and historians were able to point to the evident historical errors and vulgar distortions this entailed, including the fact that the Spitfire used in BNP literature was actually part of the Free Polish contingent of the armed forces in Britain, piloted by a brave Pole.

While fascists and the extreme right have been very keen to cannibalise and ‘politicise’ the past for current-day purposes, they have certainly not been good historians by any stretch of the imagination. When the UK held events to commemorate ‘VE’ (‘Victory in Europe’) Day and other events associated with the end of the Second World War, for example, the extreme right again sought to tap into and exploit those memories and events for their own political purposes (see photo). Veterans, however, including former soldiers who had landed on the beaches at Normandy, and who had later participated in the liberation of the Nazi Death Camps, pointed out that people such as the BNP leader Nick Griffin had a record of Holocaust Denial, and had sought to question and challenge events that veterans had actually seen with their own eyes.

Weaponizing ‘heritage’ and tradition

Another important facet of the extreme right’s attempts to construct an alternative historically-informed culture over the years has been to emphasise the role of heritage and tradition in the British story. One of the big obsessions of the extreme right’s ideologues has thus been with the supposed need to defend ‘traditional’ and ‘real’ culture from ‘false’ liberal versions of the past. The extreme right’s version of what has constituted ‘traditional’ history has mainly tended to be drawn from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, especially from military history and the ‘heroic’ history of the nation at war. However, at times, extreme right ideologues have also selected themes with much longer historical pedigrees that go, in some cases, right back to ancient classical times. Greek or Roman warriors have been held up as ‘heroic’ and pure figures to be emulated for their discipline and valour.

Similarly, the BNP liked to present an image of themselves as ‘crusaders’, defending the country from outside hordes, a message evidently designed to play upon contemporary fears of Islam. One BNP scribe, writing in 2000, looked back at Mediaeval England and argued that, far from being a time of backwardness and tyranny, the Middle Ages was something of a ‘Golden Age’ for people, a ‘Merrie England’ where the inhabitants had real freedom. 

Presenting the past today

More recently, relatively new extreme right parties have continued to appropriate history and use it for ideological and explicitly propagandistic purposes. A good example has been the ‘British Freedom Party’ (BFP), which has included former BNP leader Nick Griffin among its supporters and writers. The BFP has been especially keen to present highly selective versions of Britain’s past in its publications.

In its newspaper The Britannia, for example, which uses an image of Britannia and a lion on its masthead, the BFP has very much sought to tap into the nostalgia of potential supporters for some kind of ‘golden’ past. In 2020 the BFP claimed: ‘Our traditionalist approach means we reject the current individualistic culture… We are dedicated to ensuring that the freedoms, secured by the bloodshed of our heroes, are retained at all costs’.

The idea is regularly emphasised that mainstream experts have conspired to ‘control’ traditional knowledge and to deny ordinary citizens access to their own past. This has led to the BFP’s newspaper carrying large posters of the late Queen Elizabeth and to highly questionable articles asserting the Establishment is in the hands of a ‘liberal’ network that distorts and censors historical knowledge. According to Britannia, for example, there has been a ‘hidden history’ of White slavery which has not been taught in our schools, and the BBC and the rest of the media have been ‘supressing nationalist voices’.

Above all, the BFP is, in many ways, merely following the strategy pursued by various extreme right ideologues and parties in Britain over the decades, where ‘history’ is utilized to stir up anger and to promote the idea that history and the past is an arena or ‘battlefield’ where ‘nationalists’ must fight to preserve their race and culture from agenda-driven ‘enemies’.

As professional historians, good scholars, and serious students of the past will all know, we should remain critically aware of how history and culture is often open to abuse by such extremists. It is all the more reason why we should study the past with utmost care and attention, so that we can educate people about the realities of their history rather than see them fall victim to irrational untruths and ill-informed conspiracy theories.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was first published here in 2015.

 

Mobilising British Housewives in the 1920s: The case of Mrs. Dorothy Peel and the Profiteers

Accusations of ‘profiteering’ by retailers and business traders became a regular and controversial theme on the Home Front in Britain during the Great War, when rationing made it a near daily challenge for many mothers and wives to feed their families adequately. Allegations that certain retailers were being dishonest and were heartlessly exploiting shoppers were also linked to stereotypes about national identity. It was not ‘British’ or ‘fair’ or even ‘cricket’ for traders to engage in such behaviour, especially during a time of national emergency.

But what is quite striking about this is the extent to which such allegations about profiteering and shady practices by various small shopkeepers regularly continued during the immediate post-1918 peacetime years. In fact, such patterns of protest can be periodically detected throughout the 1920s.

Mrs. C.S. Peel

The 1920s were also, of course, a decade of greater women’s activism in Britain, and middle-class women in particular were determined to find a critical ‘voice’ on what they saw as the great issues of the day, including the lingering perception that ‘profiteering’ was still rampant across society. Significantly, there were a number of middle-class pressure groups formed by women at both national and local levels to protect what they saw as the importance of the family unit and to fight back against the evils of ‘profiteering’. Some of these groups have received close academic attention and scholarly research, while others remain less familiar to historians and are still relatively under-researched.

One such group arguably in need of more scholarly scrutiny was the British Housewives’ Association, founded in March, 1926, by Mrs. C.S. Peel, who became its chair and, it seems, its main source of ideas and policies. The Association was concerned with the price and handling of food, and also with the building of ‘well-planned’ homes. Indeed, in the eyes of Mrs. Peel, the object of the Association was ‘to wage a war on profiteers and to help in all matters appertaining to the home’. According to one newspaper at the time, the housewives of Britain were banding together to ‘check profiteering, defeat the food tricksters, and insist on clean food’, and the new Housewives’ Association would be ‘a new and powerful weapon for fighting the high price brigade of food traders’. The new Association would also be ‘non-political’.

Members of the committee of the Association included, among others, Gertrude Best, formerly the assistant Matron of St. Thomas’s Hospital, Mrs. Leslie Pyke, and Dame Maud McCarthy. But much of the leadership drive and energy undoubtedly came from Mrs. Peel.

Who was Mrs. Peel?

The founder of the British Housewives’ Association had an interesting background. Constance Dorothy Evelyn Peel (1868-1934) came from Herefordshire and, aged 17, had moved to Folkstone. She later moved to Twickenham, where she started a career in journalism, and married an electrical engineer, Charles Steers Peel, in 1894. Writing under the name of ‘Mrs. C.S. Peel’, she began to specialise in ways of easing household costs, and her first book, The New Home (1898), described how she had started a household on modest financial means. Over the next few years, she edited journals such as Hearth and Home, and also published a series of popular cookery books.

In fact, during the First World War, she had been something of a ‘celebrity’, and contributed regularly to the press as a writer on all subjects concerned with the affairs of the home, especially food and how to feed the family in a cheap but still nutritious way.

On food, for example, she advocated the need to economise in cooking, making creative use of war ration cooking ingredients, and advised readers on how to create special ‘Victory’ recipes. In fact, she received an O.B.E. as one of the three women appointed as advisers to the government’s Food Ministry.

In 1918, she also became editor of the women’s page of the Daily Mail, a position she held until 1920. And during the early 1920s, despite some ill-health, she continued to work tirelessly to improve the domestic lives of all women, whether working-class or middle-class, advocating the need for strong family units, upstanding morals, and decent housing for all. Interestingly, some of this emphasis on unity and ‘classlessness’ can be seen in her book A Year in Public Life (1919), in which she claimed that the War had brought people together in a new way: ‘Women of all classes have been brought together – together they must remain, gaining ever greater Knowledge and a greater sympathy for each other’ (p.296).

Housewives in Action

On Wednesday, March 24th, 1926, the newly-formed British Houswives’ Association held its official foundation event and first public meeting at Caxton Hall, Westminster, in central London. Presiding at the meeting was Mrs. Beatrice Drapper, who was presented as the Housewives’ champion on the nation’s Food Council. One week before the Caxton Hall meeting, Mrs. Drapper had told the press that the main object of the new Association was to teach housewives to ‘protect themselves’. She explained: ‘We hope to form branches in every borough, so that women throughout the country can keep in touch with each other and provide an effective check on the profiteer’. Drapper added: ‘By keeping the Association non-political we hope to be able to bring in a number of women who could do much to help, but who have been debarred from joining any associations in the past because of the political element’.

The Caxton Hall meeting was presented in news reports as ‘mobilising’ women who were taking up arms ‘in the war on profiteers’, and the meeting’s key slogan and message to women was ‘Protect Yourselves’. The attendees at the meeting drew up a plan of campaign’ under the ‘generalship’ of Mrs. C.S. Peel, who had become chair of the Association. Peel told the meeting: ‘It is possible for a large union of women if necessary to apply the power of the boycott’. She added: ‘It has been done in other countries and it can be done here’. Peel also emphasised that ‘honest’ traders had no need to fear the Association and, indeed, ‘should welcome it’.

A number of campaign ideas were put forward at the meeting by Peel and others. These included drawing up ‘white lists’ of bakers who sold bread the right way; distribution of leaflets theatening concerted action if ‘abuses’ were not remedied; and the appoinment of investigators to ‘protect housewives against dishonest traders’. It was also suggested that Members of Parliament and Councillors on local authorities should be canvassed to ‘press for food reform’.

Although the Association was good at creating publicity, and Mrs. Peel in particular was adept at making use of her celebrity reputation to further push the organisation’s agenda, it is difficult to measure the extent to which the Association had any real long-term impact. Although it continued for a while afterwards, it seems that it found it difficult to compete with the arrival and growth of various other women’s organisations in the 1920s, all of them eager to build upon the momentum created by the extension of the voting franchise in 1918 and again in 1928.

Moreover, it would appear that, despite the populist message against profiteering and ‘tricksters’, Mrs. Peel and her Association’s rather conservative core doctrine was much less appealing to new female voters than she had anticipated. The new younger female voters appeared less interested in themes associated with the War years, and the idea of settled domestic bliss seemed rather old-fashioned and suffocating. Exciting new possibilities beckoned instead. This was now the age of the ‘Flappers’ and a new hedonism.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was published here in October, 2022.

Rejoice but Mourn: Responses in Kingston-on-Thames to news of the Armistice in 1918

On Remembrance Day, as communities across Britain hold poppy day events and commemorate the many sacrifices made in the name of the defence of liberty, it is worth looking back on how the nation breathed a huge collective sigh of relief when news broke in 1918 that the Great War was over.

The end of the First World War brought great joy to many people in cities, towns, villages and numerous other communities across the British Isles, but at the same time there was also sadness and some poignant scenes for the thousands who had lost loved ones and close family members in the brutal conflict.

Events in Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey

How did the people of Kingston-on-Thames and district respond to the news that an Armistice had been signed on November 11th, 1918? As we commemorate the end of the ‘Great War’, it is interesting to look back at the coverage of the Armistice offered by the local Surrey Comet newspaper in Kingston-on-Thames, which was the town’s main source of news at the time, and explore the details the paper gave to its readers about the events of that special Monday.

As the nation entered into the early days of the new month of November, 1918, the Surrey Comet had noted how the ‘rhythm’ of the war at the front appeared to be changing, but the paper also seemed to sense the sheer exhaustion now felt by local people at home. In an editorial in the November 2nd edition, entitled ‘A Month’s Victories’, the paper had pointed to the ‘tremendously dramatic events’ that were transpiring in the war zones, events which had left people ‘nearly breathless with interest; and yet, it must be added, that never did a great people who have waged war for upwards of four years, and in their hearts intensely desire peace, appear to be so little moved and exulted by it all’. The paper argued victory was in sight, but there could be no relaxation of effort.

The Surrey Comet’s coverage of Monday, November 11th, 1918 (the day of the Armistice), was published on Wednesday, November 13th, in its mid-week edition, and the sense of relief at the dramatic news about the Armistice was palpable. The mid-week edition included an editorial which proclaimed: ‘The people of our country and Empire can lift up their hearts today, for the most awful war in the world’s history has come to a close…’.

A triumphalist tone

Reflecting on the previous four years, a note of triumphalism could be detected in the Comet’s stance; the paper’s editorial argued that Germany ‘had listened to false prophets who declared her people to be the Blonde Race destined to rule the world; and in pursuit of the world ambitions which thus infected the blood, has met the fate she so justly deserved’. The editorial added: ‘Marching through blood, rapine, lust and murder, she has over-reached herself and now tastes the galling bitterness of humiliation and defeat’. The Comet then praised ‘the dauntless valour and self-sacrifice’ of Naval and Military forces: ‘The Mighty Dead will live ever in the Nation’s memory…’.

On the next page, under the heading ‘Victory At Last!’, the paper then offered the Comet’s readers some fascinating detail on how the news of the Armistice was received in Kingston and the surrounding area. According to the paper, November 11th was ‘a day that dawned with new-found hope for a European peace…’.

Monday was a ‘a day of national rejoicing’, and within a few minutes of the confirmation of the official news, ‘Kingston and the surrounding neighbourhood presented quite a blaze of bunting. Flags appeared as if by magic’. Flags were put out on all public buildings in the town, and: ‘Cottage and mansion vied with each other in making the best show’, while there was also a ‘tremendous run on all the available stocks of flags at the shops’.

Soon the streets ‘became thronged with people’, who were ‘bent on making holiday’. The bells of All Saint’s Church in Kingston ‘rang out merry peals, and everyone was radiant with smiles. Rich and poor rubbed shoulders with one another in the crowds which surged through the streets…’.

Interestingly, the Comet revealed that a number of operatives from Sopwith’s Aviation factory (which was a large wartime employer in the town), who ‘had downed tools in ebullient glee when the glad tidings were received’, then passed through the streets in a motor-van, with a ‘conspicuous figure’ decorating the van – an effigy of the German Kaiser.

Sorrow and Mourning

Simultaneously, however, the Surrey Comet’s report of the events of that day also recognised that ‘it was not all rejoicing. There was a ghost at the feast. The mourning attire and the sad, set faces of many women told their own sorrowful stories, and the hearts of all who are near and dear to them went out in deep sympathy to those who have experienced the tragedy of the war in its bitterest form by being robbed of their loved ones’.

During the afternoon of November 11th, the rain set in. In the words of the Comet: ‘It was a nasty drizzle which clung to one’s clothes, but it failed to damp the ardour of the revellers, although it appreciably thinned their ranks’. Indeed, as darkness fell, many people in the town and district apparently went home, ‘preferring the comfort of their homes to the damp streets…’.

Yet, the next day (Tuesday) saw the rejoicing continue. A prominent lead was given by the employees of the Sopwith Aviation Works again, who had been given a holiday until Wednesday.

As the Surrey Comet described it: ‘A long procession was formed of motor-lorries and motor-cars crammed with men and women, with a considerable number on foot bringing up the rear’. Moreover, the ‘foremost lorry’ in the procession carried effigies of ‘the butcher of Berlin’ (the Kaiser) and his eldest son, both adorned with German Iron Crosses. Led by a big drum, with bugles blaring and flags flying from every car, the procession made its way slowly through the streets of Kingston, ‘and was greeted everywhere with vociferous cheering’.

In Kingston Market Place, in the heart of the town, the ‘processionists’ were joined by an Army motor-lorry, ‘crowded with men in Khaki’, and the effigies of the Kaiser and his son were then burnt ‘amidst tumultuous cheering’. Significantly, the Surrey Comet also noted that Kingston Barracks (near Richmond Park), the depot of the East Surrey Regiment which had trained and provided so many local men for military service in France and Belgium, also saw ‘lusty cheering’ and ‘vociferous expression of satisfaction at the cessation of hostilities’.

It was clear that, for some soldiers, sheer relief at the end of the conflict was more important than some of the triumphalism of their comrades.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(All images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: This is an updated version of a blog first published here on 11th November, 2018.

The ‘Fourth Reich’? The continuing appeal of conspiracy theories about Hitler and the Nazis

I was recently approached by a journalist who was interested in my thoughts about the discovery of the wreck of a German U-Boat submarine off the coast of Argentina, and claims by conspiracy theorists that it had transported Hitler to South America so that he could construct a ‘Fourth Reich’. I immediately debunked the claims.

The idea of a ‘Fourth Reich’ is a regular theme in certain strands of conspiracy theory. A diverse but notable number of conspiratorial-minded theorists remain desperately keen to persuade us that, after the collapse of the German Third Reich, the Nazis who escaped justice in Europe (including even Hitler himself), and who ended up in living new lives in South America and elsewhere, invested their time and resources in a project to construct a Fourth Reich to resurrect National Socialism.

It’s a truly bizarre idea, but is a claim that refuses to die, and has taken on even greater currency since the emergence of the internet in the mid-1990s, which has become an invaluable tool for conspiracists to disseminate such fraudulent versions of history. There are now numerous websites pushing these ideas, claiming they have ‘incontrovertable’ evidence that Hitler ‘escaped’ Berlin, or the Nazis built the first flying saucers, or that today’s Nazis are planning for the ‘big day’ when a clone of the Fuhrer will make a dramatic appearance on the global stage.

In 2019 Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s fascinating book The Fourth Reich traced the history and nature of this conspiratorial theme in popular culture since 1945 and up to the present-day. As he pointed out, ever since the collapse of the ‘Thousand Year’ Third Reich, big anxieties have persisted about Nazism’s possible revival in a ‘Fourth Reich’.

More recently, the historian Richard Evans has penned the excellent book The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination (2020). In this important study, Evans stated the need to expose the ‘fantasies and fictions, fabrications and falsifications’ of conspiracists concerning the Third Reich, including the so-called ‘escape’ of Hitler in 1945.

Hitler as Conspiracist

The Nazi leader himself was, of course, a notorious conspiracy theorist and made use of conspiratorial themes in his extreme anti-Semitism. This included utilisation of the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which, Hitler claimed, exposed the Jews’ ‘ultimate final aims’. The Nazi regime even added the Protocols to the German national school curriculum in 1933.

Some conspiracy theorists have claimed that Hitler was also interested in ‘special powers’ and may have dabbled with the ideas of the occult. This has been a regular source of fascination for writers of popular ‘pulp’ history; when I was putting together a module for students on the nature of conspiracy theory, and trawled the field of publications on this, I was especially struck at the number of books that have sought to exploit this in a highly sensationalist way: books such as Satan and Swastika by Francis King and Hitler and the Age of Horus to give just two examples.

Another strand of conspiracy theory about leading Nazis has been some pretty wild speculation about Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who suddenly flew to Britain in 1941 on a probable ‘peace’ mission (or so he thought). Conspiracy-minded ‘researchers’ have raised a whole series of questions about the Hess affair, ranging from claims that he had secret links with Nazi sympathisers in the British Establishment, to suggestions that he had fallen into a special ‘trap’ mounted by British Intelligence using advice from astrologers or the infamous English occultist Aleister Crowley.

Some conspiracists assert that the Hess who parachuted into Scotland in 1941 was not the’ real’ Hess, but a ‘double’. In addition, there has been a reoccuring claim that the Hess imprisoned in Spandau by the Allies was not the genuine Hess, or that he did not really commit suicide in Spandau but was ‘murdered’ so that certain embarrassing secrets he held about the wartime Allies would remain completely secret.

Fourth Reich racists

Another regular strand in conspiracy theory is the claim that ‘secret’ Nazi super-technologies will be utilised by those members of the Aryan race who are constructing or preparing the ‘Fourth Reich’. There is a tediously persistent claim that the Nazis invented Flying Saucers in World War Two, and that the wave of sightings of UFOs (Unidentified Flying Objects) that came in the late 1940s and 1950s were actually examples of surviving Nazis testing such technologies, in readiness for the ressurrection of Nazism.

Fairly typical of this kind of assertion came in the writings of the Chilean neo-Nazi Miguel Serrano (1917-2009), an exponent of so-called ‘Esoteric Hitlerism’. Serrano claimed that a ‘super-race’ (of extraterrestrial origin) had hidden the escaped Hitler in the Antarctic, where the Fuhrer was suposedly planning a ‘Fourth Reich’, with new super-weapons and fleets of spacecraft as part of this project.

It was all utter nonsense, of course, but had a certain appeal to those of an extreme rightwing tendency who loved to fantasise about a new Reich and a new racial utopia ‘saving’ the world.

Moreover, such themes have seeped into popular culture in a big way: it is now common to see new books or TV documentaries devoted to the idea of ‘Nazi UFOs’, and to claims that there is physical evidence dotted across Europe of secret Nazi ‘testing’ centres, where flying saucers, nuclear techonologies and other ‘advanced’ inventions were tried out, and then such knowledge was passed into the hands of eager post-war neo-Nazi networks.

Hitler Lives!

More recently, the ‘Hitler did not die’ strand of conspiracy theory has taken on fresh momentum due to the work of the controversial TV journalist and producer of corporate videos Gerrard Williams. His 2011 book Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler, written in partnership with Simon Dunstan, seemed to capture the imagination of many people who are susceptible to ‘alternative’ history or ‘faction’.

Unfortunately, what gave added momentum to such absurd material was the decision of the History cable TV channel to produce three and a half series of a show entitled Hunting Hitler, which commenced in 2018. The programme seemed to persuade an alarming number of viewers that they had not been given the ‘real facts’ about Hitler, that there had been a ‘cover-up’, and that he had indeed escaped Berlin 1945 and made it to South America by plane and submarine.

Presented in a documentary-style format, with plenty of dramatic mood music and hand-held camera shots, the series followed a special ‘team’ of experts (including Gerrard Williams himself) as they followed up clues and ‘evidence’ about the escape route taken by Hitler and other Nazis out of Europe. The show purported to find evidence that Hitler and his entourage had indeed arrived in South America and had set about building the foundations of a Fourth Reich from the safety of bunkers or hidden houses in secluded areas of the jungle.

From a professional historian’s perspective, it is depressing how many times one now comes across people who appear to have been influenced by such TV programmes and have accepted the fraudulent claims that form the core of such material.

Perhaps the last word should go to Richard J. Evans again, who notes that the current proliferation and, in some cases, revival of conspiracy theories involving Hitler ‘is part of a much wider trend, in which a number of influences have come together to blur the boundaries between truth and fiction…’. Conspiracy theorists seek to present alternative ‘truths’, with quasi-evidential support to back up their claims.

For academic historians, as Evans observes, working out what really happened in history is difficult: it requires a great deal of hard work. But in an age like our own, where conspiracy theorists seek to challenge ‘mainstream’ or ‘traditionalist’ history, it remains very important, therefore, to establish what is true and what is false ‘by painstaking research’ by scholars.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge specialises in the study of fascism and the far right

(Images: Wikipedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was published here in November, 2021.

History restored: How new technology recreated JFK’s ‘unspoken speech’ from 1963

Sixty years ago, in November, 1963, John F. Kennedy (‘JFK’) was tragically assassinated in Dallas, an event which shocked not just the USA but the entire world. Many people had seemingly invested their hopes and dreams in the new youthful president, and suddenly that optimism had been cruelly crushed.

I have given lectures on the nature of U.S. foreign policy during the all-too brief presidency of Kennedy, who was in the White House 1961-63. I remain especially interested in the nature of his foreign policy, and how he viewed the wider world. Kennedy, of course, was particularly skilled at oratory, and the 35th president of the USA arguably left us with some of the most memorable speeches ever made by an American leader during the course of the late 20th century.

Interestingly, back in 2018, it was revealed that, thanks to an impressive breakthrough using modern technology, scholars of American history were now able to hear the final speech of president J.F. Kennedy, an address he was due to make in Dallas on November 22nd, 1963, had he not been brutally assassinated beforehand by the lone gunman Lee Harvey Oswald (despite all the conspiracy theories to the contrary over the years).

As part of an initiative by the London Times newspaper (entitled the JFK: Unsilenced project), sound engineers had used new technology to recreate the voice of the 46-year old president. The newspaper had teamed up with CereProc, a British audio technology company, and Rothco, an Irish creative agency, to construct a database that had been employed to deliver JFK’s ‘unspoken’ speech in the U.S. president’s own voice.

JFK’s ‘Final’ Speech

The team had recreated JFK’s voice by analysing recordings of his speeches and radio addresses. Sound engineers then took 116,777 sound units from clips of Kennedy speaking in order to create an audio track of him delivering the ‘final’ speech in his unique cadence. Chris Pidcock, co-founder and chief voice engineer at CereProc in Edinburgh, told The Times (March 16th, 2018) that it was the first time that the company’s technology had been employed in this particular way. Pidcock’s company specialised in ‘text-to-voice’ technology, and had previously helped people who have lost their voice through degenerative disease or other such problems.

The Kennedy project was especially challenging, but also highly satisfying. The best-quality recordings of JFK’s voice were cross-referenced with the text of Kennedy’s undelivered 1963 speech, and a new computer system was then employed to recognise and recreate JFK’s oratorical ‘style’. Data from JFK’s speeches was then fed into a computer until it learnt the patterns of his delivery, and then the sounds were tweaked to make them sound more natural (as far as possible). It took eight weeks to bring to life the 2,590 words that Kennedy was never able to deliver to a lunch at the Dallas Trade Mart.

Despite the confusion, shock and panic that surrounded that November day’s dramatic events back in Dallas in 1963, and the tragic death of JFK, the text of his speech was preserved and was given to a local businessman by Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy’s vice-president who was quickly sworn in as the 36th president.

What kinds of ideas and assertions were present in JFK’s undelivered speech? According to commentators and historians, it can be partly interpreted as a rebuke to the growing ‘populist’ politics of the time, voices on the right of politics who were sceptical about the new liberalism of the 1960s. It is a speech that warned about the ‘dissident voices’ in U.S. society, voices that played only to people’s fears, ‘finding fault but never favour’, and rejecting the progress of the period. Kennedy warned: ‘In a world of complex problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason – or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly simple solutions’.

He added: ‘There will always be dissident voices in the land expressing opposition without alternative…’.

America and the Globe

In relation to America’s wider position in the world, some familiar ‘Kennedy-esque’ themes can also be detected. His message seemed to be that America’s role and status in the world would be shaped more by its role as a ‘beacon of freedom’ than on its military might. At one point, he referred to his generation as being ‘the watchmen on the walls of world freedom’, and explained: ‘I have spoken of strength largely in terms of deterrence and resistance of aggression and attack. But freedom can be lost without a shot being fired, by ballots as well as bullets. Our success is dependent upon respect for our mission in the world as well as our missiles; on a clearer recognition of the virtues of freedom as well as the evils of tyranny’.

While we should always be wary about the claims made by politicians, the opportunity to actually hear JFK’s voice deliver such words in a speech he never made has been a real bonus for the historian.

However, the use of such technology does raise some tricky ethical and other issues for historians. As one writer in The Times (Libby Purves) put it a few days later, on March 19th, 2018, the JFK voice software, she felt, should be ‘handled with care’. Purves wrote that she was unsurprised ‘but slightly alarmed’ by the technological brilliance of CereProc and Rothco on the JFK project. On the one hand, such new technology is evidently a real boon for those who lose speech through illness, but could be a potential tool for worse-intentioned users. She warned: ‘The lying creators of “fake news” will be on it soon’. Familiar voices could be harvested, analysed, and reproduced ‘to say words they never uttered’. In an age of ‘post-truth’ and alt-facts, this could be potentially dangerous.

These were powerful points. In the hands of Trumpian-style populists, such technology could be ‘weaponised’ by the more unscrupulous and manipulative in society, especially those with extreme ideological agendas. There does need to be a serious debate about all this, similar to the one that has taken place about the ‘colourisation’ of old black-and-white newsreel footage and the increased spread of ‘fake’ images.

Nevertheless, from a historian’s perspective, as we near the end of 2023 – if used responsibly – such technology can surely remain very helpful in making certain aspects of the past ‘come alive’ once again for a modern audience.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(All images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: This is an updated version of a blog first published here in 2018.

A New Vision: The foundation of a branch of the League of Nations Union in Kingston-on-Thames, Surrey

There are times in history when the global will very much influence the local, and during the interwar period Kingston-on-Thames in Surrey, England, saw a burst of activity from a local lobby group, the League of Nations Union (LNU), which was designed to both promote the new international League of Nations and educate people about foreign affairs more generally.

The creation of the League of Nations had been very much down to the vision, drive and energy of President Woodrow Wilson of the USA who, in January, 1918, had called for the foundation of a ‘general association of nations’ to help guarantee the political and territorial independence of all states after the Great War. He said he looked forward to a new world of international co-operation and open diplomacy, backed by the organisational machinery of the League. Ironically, though, the USA did not become a member of the League and Wilson was left bitterly disappointed about this.

In Britain, however, to help support the League and influence public opinion in its favour, a new national organisation was created in November, 1918, the ‘League of Nations Union’ (LNU). According to research by the historian Helen McCarthy, the LNU became one of Britain’s largest voluntary associations during the 1920s and 1930s, and similar organisations were set up in a number of other countries around the globe.

The League in South-West London

In south-west London, League supporters soon became active, including in Kingston-on-Thames. In nearby Richmond, a local branch of the LNU had been founded as early as May, 1919, but in Kingston it took a while longer to organise a branch. Thus, according to the local Surrey Comet, in February, 1921, a ‘representative group’ of people gathered for a meeting at the town’s Assize Courts one Tuesday evening, presided over by Kingston’s local Member of Parliament, Mr. J.G.D. Campbell. Kingston’s MP said that they had ‘just emerged from the greatest and most terrible war in history’. Whatever their ‘views or prepossessions might be’, he reasoned, they ‘all felt determined that a war like that should not occur again’. This comment received a round of applause from the audience.

Warming to his subject, Campbell continued by noting that the war had seen ‘millions of men cut off in their prime’ and millions more incapacitated. Moreover, children ‘were still suffering from malnutrition and starvation’. But, he argued, the ‘horrors of that war were nothing to what the horrors of a war in twenty years would be. It would end in the destruction of civilisation as they knew it’. The ‘hope for the future’, he claimed, lay in the nations discussing their differences ‘amicably’.

Next to speak to the Kingston audience was Mr. F. Whelen, who spoke for an hour about the moving scenes he had witnessed at a meeting of the League of Nations Assembly in Geneva. Only a year had passed since the League had come into existence, he said, but already it embraced 42 nations, representing 1,100 millions of people, or three-quarters of the population of the earth.

Another key local figure present at the meeting was Sir Sidney Pocock (1854-1931) (see photo), a businessman, magistrate, writer and Liberal Party politician (who also happened to be an authority on prisons).

Pocock, in his comments to the audience, strongly emphasised what he saw as the necessity of the League, and he moved a resolution to establish a Kingston branch of the League of Nations Union. The resolution was seconded by the Vicar of Kingston.

The inauguration of the new LNU branch in Kingston certainly caught the attention of the Surrey Comet newspaper, which devoted a detailed editorial to discussion of the League, entitled ‘A Federation of the World’. In the Comet‘s view, the League of Nations was ‘the first attempt in the history of the world to legislate for the good of humanity, instead of for the advantage of individual nations’.

According to the paper, it was therefore ‘gratifying’ to see that representatives ‘of every shade of political and religious opinion, and of all the most prominent organisations in Kingston’, had combined to inaugurate a local branch of the LNU. Sounding notably optimistic, the Comet added that it was ‘another sign that the common will is set steadfastly against a recurrence of war’, and that the people were marching resolutely forward.

LNU Growth

It is difficult to determine how many local people signed up to be members of the Kingston LNU at this inauguration meeting but, when the branch next met two months later (in April, 1921), at what was described as a ‘very successful public meeting’ held at the Kingston Congregational Church, it was announced that about 60 members had been enrolled over the previous two months. Moreover, the Surrey Comet reported that, at the meeting that evening, Mr. Raymond, the local secretary, and his assistants, ‘enrolled a good many new members during the evening’.

Interestingly, perhaps indicating the keen wider interest among people in the town, this second meeting reportedly had an audience ‘that nearly filled the hall’.

The speakers at the meeting included Mr. W. Llewellyn Williams, who apparently spoke for nearly an hour and a half. He insisted that the League of Nations was ‘not a mere dream or ideal but an accomplished fact’ and it was ‘the greatest political fact in the world today’. He added that America’s aloofness from the League was ‘very regrettable’, but he argued that Christian public opinion ‘of all shades and all churches’ in America ‘was more enthusiastic, better organised and more outspoken’ than in Britain or any country of Europe.

Looking back on the League 

The overall story of the parent League of Nations in the interwar period was, of course, not a happy one. While there were some notable successes (especially in social reform, labour legislation, and medical campaigns against disease), the League – despite the initial optimism of the 1920s, as illustrated in stark form in Kingston – was unable to stop the outbreak of new disputes and conflicts and, ultimately, failed to prevent the outbreak of a new world war in 1939. There were many complex reasons for this, not least – as the historian Ian Kershaw put it recently – the fact that the legacy of the First World War had made another world war more likely.

Nevertheless, looking back with the benefit of hindsight on the 1920s and the early beginnings of the LNU in Kingston, what is especially striking is the tremendous enthusiasm that its adherents had for the League’s ambitious vision of a new and peaceful world, particularly after all the bloodshed and trauma of the Great War. It would be easy to dismiss this as naive idealism or an impractical understanding of how nations operate, but the early activists of the LNU sincerely believed that they could build enthusiasm in Britain for an international machine that would help to outlaw war in human affairs.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is Lecturer in History and Politics 

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

(Note: This is an updated version of a blog first published here in November, 2017)

Five reasons to study for a degree in History

Are you thinking about studying History at degree level? A big question on your mind might be: ‘What can I actually do with a degree in History?’

At this time of year History staff are regularly asked this by prospective new students (and their parents!), who are keen to learn about the value and uses of a degree in History. Employers are also deeply interested in what key skills a History student can offer them. The short answer is: lots.

Students on a trip to Hampton Court Palace

So, with this in mind, here’s some brief food for thought, summed up in five easy and bite-sized portions…

1. It’s a Stepping Stone: A degree in History can be an excellent ‘stepping stone’ to a wide variety of careers and professions, ranging from the top job in British politics (a recent Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was a History graduate), through to teaching in the public sector, journalism or working as a researcher in the media, or acting as an archivist in a major museum or library. History graduates have gone into the UK’s public or private sectors, such as working in public broadcasting or acting an advisor at the National Archives, or providing research support for a large company or national (or international) lobby or charity group.

2. It Equips You With Valuable Skills: History and the study of the past at degree level provides students and graduates with a wide variety of what have been called ‘transferable skills’. History students receive truly invaluable training in being able to understand and analyse key issues and events, both in the past and in the present, to a very high level of competence. You also become very confident in being able to offer potential employers a good range of other highly marketable skills, such as a talent for clear expression; putting ideas and arguments forward in a concise and professional manner; collecting, investigating and assessing complex bodies of material; the ability to synthesise and communicate effectively, packaging such information into accessible forms; generating new ideas and informed conclusions based on original research; and organising material in a logical and coherent way.

3. It Develops Your Critical Thinking: A training in the study of History enables you to think critically and independently, either as an individual or as part of a team. Taking the lead-role in a team, for example, is a highly-prized skill for employers and they often look for evidence of this on your C.V. Many History departments also encourage their students to think about and gain experience in the ‘hands on’ practical skills of presentation and public communication, such as debating, report-writing, speech-making, pod-casting, website design, and film-making.

4. You Become ‘Calm Under Fire’: To employers who recruit graduates in any discipline, such skills will often be more important than the actual subject a student has studied. On the other hand, one can argue that History students, because of the very nature of the subject they have become experts in over the course of three years, can often bring to their workplace important additional skills which other graduates simply lack: considerable self-discipline (gained through hours of patiently working your way through primary documents or weighing up one historian’s interpretation against another); the ability to be ‘calm when under fire’ i.e. deal calmly with tight deadlines when under stress (efficient time-management, planning and multi-tasking become almost second-nature to a History student!); and a highly flexible approach (which comes from History students being strongly encouraged to view topics from a variety of different and exciting perspectives and angles, gained through writing essays, or blogs, or reports, or completing projects).

5. A History Degree Will Boost Your Career Prospects: Where do History students end up when they step out into the wider world? A significant number opt for careers in the heritage sector, teaching, the civil service, local government, public sector administration, publishing, advertising, retail, business, the police and the Armed Forces. Common professions also include banking, journalism, and law. The legal profession, for example, simply loves History graduates. Why? Because they are prized for their analytical and critical reasoning skills, which are highly valued, and their ability to make a case in favour of or against something. Recent reports by, for example, the Royal Historical Society and the Historical Association have more than demonstrated the value of holding a History degree in today’s highly competitive workplace.

If you have a passion for the past, love a challenge, and enjoy communicating and debating, then a degree in History is a great choice.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics 

How a conspiracy theory bit the dust: Hess was indeed Hess

One of the big challenges for professional historians in recent years has been the worrying growth of conspiracy theory. Questionable claims with no empirical evidence often spread like wild-fire across the internet and, disturbingly for scholars, are regularly taken seriously by people who really should know better (‘Hitler did not die in Berlin’, ‘The Moon landings were faked’, ‘9/11 was an inside job’, ‘Covid was a manufactured bio-weapon’, ‘green lizards run the world’, and so on).

Such myths and fabrications also tend to become embedded among the general public and in popular culture, and it is often difficult for historians and other experts to dislodge them once they take hold. Sometimes, though, the tide turns. Here’s a good example.

In 2019, according to the Guardian, a longstanding theory that the Nazi war criminal Rudolf Hess (pictured) was replaced by a doppelganger in Spandau Prison was fully debunked. Genetic tests conducted by scientists on blood samples taken from the famous prisoner known as no.7 (Hess) and a living relative demolished the popular but bizarre conspiracy theory that the man known as Hess was really a double.

Hess in Context

Rudolf Hess (1894-1987) was effectively Hitler’s deputy until he surprised the German Fuhrer (and, indeed, the whole world) in May, 1941, by taking a plane and embarking on a solo flight, parachuting into Scotland. Hess apparently hoped he could make contact with sympathetic British aristocrats and, via them, eventually negotiate a peace treaty with Winston Churchill and the British government, and that this would meet with the Nazi leader’s approval. However, on being told of the dramatic news, Hitler flew into a rage and disowned his former friend, and Churchill (who could hardly believe his luck) had Hess imprisoned in the Tower of London and then in a secure mansion in Surrey. It was a major propaganda blow against the Nazi regime.

At the war’s end, Hess was tried alongside the other surviving Nazi leaders as a war criminal at the Nuremberg war trials, and was given a life sentence. He spent the rest of his life in Spandau prison in Berlin (see photo), and the four victorious Allied powers (Britain, France, America and the Soviet Union) took it in turns to guard the old Nazi, who eventually became the only prisoner left in the gaol. He committed suicide in 1987, aged 93.

However, over the years, various conspiracy theories emerged about Hess, with one suggesting that the man the world knew as Rudolf Hess was not the ‘real’ Hess, but actually a double. In 2019, persuasive scientific evidence finally put this irrational claim firmly to rest, although one suspects that die-hard conspiracy fans probably dismissed the new information being as part of the ‘plot’.

The New Findings

Writing in the journal Forensic Science International, Prof. Jan Cemper-Kiesslich, of the University of Salzburg, along with other colleagues, reported their conclusion that the ‘Hess was a double’ theory had no basis: analysis of a blood sample taken from prisoner no.7 in 1982, together with a DNA sample given freely by a relative of Hess, showed that the two people were more than 99.99% likely to be related. Cemper-Kiesslich was quoted as commenting that he and his team were ‘extremely sure’ that both samples originated ‘from the same paternal line’.

It is perhaps worth noting that a whole ‘Hess industry’ of conspiracy theories has built up over the decades: apart from the Hess-double theory, conspiracy-mongers have claimed, amongst other things, that Hess did not commit suicide but was murdered by British agents, as the UK’s government feared Hess still held secret and potentially damaging information about British wartime dealings with the Nazis. Similarly, a number of other conspiracy-minded ‘researchers’ have claimed that the original Hess mission in 1941 was a consequence of the Nazi deputy’s interest in the occult, and that he had been lured into a trap set up by British Intelligence agents who had been advised by a leading Satanist and black magician, Aleister Crowley.

Conspiracy theory more generally always sees ‘purpose’ and devious manipulation at work in history; ‘secret’ forces are supposedly at work behind the scenes, plotting and planning and pulling the strings, eager to keep the ‘real’ version of history under wraps.

It is no exaggeration to say that this kind of dogmatic conviction about the past and how things occurred is probably one of the most difficult things for historians to challenge in our digital and information-saturated age, but we would be neglecting our duty if we did not. And science has been an invaluable ally in this important task. Public fascination with the Nazis, of course, remains strong and can be deeply unsettling, especially when it is hijacked by conspiracists. But, refreshingly, the demolition of the Hess-double theory was a most welcome step in the right direction.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is Lecturer in Humanities at Kingston University, Surrey

(All images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was published here in 2019.

The Irish Fascists who fought for Franco

During some research on the extent to which General Francisco Franco and his Nationalists received international support from fascists and other rightwing sympathisers during the Spanish Civil War, I took another look at the Irish contribution. This came principally from General Eoin O’Duffy (1890-1944), a devout Catholic who had increasingly come to admire the various European fascist movements of the 1930s.

Interestingly, earlier in his career O’Duffy had been a prominent figure in the IRA (Irish Republican Army) during the Irish War of Independence and had become an ambitious politician during the first decade of the new republic, with a clear interest in Irish military and policing affairs. In the 1920s he had become the second commissioner of the Garda Siochana, the police force of the new Irish Free State.

But O’Duffy (see photo) was a highly complex individual, riddled with contradictions. A heavy smoker and alcoholic, he was fond of preaching the need for peak physical fitness among his men. Moreover, while he was a seemingly committed Catholic who promoted the strong family unit as the essential cornerstone of society, the evidence was that he enjoyed a series of homosexual adventures in Dublin’s nightlife.

Yet, at the same time, he had good leadership and speechmaking skills and an undoubted ability to train and cultivate loyal support from his key officers. It is said that a ‘cult of personality’ built up around O’Duffy even while he was police commissioner, and some critics had aleady noted his admiration for Benito Mussolini.

In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that O’Duffy had increasingly moved further and further rightwards in his political outlook, and tended to side more and more with the more conservative elements in the new state. He became especially frustrated at the levels of disorder and ‘anarchy’ that broke out at political meetings and felt there was a need to protect ‘free speech’ with iron discipline and strong-arm tactics.

Embrace of Fascism

In February, 1933, a new government dismissed O’Duffy from his position. Out of favour and out of a job (and perhaps as a way of hitting back against the new government), in July 1933 O’Duffy took control of the ‘Army Comrades Association’, a paramilitary movement in Ireland, which he soon renamed as the ‘National Guard’, although it became known more commonly as the ‘Blueshirts’. With its emphasis on anti-Marxism, military discipline, a distinctive uniform, a straight-arm Roman salute and clear interest in ideas about ‘corporatism’, many commentators see the Blueshirts as Ireland’s version of fascism. Or, more accurately, the movement was a very good example of what historians have seen as ‘clerico-fascism’.

Indeed, as a strong Catholic, O’Duffy had become increasingly alarmed by what he saw as the ‘un-Godly’ rise of Communism and, when the Spanish Army Generals engaged in an illegal rebellion against the Spanish Republican government in 1936, O’Duffy saw this as a natural and inevitable part of the wider European ‘crusade’ against Marxism. He was determined to raise an Irish Brigade to help General Franco and, in particular, to defend the institutions of the Catholic Church in Spain. In O’Duffy’s mind, Mussolini’s fascist movement had achieved the same objective in Italy, saving the nation and Church from the ‘evils’ of ‘Red Revolution’ and anarchy.

O’Duffy’s positioning of the Blueshirts as Ireland’s version of Mussolini’s Blackshirts had already seen him trying to network at the international level with other like-minded movements. He had made an appearance at the 1934 International Fascist Conference in Montreux and, in the same year, had offered Mussolini the services of 1,000 Blueshirts during the Italo-Ethiopian war (the Italian dictator’s illegal invasion of Abyssinia), which O’Duffy said was a struggle between European ‘civilization’ and tribal ‘barbarism’. Significantly, General O’Duffy persuaded himself that the Spanish Civil War was similar in nature, referring to it as a struggle between ‘Christ’ and ‘antichrist’.

Although O’Duffy claimed he had received interest and applications from 7,000 Blueshirts to fight in Spain, the reality was that the movement was dogged by factional infighting and splits. However, despite this, possibly due to O’Duffy’s charisma and hold over a number of loyal supporters, the formation of the ‘Brigade’ went ahead. Ignoring the wishes of the authorities (the Irish government issued strong warnings against Irish citizens getting involved in the conflict), volunteers came forward and it is estimated that up to 700 Blueshirts made their way to Spain to serve in O’Duffy’s ‘Irish Brigade’. This was a much smaller number than O’Duffy had hoped for, but he felt sure that more would follow as word spread of the Brigade’s exploits.

Myth versus Reality

Once in Spain, though, the members of the Brigade soon found Franco’s forces did not have much for them to do, and they saw little actual fighting. A fair number of the volunteers became seriously homesick and also complained bitterly about the food. Moreover, disagreements broke out between O’Duffy and some of his top officers over what their precise objectives should be. While some of the other volunteers in the Nationalist ‘International’ forces had demonstrated their value, General Franco himself had not been impressed with the Irish Brigade, especially the factional infighting at the top. The Nationalist leader also suspected O’Duffy was using the Irish presence in Spain as a propaganda opportunity above all. Franco sent the Brigade home in June, 1937, saying their services were no longer required.

Unsurprisingly, O’Duffy’s version of this was much more rosy. When he returned to Ireland from Spain, O’Duffy quickly set to work on a book about the Irish Brigade in the Civil War, which was published as Crusade in Spain (1938). With a notably anti-Semitic tone, the book made a series of questionable claims and dubious assertions about the nature of Irish fascism and the Blueshirt contribution to Spain’s Civil War which bore little relation to reality.

Predictably, the book portrayed the Irish Brigade’s exploits as a resounding success. O’Duffy wrote that he was proud of the courage of his troops in Spain, and said that, while his Brigade had been sneered at and slandered by ungrateful critics back in Ireland, ‘truth’ and ‘justice’ would prevail.

O’Duffy remained determined to continue with the ‘crusade’ against European Communism. During the Second World War, he tried to reach out to Nazi Germany. In 1943 he approached the German Legation in Dublin with an offer to raise a ‘Legion’ of Irish volunteers to help Hitler’s forces fight against ‘Bolshevism’ on the Eastern Front. The Nazis rebuffed his offer.

Ironically, in Spain, as Franco consolidated his dictatorship after his victory in the Civil War, the history of the International volunteers who had fought for the Nationalist side was quietly written out of the official story, and was replaced with a propagandistic version of the past which emphasised how the war had been won by ‘patriotic’ Spaniards overcoming the dark forces of ‘foreign’ international Communism. The Irish Brigade, along with the various other voluntary groups from other countries who had served in Franco’s forces, found themselves censored out of the story. On the other hand, some of the Irish volunteers were pleased about this, as they wished to bury their involvement and association with fascism, especially as they set about carving out new careers and lives in post-1945 Ireland.

O’Duffy did not live to see the defeat of fascism by the Allies. After a significant decline in his health, clearly made worse by his addiction to alcohol, the Blueshirt General died on 30th November, 1944, aged just 54.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikipedia Commons)

Kingston-on-Thames’s War Memorial: A brief history

In November, 2023, the main war memorial in Kingston-on-Thames in Surrey will be 100 years old, and will again be a key feature of Remembrance Sunday, which falls this year on Sunday, 12th November.

Remembrance Sunday, created in the UK to recall the end of the First World War and now also a day when we commemorate all those who died in subsequent wars, created much debate in Britain over what form memorials to the fallen should take.

In fact, it is important to note that, in many towns and villages across the country, quite a vigorous debate broke out about whether such memorials should be traditional carved statues, crosses or other types of monument, or whether the act of memory would be served better by the construction of memorial halls, public housing projects, new hospitals, or new educational centres.

Interestingly, in the immediate aftermath of the end of hostilities in November, 1918, Kingston-on-Thames in Surrey saw its own version of such a debate. Residents in the town, elected councillors and other local dignitaries soon began consideration of what might be a suitable memorial to the many local men who had been killed over the previous four years. But it is clear that there was, at first, very little agreement or consensus.

When the then Mayor of Kingston, Alderman Sir Charles Burge, convened a special meeting on the subject at the town hall, his view that Kingston needed a ‘monument of artistic beauty, worthy of the grand traditions of the Royal Borough’, did not please everyone present. Alderman Burge, who took the view that ‘a mean or poor memorial would be an insult to the men who will never return’, revealed that he had already invited suggestions for a suitable memorial and had asked an artist to prepare a sketch. But, much to his consternation, he found himself being challenged by others. Indeed, he was accused of trying to force his own preferred pet scheme on Kingston’s townspeople.

Some residents wanted, instead, the construction of a memorial hall or a new centre for education. One person also called for the ‘erection of cottages with a memorial in the centre’, while another argued that Kingston could take inspiration from the town of Slough, where the proposed memorial was to be a maternity and child welfare centre.

To add another layer of complexity, there was also disagreement about the precise location for Kingston’s proposed memorial, whatever form it would eventually take. Some suggested it should be located in Canbury gardens, by the River Thames, while others called for it to be sited on the Queen’s Promenade, further down the riverside. Others seemed to favour it being placed prominently in Clarence Street, the main shopping street.

Disagreement and Compromise

According to the local Surrey Comet newspaper, the Mayor’s special meeting became so heated that it degenerated into ‘irrelevant argument’, and was only brought to order when a motion was passed which said ‘that this meeting of the inhabitants of the Borough requests the Mayor to raise a fund worthily to commemorate the sacrifices of the men of Kingston upon Thames who have given their lives for their country, and that this meeting agrees to support the Mayor in the attainment of this object’.

This motion appeared to take some of the heat out of the strong disagreements apparent at the meeting, but the subsequent efforts of Sir Charles Burge to persuade people and businesses to donate to the fund proved very difficult. This was because the economic situation in Britain in the aftermath of the Great War was very poor, including in the so-called leafy Boroughs of south-west London. The war had drained the financial resources of the nation, and local residents were very reluctant to make donations to charities or to use monies from their depleted savings.

Nevertheless, by 1920, the Mayor’s memorial fund had enough money in it to commission a sculpture by Richard Goulden, a former Royal Engineer. He had been invalided out of the army and had turned his attention to creating sculptures, commemorative plaques and other forms of memorial. In fact, he had built up a national reputation for his skills and had helped other towns across the country to construct war memorials of all types.

The Mayor, it seems, was determined to still have a ‘traditional’ kind of memorial in the town, but was open to this being a beautiful sculpture of some kind, not necessarily in the form of a soldier, the form of memorial that so many other towns had chosen.

Goulden’s Vision

Significantly, the selection committee sought a sculpture which would show ‘the spirit of youth pressing forward’ and helping two little ones ‘who look to him in trust to clear from the path the evil that threatens mankind’. And Goulden certainly fulfilled this objective; he designed some striking bronze figures, which were cast at the famous Burton’s foundry in nearby Thames Ditton, and which created some interesting discussions about their meaning. The sculpture can be interpreted and read in a number of ways: on the one hand, it is a ‘traditional’ war memorial; on the other hand, one can arguably see a Christian message about the need to protect the innocent from evil. Some observers have also detected a message of optimism and peace in the symbolism of the sculpture.

As the months ticked by, the disagreements of the immediate aftermath of the war also seemed to dissipate with the passage of time. In February, 1922, the Surrey Comet published an urgent appeal for donations so that the project could be completed, and two months later the newspaper revealed that the money had been raised ‘at last’.

Moreover, a suitable location had also been settled on: in what was then known as the ‘old burial ground’, and what we now know today as the memorial gardens in Union Street in Kingston. Five long years after it had first been argued about at a meeting in the town, the new memorial was officially unveiled by Kingston’s MP, Frederick Penny, on Armistice Day, 1923.

The memorial itself was most impressive, consisting of a granite plinth surmounted by a bronze statue of a man shielding two children with a sword in one hand and holding a flame aloft in his other hand. The plinth now displays several bronze plates bearing the names of Kingston’s military personnel who have died in warfare over the years.

The sculpture, unsurprisingly, became the gathering place for large Remembrance Sunday ceremonies for many years, and this remained the case until – sadly – the Corona-19 virus intervened (all public gatherings had to be cancelled during the lockdown regulations). With end of lockdown, the traditional Remembrance ceremonies have now returned to the town.

The memorial today is protected by Grade II listing and was refurbished in 2005, and will no doubt remain a key feature of all future Remembrance Sunday events held in the town for generations to come. The next time you happen to be in the area, pause for a moment to take in the visual presence of the memorial and to reflect on the sacrifices made by young men in the past who paid the ultimate price in the horrors of war.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in the Humanities at Kingston University, Surrey.

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Slaves, Soldiers and Citizens: Celebrating Black History Month in Britain

This month (October, 2023) is Black History Month (BHM) in Britain. BHM is a month of events in October which takes place annually and celebrates the culture, history and achievements of Britain’s African, Asian and Caribbean communities in the country.

Although the event had its origins in the United States, the British version has become more and more attuned to what is unique to Black history in this country. It has taken place every October since 1987 and, importantly, helps us remember that the United Kingdom has a long and rich history of contributions from people with African and Caribbean heritage, together with those of Asian ancestry, and that Britain thus enjoys a vibrant and diverse cultural heritage, including here in south-west London.

Indeed, as London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, speaking on the eve of 2022’s BHM, so aptly put it, the month is ‘an opportunity to focus on the many enduring stories of our capital’s black communities’. He added: ‘London’s diverse communities have contributed so much to our capital, yet too often their stories remain untold’.

Kingston-on-Thames and Black History

In recent years, the area where I reside, Kingston-on-Thames in Surrey, has used BHM to help celebrate the life-story of Cesar Picton, a local resident.

Cesar Picton House, Kingston. Photo: Hayward

Cesar Picton (1755-1836) was brought to England from Senegal as a gift for a local family in 1761. He went on to become a coal merchant and a wealthy and respected gentleman. He remains Kingston-on-Thames’ most famous eighteenth-century Black businessman, and his previous homes in Kingston and Thames Ditton are marked by commemorative plaques.

He has also been commemorated at Kingston University’s main campus through the Picton Room, which was named after him. However, as recent scholars have shown, Picton was just one of a growing community of Black Africans in Georgian London.

Other well known black contemporaries included people such as Dido Belle, Ignatius Sancho and Olaudah Equiano, and – via new avenues of important research on Black British history – it has been estimated that some 10-15,000 Africans lived in Georgian London alone. BHM has been instrumental in raising more awareness of this fascinating and relatively neglected dimension to our national history.

In fact, BHM has helped contribute much more research on general Black British history, an approach to the past which explores how Black history is part of national, local and community histories, as well as identifying and celebrating the many ways in which black individuals have impacted on economic, social, political and cultural histories across the UK.

World War One

This was especially the case in 2018 when we commemorated 100 years since the end of the First World War. As part of this, exciting pieces of new research appeared on the contribution of the African and Caribbean communities to Britain’s war effort in 1914-1918, including from those in London. It is no exaggeration to say that BHM has been instrumental in raising public awareness of this fresh academic scholarship, and continues to do so.

Significantly, recent research is now beginning to show that there were many people of African descent who fought for ‘their’ country and empire during the Great War. One of these people, for example, was Walter Tull (1888-1918), a professional footballer for Tottenham and also a war hero. Both he and his brother served in the military. Tull fought in the first Battle of the Somme in 1916 and was killed in the second Battle of the Somme on 25 March, 1918, near Favreuil, France.

By then, Tull had become an officer in command. Moreover, not only was he the British army’s first Black officer, but he had been the first Black officer to lead white troops into battle. Pleasingly, in 2018, the Royal Mail issued a striking postage stamp with Tull’s image on it (see photo), which helped create even more interest in his life and times.

In 2019 the historian David Olusoga also helped push research into the role of Black troops in World War One even further forward with his critically acclaimed The World’s War: Forgotten Soldiers of the Empire. More recently, in 2021, Olusoga also campaigned to highlight Britain’s failure to honour the country’s Black and Asian war dead.

Another important angle on reclaiming Black British stories has been, in my view, the publication in 2022 of Black Victorians: Hidden in History, by Keshia Abraham and John Woolf. This truly fascinating book was an exciting contribution to the growing historiography on Black British history.

BHM and new research

My own research has also tapped into the growing historical interest in the experiences of the ‘Windrush Generation’ in the local south-west London area. I have discovered, for example, that during the 1950s, civic leaders in Kingston were very keen to develop close links with Kingston in Jamaica.

I have also explored the extent to which there was local hostility to new migrants from the West Indies, such as racist graffitti being painted on walls by extreme rightwing groups such as the League of Empire Loyalists in the late 1950s. In particular, I have also traced the story of how the extreme right National Front set up its national HQ in a leafy street in Teddington in the 1970s, and the impact this had on local race relations.

BHM has helped stimulate new research into both local and national history, and long may it continue. What originally started as an event in the USA to help celebrate the history and cultural heritage of the Black community in the New World has now very much become an established event in Britain and has arguably grown in popularity with each passing year.

As one commentator (on www.history.co.uk) has pointed out, perhaps one day ‘the need for an annual celebration will no longer be required, when Black British history is universally accepted as British history and is studied and celebrated year long around the country’.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge specialises in British and European history and politics

(Images: Hayward and Wikimedia Commons)

Suspicious Minds: some reflections on the role of conspiracy theory in history and politics

What was really striking about the annual conference of the British Conservative Party, which has just taken place in Manchester, was the extent to which various speakers used what can only be described as conspiracy theory in their speeches and interactions with attendees and the media.

Attacks on the ‘liberal elite’, the leftist ‘Establishment,’ and bizarre claims about 15-minute cities, once the language of fringe populists, have clearly taken over the mainstream of Conservative politics. In fact, the current Conservative Party appears to have moved in a blatantly ‘Trumpist’ and nakedly rightwing direction, where key Cabinet members have been seeking to stir up paranoia about migrants (‘a coming hurricane of millions’) and to portray the Party as an underdog and victim of the machinations of bullying ‘woke’ pressure groups.

At one stage, it appeared that the Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, capitalizing on her recent highly controversial attack on multiculturalism, was seeking to portray British society as being in crisis and breakdown, with crime-ridden no-go areas. She claimed on Sky News that there are ‘many towns and cities’ in the UK where intergration has not worked. It all sounded depressingly ‘Trumpian’.

Indeed, the U.K. Conservative Party looks more and more like the Trumpian version of the U.S. Republican party with each passing day. Former U.S. president Donald Trump, of course, has become infamous for promoting conspiracy theories. He has spent much of the last two years, for example, claiming that his defeat in the presidential elections, where he lost to Joe Biden, was a fraud or conspiracy designed to deny him a second term.

Although precisely who was able to organise such a vast operation remains vague in Trump’s speeches, he appears to subscribe to the claim that an elitist ‘shadow’ state operates behind the scenes in Washington. He has even called the Capitol attack of January, 2021, an ‘insurrection hoax’.

‘Weaponising’ Conspiracy

Trump’s use of conspiracy has been mirrored by other authoritarian-style leaders across the globe, such as Vladimir Putin. The propaganda line regularly pumped out by president Putin’s regime in Russia is that Ukraine is run by ‘neo-Nazis’, enabled by secret forces in the West. Why do so many people, especially politicians, appear to believe that ‘secret’ forces are at work in the world, or that there is no such thing as chance or accident in history?

I pondered such questions at length during lockdown when I heard that the former footballer, Green activist and notorious conspiracy theorist David Icke had organised an ‘anti-mask’ protest in London, and had also repeated his bizarre claims that Covid-19 was part of a ‘hoax’ being perpetrated by ‘globalists’, who are supposedly out to wreck our freedoms.

Icke (b. 1952), who once claimed to be the son of God, is infamous for his belief that ‘interdimensional reptilian aliens’ operate behind the scenes, brainwashing and controlling the world’s governing elites and shaping history for particular ends; apparently the aliens have even counted people such as the late Queen Elizabeth II as one of their number. Moreover, Icke’s series of epic but turgid books remain best-sellers. How can people be so gullible?

Significantly, Icke’s obsession with ‘reptiles’ was the result of a more coded language that he subsequently adopted when there was an outcry over one of his earliest books. In The Robots Rebellion (1994), Icke had made uncritical use of that classic Czarist anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (1903), which claims that the world is subject to manipulation and control by a secret ‘cabal’ of Jewish elders who meet annually.

In the second edition of Robots Rebellion, this material was carefully edited out, but Icke’s general claim of a grand conspiracy at work across the globe remained. His books and sell-out talks have repeated this thesis ever since, in ever more elaborate ways. Disturbingly, an ugly whiff of anti-Semitism has also crept back into his books and talks, with regular mentions of the Rothschilds and ‘Zionism’.

Theorising Conspiracy

While preparing some new teaching material on ‘conspiracy’ over the ages, I completed reading a number of the leading academic studies on the history and impact of conspiracy theory. This included a relatively new book on the nature of conspiracy theory and, given some of the controversies bubbling away in politics at this very moment, I am even more pleased I chose to do so. Written by Rob Brotherton, an academic psychologist, Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (Bloomsbury Sigma, 2015), is very helpful to the historian. It certainly gave me food for thought.

From my own research perspective (the study of fascism and the Far Right in history), I often have to try and understand those people who, in the 20th century in particular, regularly claimed that we are all subject to ‘puppet masters’ pulling the strings behind the scenes, or that things have never happened in the past in quite the way that we perhaps assume or think. The political Right, especially the extreme anti-democratic Right, often sought to associate itself with a number of so-called historians in order to give legitimacy to such paranoia.

A classic example was the arch-conspiracy theorist and self-proclaimed historian Nesta Webster (1876-1960), who was popular with interwar fascists and still remains – even today – an inspiration for elements of the extreme Right.

Moreover, one quickly becomes aware that ‘conspiracism’ has a long and ugly history in itself, with roots that can be traced right back to at least the time of the French Revolution and to extravagant ideas about freemasons and the Illuminati. Importantly, conspiracism has not just been confined to the Right, but has also been employed at times by parts of the political Left, a fact that has so painfully re-emerged in recent years in Britain.

Fringe Ideas?

Interestingly, Brotherton’s study argues that conspiracy theories are not exclusive to ‘a handful of paranoid kooks’, and he challenges the idea that conspiracy theories are mainly a fringe affair. Indeed, Brotherton argues that nothing could be farther from the truth: ‘All told, huge numbers of people are conspiracy theorists when it comes to one issue or another’. Added to this, Brotherton persuasively makes the case that it is not just people in the West who display the conspiratorial mindset: ‘Conspiracism is a global phenomenon’. Pollsters have found, for example, that large numbers of people across the world still refuse to believe that the 9-11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 were carried out by Arabs, while equally significant numbers hold the view that it was an ‘inside job’ conducted by the CIA or ‘Zionists’.

In relation to this, recent years have seen the rise, especially in America, Britain, Australia and elsewhere, of a loose movement titled the ‘9-11 Truth Movement’, a network of people who simply refuse to accept scientific fact, empirical evidence, or ‘mainstream’ history. They proclaim they are in pursuit of ‘real’ history instead.

So, the big question we should ask is, why?

Brotherton’s interesting contention is that it is because conspiracism may be a natural product of the way our minds work. His argument is that many people, both in the past and in the present, have succumbed to the habit of always seeing ‘patterns’ where none exist.

Examples from the Past

He gives the famous example of the belief that ‘canals’ had been discovered on Mars, something that resulted from telescopes being focused on the Red Planet by 19th century astronomers. The eager astronomers used telescopes that were not quite powerful enough to see things clearly, but just strong enough to persuade the stargazers that they were observing straight and long lines on the Red Planet’s surface. One thing led to another, and soon a sophisticated theory was being constructed that these ‘lines’ were in fact the last remnants of a desperate civilisation that had faced collapse through water shortages and thirst.

According to Brotherton, our mental inclination is often to try and ‘connect the dots’ where none exist, which is similar to the way that conspiracy theorists seek to find meaning in all the chaos and messy variety of history and past events. Brotherton notes, for example, how modern-day conspiracy theorists (such as David Icke) endlessly repeat the mantra that ‘only when the dots are connected can the picture be seen’.

Above all, in Brotherton’s estimation, our ‘desperate, deep-rooted desire to explain the inexplicable can lead us up garden paths, and down dark alleys’. That is a very perceptive comment. The long months of lockdown endured by many thousands and the natural worries of people over the Corona virus emergency has tended to feed this thirst for meaning and clear explanations. Unfortunately, people like Icke and his supporters have only been too eager to offer up irresponsible and nonsensical claims and exploit such desires.

This is all the more reason why we should study conspiracy theory, keep a close eye on such thinking (especially as it intrudes more and more into mainstream politics), and stay fully alert to its dangers.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was published here in May, 2016.

Researching the ‘Imps’: the activities of the Junior Imperial League in the interwar period

How did the British Conservative party try to enthuse its younger members during the interwar period? One important avenue for this attempt to politicise the upcoming generation came via the ideas and activities of the ‘Junior Imperial League’ (JIL), otherwise known as the ‘Imps’.

Surprisingly little has been published on the JIL and, in so far as they have received serious scholarly attention, this has usually been through general histories of the main Conservative party and its key personalities or creed.

So, who were the ‘Imps’? As a national organisation the ‘Imps’ had their roots in the Junior Imperial and Constitutional League, which had been formed by the Conservative party in 1906 to encourage ‘practical political work’ among the younger generation in Parliamentary Divisions in Britain and across the Empire. By 1909, there were 36 branches, and by 1914 this had increased to between 330 and 350 branches across Britain, with an estimated 200,000 members.

However, the First World War had a devastating impact on the JIL, including the loss of 100 branch honorary secretaries who had joined the army to fight on the Western Front.

In the post-war world of the 1920s, the Conservative party became very keen to widen the appeal of the party to the ‘younger generation’, and thus sought to rebuild the League as part of Stanley Baldwin’s project for a ‘New Conservatism’. Senior figures in the party said they wanted to create ‘practical interest’ again in political work and organisation amongst the young men and women of Britain and the Empire. Moreover, they increasingly saw the need to attract young women, fearing that young female ‘flappers’ (as they were called) might be tempted by the relatively new Labour party and the ideology of Socialism.

Baldwin meeting some young workers

By 1926, it was being reported that the JIL had seen significant growth again, reaching 961 branches, and by 1928 there were an estimated 1,500 JIL branches in existence. In 1929-30 alone, 150 new branches were started and, by mid-1930, there were nearly 2,000 across the nation.

These branches became particularly important for the main party during General Election campaigns, such as the one held in 1929, where senior party officers could call upon the more committed and enthusiastic JIL activists to provide additional help during door-step canvassing. The more eager members of the JIL were also increasingly adept at holding open-air street corner meetings and rallies.

On the other hand, it still seemed quite a challenge for members of the main party to fully mobilise some JIL branches. Not all members of the JIL were keen on the ‘political’ campaigning duties asked of them by party officers, and this sometimes led to complaints that numerous JIL members were evidently more interested in the dances, sporting events and cultural activities of the ‘Imps’ rather than engaging in the hard foot-slogging of ‘politics’.

Indeed, it does appear that a significant minority of JIL members saw the ‘Imps’ as predominantly a social club which provided opportunities for members to break free from the humdrum of family life and parental control and, importantly, to meet members of the opposite sex.

Moreover, when the Conservatives lost the 1929 General Election, it did lead to considerable soul-searching and some difficult questions were asked about whether the JIL had lost its way. Some in the party proposed a more professional form of training for JIL members, with more Summer Schools and speakers classes. There was a renewed emphasis on members having the opportunity, if they wished, to attend courses of instruction at the New Bonar Law College located at Berkhamsted.

A Brief Case Study of a Local Branch

The Richmond-on-Thames branch, which was open to all ‘boys and girls aged 14-25’, had its inaugural meeting in February, 1925, and was based at Bellevue House, in Petersham Road in Richmond. During the next few years, the branch’s activities involved a combination of political initiatives and regular social events. In fact, the ‘social’ side to the League in south-west London was a particularly important way of drawing in young people and gradually introducing them to Conservative ideals: this included concerts, dances, quizzes, walks, sports events and special day trips.

However, there were some occasional misgivings expressed by the parent party’s officers that the JIL in Richmond were perhaps too fond of the ‘social’ side. To overcome this, JIL dances (which were popular and often well-attended), would usually have a ‘talk’ given by a party officer at the half-way point of the evening, emphasising the need for dedicated constituency work in Richmond by JIL members or promoting Conservative ideological values: in this sense, there was a clear effort to ensure that ‘politics’ remained a big part of JIL culture. There was an emphasis on ‘Home, Nation, and Empire’, and (at local branch HQ) Richmond’s members also heard talks by special guests from the world of politics or industry, especially anybody with a strong record of ‘service’ to the British Empire, such as former soldiers.

A good example of the latter was Lt. Col. Reginald Tyrer, a soldier who had served in both Africa and India. Tyrer was quite a controversial figure and was an outspoken local defender of all things ‘imperial’. He was also very keen to educate the JIL in anti-Socialist ideas and to imbue members with the twin ideals of ‘Home’ and ‘Empire’.

It is difficult to calculate the actual size of the membership of Richmond’s Imps. Nearby branches saw, membership numbers ranging between 250-400, so it is reasonable to suggest that Richmond JIL saw about 200-250 members at its height. There were regular appeals for individual members to recruit new members from their circles of friends.

The Wider Local Context

Research into the Richmond branch and the ‘Imps’ more generally can also help build up a detailed picture of JIL activities in the wider Thames Valley area, in both Surrey and Middlesex. Thus, in addition to Richmond, branches appeared, for example, in Surbiton, Kingston, and New Malden, while other branches were founded in Bedfont, Isleworth, Twickenham, and Brentford and Chiswick.

One of the most active – and most outspoken – of the local JIL branches was in Hounslow, especially in the run-up to the 1929 General Election. Hounslow’s ‘Imps’ held regular open-air meetings, and some of these became very ‘lively’, to say the least. It was quite a blow to them when Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour party won that election. Indeed, some JIL members directly blamed their leader, Baldwin, for the defeat. In fact, in 1930-31, the Hounslow JIL appears to have split, with some of the most active members defecting to the ‘Crusaders’, the junior wing of Lord Beaverbrook’s campaign for Empire Free Trade.

The nearby Richmond branch, on the other hand, seemed more able to survive such turmoil, and continued to function throughout the 1930s. Ultimately, however, the JIL at national level did not really meet the hopes and expectations of the main Conservative party hierarchy: most historians argue that the League was not all that successful in attracting large numbers of young people into Conservative politics.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

A ‘Red’ Scare in a leafy London suburb: Fears of Bolshevism in Surbiton in 1920

In October, 1917 (depending upon which version of the calendar one uses) the Bolshevik party under Lenin achieved a dramatic seizure of power in Russia, a coup d’etat which sent a chill of fear across the ruling elites in much of Europe, including in Britain.

In the immediate years following 1917, numerous anti-Bolshevik meetings were held across the country (including in the south-west London area), where Russian refugees or other speakers gave notably gloomy accounts of what had happened in the former Czarist Empire, and offered dire warnings about what could befall Britain and its Empire if people did not ‘wake up’ to the growing Communist or ‘Red’ menace, and to the possibility of a Russian-style revolution occurring here.

A typical example of this occurred in Surbiton in February, 1920, and careful exploration of local newspaper coverage can help piece the full details together. Held under the auspices of the new ‘Middle Classes Union’ (MCU), an organisation founded in 1919 to protect the middle classes from Socialism, strikes and general working-class agitation, a lecture on ‘The Bolshevik Terror’ was given in the large hall of the Surbiton Assembly Rooms (pictured) by Mr. George Curnock, who was described in the local press as a ‘well-known London journalist’.

Soviet Surbiton?

Presided over by Mr. G.C. Hodson, a ‘large and deeply interested audience’ listened to Curnock for an hour and a half while he described the ‘men and forces’ which, he claimed, were trying to bring Bolshevism to England; he also dealt with various aspects of life in Russia under the new Soviet regime. In what was called a series of ‘vivid pictures’, the lecturer showed to the audience the ‘type of men’ who advocated Bolshevism in Russia and the methods they had adopted to deal ‘with those who do not agree with them’.

Curnock also dwelt upon what he alleged was the strong relationship between the Bolshevists in Russia and their ‘admirers and would-be imitators’ in Britain. The revolutionary Socialism of today, he argued, was the Communism of Karl Marx, who had taught the working-man to look upon his employer as an ‘active enemy’ instead of a friend. Moreover, in Curnock’s estimation, all Communists were confirmed students of Karl Marx, whether they were found in Russia as Bolshevists, or in England ‘as alleged leaders of British labour’.

London, said Curnock, had in recent years shielded several men, including Peter the Painter, one of the Sydney Street anarchists from a well-known siege in 1911, and other men who had since gone on to directly join Lenin and Trotsky in Russia.

Revolution, Curnock told his Surbiton Assembly Room audience,  had not yet been stirred up in England, ‘but it behoved all who loved their country to be prepared to defend it against the vile forces of revolution and anarchy’, forces which, ‘in the the name of Bolshevism or Communism or in some other guise’, would – if they were not watchful – ‘throw Britain into the abyss in which Russia was already sinking…’.

Bariatinsky and Her Fears

A few months later, the local Middle Classes Union organised another anti-Bolshevik event in the form of an open air fete, held at Raven’s Ait, a small island on the River Thames (‘by kind permission of Kingston Rowing Club’), which is just a ten-minute walk away from the site of the Surbiton Assembly Rooms. Guest of honour at the event was Princess Bariatinsky (1871-1921), an aristocratic refugee from Russia.

Bariatinsky (see photo) had been a famous theatre actress and socialite in Czarist Russia, who had taken the stage-name of Lydia Yavorska, and eventually became a staunch critic of the Bolsheviks and their revolution. The new Communist regime had issued an arrest warrant for her, but the Princess had made a daring escape from Russia before they could detain her.

After music from a band heralded her arrival at the Raiven’s Ait event, and she was introduced to local members of the MCU, the Princess spoke of her experiences in Soviet Russia. She read a letter which, she said, she had just received from her brother, which had informed her of his wife’s death of typhus in a Russian prison. The condition of the people in Russia, the Princess said, ‘under Lenin’s savage and inhuman rule was simply appalling’, it being the ‘most merciless tyranny ever recorded in history’, a situation which she had personally escaped from. An account of her escape, she said, was about to appear in a journal.

Local members of the MCU continued to highlight their concerns about Socialism and Bolshevism for the rest of 1920, often seeking to link the new Labour Party in Surbiton and Kingston with the ‘Red Peril’ posed by Bolshevik Russia and its agents. In October, 1920, Mr. A. P. Crouch, the Hon. Secretary of the Kingston Branch of the MCU, penned a letter to the Surrey Comet newspaper in which he claimed that the Labour Socialists were ‘out for the nationalisation of everything’. Nationalisation in Russia, he warned, had ‘spelt absolute chaos’. He added: ‘We do not want the same result in England’.

In fact, the Bolshevik Revolution remained a useful ideological weapon for organisations such as the MCU, whose activists in Surrey and elsewhere remained markedly keen to always link the Soviet regime to all industrial unrest, or indeed any other signs of discontent, in the Britain of the 1920s.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was published here in October, 2017.

The other Philby: The far right sympathies of St. John Philby

While there has been tremendous interest in the life and traitorous activities of the notorious spy Kim Philby, not many people are aware that he had a highly controversial father, St. John Philby, whose sympathies lay not with Communism but with extreme nationalism and fascism.

In fact, Harry St. John Bridger Philby (1885-1960), more commonly known as Jack Philby, had an equally colourful career: educated at Westminster and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, he was an explorer, writer and dedicated British Arabist. He also spent some time as a colonial intelligence officer. In the First World War, he had worked for the British administrative authorities in Baghdad. Much of this background context can be read about in his autobiography, Arabian Days, published in London in 1948.

A notably complex figure, St. John Philby (see photo) apparently had a fearsome temper and could be quite volatile, with a reputation for contrariness and a love-hate attitude to women. But he was a good talker and could make a persuasive case in political negotiations and diplomatic scenarios. In so far as there have been biographical studies of St. John Philby, these have tended to concentrate on his prodigious career as a writer, mapmaker and expert on all things Arabic, together with his long friendship with King Ibn Saud. Indeed, such was his love of Arab culture, and his extensive work as an adviser to Kings and Princes in the Middle East, he became known in some quarters as ‘Philby of Arabia’, and was clearly quite proud of having worked with the famous T.E. Lawrence (‘Lawrence of Arabia’) on Middle Eastern affairs as part of the Colonial Office in the early 1920s.

This was largely at the behest of Winston Churchill, who was keen to sort out the mess the British had left in the area after conflicting promises had been made to both Arabs and Jews during the Great War, and much time was invested in trying to stabilizse the UK’s Palestine Mandate. However, becoming disillusioned with the work, St. John Philby had resigned in 1924, and took on a major role as an adviser to Ibn Saud.

St. John Philby spoke several languages fluently, took a deep interest in the archaeology and history of the desert Kingdoms, and converted to the Muslim faith in 1930, although some of his friends doubted the sincerity of this conversion. During the 1930s he was increasingly enthusiastic again about finding some sort of ‘settlement’ in the Middle East as a way of bringing about peace and reducing tensions, and by the late 1930s had persuaded himself that the British government’s policy of ‘partition’ between Arabs and Jews was probably the best solution, although some of his friends were quite surprised he had adopted this stance.

British People’s Party

But what is less well-known and researched into by scholars is St. John Philby’s growing sympathy for fascism and the extreme right during the late 1930s. Only a small number of historians, such Richard Thurlow and Richard Griffiths, have explored St. John Philby’s proto-fascism. More needs to be said.

Again, like his personality, the process of St. John Philby’s conversion to fascism was complex. It was partly shaped by his pacifism, his dislike of war and his enthusiasm for the British government’s policy of appeasement. Politically, he actually saw himself as a Socialist and had pro-Labour sentiments, and even wanted to stand as a Labour Party candidate some day. Yet he felt that it was imperative for Britain and Germany to come to an agreement of some kind and thus avoid the ‘spilling of human blood’ in another European war. Things came to a head in the spring of 1939. St. John Philby penned a long letter to the Manchester Guardian, which was published on April 25th, in which he advocated the removal of ‘the grievances that make for war’, especially those of Germany, Italy and Japan.

One result of this letter was that he made contact with Lord Tavistock, who had founded the rightwing ‘British People’s Party’ in the same month, was a strong advocate of Social Credit economic theories, and was highly critical of ‘war and usury’. Tavistock emphasised that the BPP were not pacifists but were ‘averse to being dragged into war’. It was a message that clearly appealed to St. John Philby.

By May, 1939, St. John Philby had joined the BPP, and – as a ‘big catch’ for the party – was quickly serving on its executive council. He seems to have taken on board all the BPP’s main policy positions, although quite how he felt about some of the clearly anti-Semitic and conspiratorial ideas of Tavistock and other leading BPP activists is difficult to discern. Tavistock and his lieutenants were highly critical of, and quite obsessed with, the role of ‘Money Power’ (code for Jews) in politics, and evidently admired Adolf Hitler for his willingness to ‘challenge’ the machinations of ‘International Finance’.

However, by mid-June, St. John Philby had agreed to stand as a potential BPP parliamentary candidate and, sure enough, in July, 1939, this wish came true – possibly sooner than he had expected. He thus stood for the BPP in a bye-election at Hythe, a normally safe Conservative seat.

Jack St. John Philby threw himself into the campaign with much vigour and energy. He spoke three times a night at public meetings, and found his rightwing anti-war message was drawing support from a diverse collection of sympathisers, ranging from direct supporters of Sir Oswald Mosley’s ‘British Union of Fascists’ (known by then as ‘British Union’) and other rightwing extremists, through to activists with the Peace Pledge Union (PPU). Those who spoke in support of St. John Philby at his meetings included not just Lord Tavistock but also highly controversial and outspoken pro-Nazis such as Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, General J.F.C. Fuller, John Beckett, Captain Vincent Collier, and Dr. Meyrick Booth.

During the course of the bye-election campaign the BPP also produced a nakedly anti-Semitic pamphlet, Alien Money Power in Great Britain. This criticised the Conservative candidate by suggesting that the City of London firm that he worked for was run by Jews. The bye-election result was, however, humiliating for St. John Philby. Out of a vote of 22,169, he gained just 576 votes and lost his deposit in the process.

Significantly, in the run-up to the War, the British government had picked up various rumours that St. John Philby had been involved in secret negotiations with representatives of Nazi Germany and Franco’s Spain on behalf of Saudi Arabia, whereby, if war broke out, Saudi Arabia would continue to sell oil to Spain, which would then supply it to Germany. Naturally, this had set alarm bells ringing in Whitehall, and St. John Philby became a person of great interest and suspicion to MI5, the domestic Security Service (and probably to MI6, too). When he had become involved with the BPP, this had evidently reinforced MI5’s concerns and suspicions about St. John Philby’s activities and sympathies.

Fascist themes

Indeed, one can see why MI5 were worried about St. John Philby and the circles he was now involved with. A quick perusal of key BPP publications can show how strongly it’s anti-war message was deeply bound up with anti-Semitic and pro-Nazi sentiments. Nn the very first issue of the BPP’s newspaper, The People’s Post, for example, for July, 1939, the front-page headline was ‘Who Wants War’, and it was claimed that ‘mass destruction’ was wanted by ‘International Finance’ solely to boost profits for the ‘Money Power’. The same issue also contained an article by St. John Philby himself, who presented the Hythe bye-election as a choice between ‘peace and war’, and said that people needed to ‘face the fact that Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini have restored their countries to the front rank’. He proclaimed: ‘We stand uncompromisingly for negotiations with Germany, Italy and Japan…’. If Britain went to war, he wrote, it’s Empire was ‘doomed’.

Even after the outbreak of war, rather than close itself down, the BPP continued its activities, and also set up an off-shoot called the ‘British Council for a Christian Settlement in Europe’ (BCCSE). In October, 1939, the BCCSE issued A Statement on the European Situation, and the signatories on the leaflet included St. John Philby. Lord Tavistock was particularly keen to obtain what he regarded as an ‘understanding’ between Britain and Germany i.e. some kind of negotiated truce. As with the other leading lights in the BPP and BCCSE, St John Philby’s support for the extreme right had become an even more acute cause for concern within MI5 and in the Home Office, especially as fears grew of possible German invasion of the British Isles and who might be tempted to collaborate. In August, 1940, while travelling from Saudi Arabia to India, St. John Philby was arrested and detained under Defence Regulation 18B, which was being used to round up and intern many leading fascists and pro-Nazis.

Ironically, as well as MI5’s fears about St. John Philby and what he might possibly do in the event of German invasion, the British authorities had been tipped off about his trip to India by none other than his former employers and close friend Ibn Saud, who had claimed that St. John Philby had become ‘mentally deranged’ and was planning to engage in ‘anti-British propaganda’ in India and the USA.

St. John Philby was not held in detention that long. In 1941, partly as a result of various letters written in his support by both friends and former colleagues at the Foreign Office, who claimed that he was simply incapable of being ‘disloyal’, he was called before an 18b Advisory Committee board. The three members of this board concluded that he was a harmless fanatic rather than a potential traitor, and recommended his release.

Yet, even out of prison, it seems the lure of politics was still difficult to resist for St. John Philby in wartime Britain. In 1942, Sir Richard Acland set up a new party named ‘Commonwealth’. Although critics quickly saw this new party as quasi-fascist, St. John Philby joined up and soon became treasuer of its Westminster branch. He was soon being attacked by opponents, especially the Communist Party of Great Britain, who dug up and publicised his previous BPP activities. Disillusioned by Acland’s seeming reluctance to fully defend him, St. John Philby left the Commonwealth party and eventually turned back to immersing himself in Arabism and his love of everything Arab.

He did not live to see his son, Kim, defect to the USSR in 1963. It would have been truly fascinating to have seen his reaction had he lived.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Britain’s long summer of unrest in 1919

Britain has faced a number of periods of acute anxiety after major events during its modern history, including in the months after the end of the First World War. Indeed, just over century ago, the country faced great uncertainty and increasing social and industrial unrest, which appeared to reach a climax during the long hot summer of 1919.

Back in July, 2019, an article in the monthly BBC History magazine revisited this period of post-war anxiety. Entitled ‘Britain’s Red Summer’, and penned by the historian Clifford Williamson, it told the dramatic story of a summer when a combination of race riots, mutinies and violent strikes left politicians very uncertain about how to deal with such disorder.

At the same time, the Government was also haunted by fears of Bolshevism spreading to the colonies and Dominions, or even of Bolshevik revolution breaking out in Britain itself.

Such worries were exacerbated by a number of police strikes across the country. As Williamson noted, for example, in Liverpool three nights of serious rioting had occurred after members of Merseyside police took industrial action and the city had been left in the hands of ‘the hooligan element’. By the time the unrest died down, a thousand soldiers had been drafted in and more than 600 people arrested.

According to Williamson, the Liverpool riot was just one of ‘many instances of violence and disorder to punctuate Britain’s “Red Summer” of 1919’. Glasgow, to give another example, saw considerable unrest in the east end of the city and in the shipyards of the Clyde. In Cardiff in Wales, tensions over lack of jobs for returning demobilised troops resulted in a series of ugly racial attacks on foreign labourers. Local Greek and Chinese businesses were also vandalised, and a gang of white men attacked West Indians or foreign sailors.

Perhaps of greatest concern to the Government was evidence of discontent and mutinous protest over conditions in British military camps and the apparent slowness of demobilisation. In the eyes of the Cabinet, there was a danger that soldiers were becoming ‘politicised’ and susceptible to ‘Communist’ agitation, and great pressure was brought to bear on local authorities to ensure demobilised soldiers regained their old jobs as quickly as possible. This was often bad news for women and ‘foreign’ labourers, who had become instrumental to the economy during the war. Moreover, local employers were not necessarily keen to re-employ large numbers of former soldiers, especially if they were now disabled from battle injuries. Unemployment among ex-service men thus remained high during 1919, and various marches and protests were staged by veterans’ associations, some of which turned disorderly.

My own research work on the period has tended to support this analysis of 1919 as a hot and ‘Red’ summer of upheaval and discontent, a time of anxiety which exerted an impact even on the leafy suburbs of Kingston and Surbiton, the local areas I specialise in. Earlier in the year the local Surrey Comet in Kingston had already devoted an editorial to what it called ‘A Surge of Strikes’, which, the newspaper claimed, threatened ‘to engulf the whole community’. The Comet had asked: ‘What is afoot? Strike, strike, strike. One would imagine that the whole industrial population had become infected with some virus as deadly in its effect as the bite of a mad dog’.

By May and June, 1919, the Comet was devoting space to the possibility of a police strike in the Metropolitan Police area of London. Some officers and constables did indeed take action, but the strike collapsed after the government offered better pay and conditions. Police members who did take action were severely punished, often with instant dismissal, and a number were banished from the service for life and blacklisted from other occupations (the photo above shows some dismissed police officers returning their uniforms).

Anxiety over industrial unrest and the seeming rise of ‘Red’ agitation also saw the formation in Kingston of a local branch of the Middle Classes Union (MCU), which had been founded in London in March, 1919. The new local branch held its first meeting in Surbiton Assembly Rooms in July. The object of the MCU was stated to be to protect the ‘middle classes’ from both the rise of labour and the exploitation of rich capitalists, and also to prevent the trade unions from ‘paralysing’ the country.

Similarly, a local branch of the British Empire Union (BEU), which had originally been formed in 1915 as the Anti-German Union, voiced conspiratorial claims that ‘Germans’ and ‘Reds’ were in a secret alliance to undermine the country, as the ‘Hun’ could not accept his defeat in the war.

Significantly, in early August, 1919, the Surrey Comet produced an editorial entitled ‘Drifting Towards Anarchy’, which complained that the striking Yorkshire Miners were now ‘bringing ruin’ upon the industries of England, and claimed that the happenings of the last few days ‘cannot fail to awaken serious misgivings as to the future of our beloved land’. A railway strike on the London and South-West Railway also saw the Comet allege that the striking railway workers had ‘lost the respect of all fair-minded men’.

At national level, as Williamson’s article so ably pointed out, there was sufficient upheaval across the country during the summer of 1919 to suggest that, at the time, post-war Britain ‘remained a nation at war with itself’.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics 

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Twickenham’s ‘Conshie’ – Cecil Templeman and his objections to military service

A special guest blog by Simon Fowler

Around 16,000 men refused to take up arms or fight for Britain during the First World War for any number of religious, moral, ethical or political reasons. Such men were known as ‘conscientious objectors’.

In south-west London, at least one Twickenham man was among their numbers. Cecil Templeman, a twenty-year old draper’s clerk, lived in Heath Gardens. As the war progressed and the losses mounted anger increased against the ‘conshies’, as they became known. And, although it seems clear that Cecil was not an easy person to deal with, he certainly suffered at the hands of the authorities.

The Military Service Act, 1916 (Original Source: Imperial War Museum collections)

After conscription was introduced in March 1916, men who did not wish to serve could appeal to a tribunal made up of local worthies. Most appellants wished for additional time to put their affairs in order before enlisting, rather than objecting to the war in principle. However, Cecil objected on other grounds.

He told the local tribunal in Twickenham: ‘in no way will I assist the military machine, because I believe all war is wrong and contrary to the teaching of Jesus Christ’. He added that he was prepared to suffer the consequences, even imprisonment, should this appeal be refused. The tribunal was puzzled about why he was refusing to serve: ‘He has not advanced to any person that he had objections to warfare previous or to the present war’. As a result, the appeal was disallowed.

He appealed again to the Middlesex County Tribunal on 24th March 1916, but this too was disallowed because, in the eyes of the Tribunal, he had not made a strong enough case for exemption, as he was neither a member of a church nor another organisation with pacifist beliefs. And, indeed, ‘He gave no evidence… holding any definite views with regard to the war’.

Cecil Templeman was arrested on 2nd April 1916, after ignoring his call-up. Police Sergeant Bridgeman told the court that, when approached, Cecil said ‘all right’ and went quietly.

Cecil’s subsequent appearance before local magistrates descended into farce when his lawyer, Mr. Hawkin, complained that there were no labour representatives on the bench and asked for the case to be referred to the High Court as a result. When pressed, Hawkin was unable to clearly describe his client’s objection to military service, but continued to raise the need for increased labour representation. It made no difference. The appeal was dismissed.

Templeman was taken from the court under military guard and transferred to the barracks in Hounslow for basic training. Two weeks later, however, he was court-martialled by the Army for ‘Insubordination and Disobedience’. Cecil was sentenced to one year imprisonment, which was commuted to 112 days. He was discharged from the Army with disgrace.

But this did not mean he could return to his civilian occupation. Templeman was sent to a work centre where conscientious objectors could stay for the remainder of their sentences. The conditions were designed to be just as bad, if not worse, than those experienced by soldiers at the front. Newspaper reports suggest that Templeman spent some time at the Princetown Work Centre inside Dartmoor Prison.

Government propaganda placed objectors under great pressure to enlist (Wikimedia Commons)

By August 1918, he was working at the Iron Construction Works in Isleworth, when he was arrested by Detective Sergeant Woollet, who accused him of being an absentee from military service. In his defence Cecil protested that he had no order to join the Army and, when charged, ‘said he did not admit anything’. Woollet said that the order had come from Scotland Yard, and then claimed that Mr. Templeman had changed addresses without authority. Rather naively, Templeman exclaimed that ‘they could not send him to prison on evidence that was untrue’. He was remanded in prison for a week.

When Cecil appeared in court again, DS Woollet said that Templeman had appeared before Brentford police court accused of being a deserter. He had ignored instructions to re-join the Army the previous Ocober. A Mrs. Weaver gave evidence in Templeman’s defence. She did ‘not consider he was an absentee, but a conscientious objector’, and had a letter from Lord Kitchener, who was the Secretary of State for War, about Cecil’s release.

His mother told the court that he had never been in the services, but ‘had been a conscientious objector ever since the war had started: he had been for two years in this “battle”‘.

Nevertheless, the court found that Templeman was an absentee. At this stage, Cecil clearly lost he temper: ‘I am in the right! For God’s sake, say I am in the right!’ He then took off one of his shoes ‘and hurled it at the Bench, but it struck the rail in front of the chairman and fell to the ground’. Still struggling violently, two warrant officers ‘hustled him downstairs to the cells’.

We do not know what happened to Cecil thereafter. Most conscientious objectors were relesed from prison in the months after the Armistice of 1918. By 1939, Templeman was living in Hampton with his brother.

The above is based on a blog by Catherine Williams at: https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/conscription-conscience-twickenham/

Simon Fowler formerly worked at The National Archives, Kew, and is now a professional writer and researcher, specialising in the two World Wars. He is Vice-Chair of the Richmond Local History Society.

(Images: Imperial War Museum and Wikimedia Commons)

How Napoleon almost destroyed the French Revolution

Fascinated by the life and career of Napoleon? One suspects that many cinemagoers with an interest in historical epics will be making their way to the box office this autumn for director Ridley Scott’s new biographical drama Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix as the French Emperor, which is due to hit the big screen in November, 2023.

In fact, interest in France’s controversial Emperor seems to grow year by year, including work by academic historians, especially new critical research on the myths and realities of Napoleon’s career. Recent books have thus included, for example, Napoleon: The Man Behind the Myth (2019) by Adam Zamoyski, and Napoleon: The Decline and Fall of An Empire, 1811-1821 (2022) by Michael Broers.

Kingston University has its own expert on Napoleon, Professor Marisa Linton. Indeed, back in April, 2022, that month’s issue of the BBC History magazine had an article by Marisa on Napoleon Bonaparte’s period as dictator and Emperor, which considered in detail the extent to which he can be seen as an heir to, or as a break with, the original ideals of the French Revolution.

‘Napoleon in his Study in 1807’ (1837)

In the article Dr. Linton, who is Professor Emerita in History at Kingston University, London, and is one of Britain’s leading scholars on the French Revolution, explored the degree to which Napoleon proclaimed himself a defender of French Republican ideals while, at the same time, did a great deal to dismantle them.

Napoleon, of course, led what was effectively a military coup d’etat in November, 1799, claiming that he was, in fact, saving ‘the cause of liberty and equality’. It was a spectacular gamble on Napoleon’s part, but it paid off: within days, he had been declared ‘First Consul’ of France.

Very few people had seen this coming. However, interestingly, as Professor Linton pointed out, one man had – Maximilien Robespierre, who had warned as early as 1792 that a military strongman could seize political power at some point and become a new Julius Caesar or Oliver Cromwell. His warnings had been ignored.

Myth and reality

Napoleon’s coup in 1799 is seen by many historians, as Professor Linton pointed out, as the end of the French Revolution and as one of the great ‘step-changes’ in European history. In many ways, the new Napoleonic regime sealed the fate of the original ideals promoted by the French Revolutionaries concerning individual liberty, equality, freedom of speech and religious tolerance. Although Napoleon himself promised that the ‘French Revolution need fear nothing’, and claimed that he was completing the Revolution, the reality was arguably very different. Indeed, as is well-known, in 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte even crowned himself Emperor Napoleon.

Nonetheless, as so often in French and wider European history, the situation was also notably complex when it came to the political practice. As Professor Linton observed, Bonaparte was not an absolute dictator, in that he gave people things they wanted: stability, after years of uncertainty; reconciliation with the Catholic Church; and some spectacular military successes for France.

On the other hand, all this came at a huge cost: victories on the battlefield led to the loss of many lives, possibly up to several millions (estimates of military deaths range between 2.5 and 3.5 million, while there were up to 3 million civilian deaths). Moreover, although the French Revolutionaries had abolished nobility, Napoleon partly shored up his personal rule by generously awarding those who served him loyally and well with honours and titles in return. In addition, although the Revolutionaries had decreed an end to all slavery in 1794 (in line with their ideals of liberty), Napoleon reversed this and reimposed slavery throughout French colonies.

Yet, ultimately, was Napoleon really able to extinguish all the ideals of the French Revolution in the longer term? Marisa Linton pointed out towards the end of her article in BBC History magazine that its ideals made a ‘fight back’ in the Nineteenth Century, and have arguably remained an influence on concepts of modern democracy ever since.

Marisa Linton is the author of Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (2013), and recently co-authored with Michel Biard Terror: The French Revolution and its Demons (2021). She recently gave a keynote conference speech on Virtue and Denunciation in the French Revolution, at SPU14, Amsterdam, and in July this year was interviewed on French radio about the life and career of Robespierre.

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: This is an updated version of a blog first published here in March, 2022.

Prof. Marisa Linton

Marisa Linton very much in demand for her expertise on the French Revolution

Professor Marisa Linton, who is Professor Emerita in History at Kingston University, London, continues to be much in demand internationally for her expert knowledge of the leaders of the French revolutionary terror, including Robespierre.

Professor Linton (pictured) gave a keynote public talk for CARP (Character Assassination, Illiberalism, and the Erosion of Civic Rights), held at SPU124, Amsterdam, on 22nd June, 2023. Her talk was entitled, ‘I was Always the First to Denounce my Own Friends’: Virtue and Denunciation in the French Revolution’.

Marisa’s talk followed one by Professor Simon Burrows, of Western Sydney University. Both historians explored the ways in which character assassination and antiliberalism often go hand in hand. Enlightenment ideals led to a surge of liberalism and sparked the birth of Europe’s first liberal democracies, but these developments also triggered strong counter reactions.

You can listen to the recording of her talk here (it starts 7 minutes and 40 seconds in):

https://spui25.nl/programma/tyranny-and-terror

Professor Linton was also interviewed recently on French radio by Emmanuel Laurentin about ‘Robespierre as the incarnation of the Terror’. The half-hour radio interview, first broadcast on 12th July, was part of a series that France Culture has conducted on the ways that historians’ views on Robespierre have changed in recent years. the other interviews were with the French historians Sophie Wahnich, Herve Leuwers and Jean-Clement Martin, and the American historian Steve Kaplan. Professor Linton’s talk is also available as a podcast.

Marisa is one of the UK’s leading experts on all aspects of French history during the Eighteenth Century and, over the course of her distinguished career, has specialized in the origins and nature of the French Revolution, its core ideas and its aftermath. In 2021, she acted an an advisor on the 6-part American TV series Dangerous Liaisons, which premiered in November, 2022. She has also contributed articles to popular history journals such as BBC History and History Today.

Marisa is the author of the critically-acclaimed Choosing Terror: Virtue, Friendship and Authenticity in the French Revolution (2013). Her latest book, co-authored with Michel Biard, is Terror: The French Revolution and its Demons (2021), which is available from Polity.

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Mobilising women in the 1920s: The case of Mrs. Peel and the British Housewives Association

Accusations of ‘profiteering’ by retailers and business traders became a regular and controversial theme on the Home Front in Britain during the Great War, when rationing made it a near daily challenge for many mothers and housewives to feed their families adequately. Allegations that certain retailers were being dishonest and were heartlessly exploiting shoppers were also linked to stereotypes about national identity. It was simply not ‘British’ or ‘fair’, or even ‘cricket’, for traders to engage in such behaviour, especially during a time of national emergency.

But what is quite striking about this is the extent to which such allegations about profiteering and shady practices by various small shopkeepers regularly continued during the immediate post-1918 peacetime years. In fact, such patterns of protest can be periodically detected throughout the 1920s.

Mrs. C.S. Peel

The 1920s were also, of course, a decade of greater women’s activism in Britain, and middle-class women in particular were determined to find a critical ‘voice’ on what they saw as the great issues of the day, including the lingering perception that ‘profiteering’ was still rampant across society. Significantly, there were a number of middle-class pressure groups formed by women at both national and local levels to protect what they saw as the importance of the family unit and to fight back against the evils of ‘profiteering’. Some of these groups have received close academic attention and scholarly research, while others remain less familiar to historians and are still relatively under-researched.

One such group arguably in need of more scholarly scrutiny was the British Housewives’ Association, founded in March, 1926, by Mrs. C.S. Peel, who became its chair and, it seems, its main source of ideas and policies. The Association was concerned with the price and handling of food, and also with the building of ‘well-planned’ homes. Indeed, in the eyes of Mrs. Peel, the object of the Association was ‘to wage a war on profiteers and to help in all matters appertaining to the home’. According to one newspaper at the time, the housewives of Britain were banding together to ‘check profiteering, defeat the food tricksters, and insist on clean food’, and the new Housewives’ Association would be ‘a new and powerful weapon for fighting the high price brigade of food traders’. The new Association would also be ‘non-political’.

Members of the committee of the Association included, among others, Gertrude Best, formerly the assistant Matron of St. Thomas’s Hospital, Mrs. Leslie Pyke, and Dame Maud McCarthy. But much of the leadership drive and energy undoubtedly came from Mrs. Peel.

Who was Mrs. Peel?

The founder of the British Housewives’ Association had an interesting background. Constance Dorothy Evelyn Peel (1868-1934) came from Herefordshire and, aged 17, had moved to Folkstone. She later moved to Twickenham, where she started a career in journalism, and married an electrical engineer, Charles Steers Peel, in 1894. Writing under the name of ‘Mrs. C.S. Peel’, she began to specialise in ways of easing household costs, and her first book, The New Home (1898), described how she had started a household on modest financial means. Over the next few years, she edited journals such as Hearth and Home, and also published a series of popular cookery books.

In fact, during the First World War, she had been something of a ‘celebrity’, and contributed regularly to the press as a writer on all subjects concerned with the affairs of the home, especially food and how to feed the family in a cheap but still nutritious way.

On food, for example, she advocated the need to economise in cooking, making creative use of war ration cooking ingredients, and advised readers on how to create special ‘Victory’ recipes. In fact, she received an O.B.E. as one of the three women appointed as advisers to the government’s Food Ministry.

In 1918, she also became editor of the women’s page of the Daily Mail, a position she held until 1920. And during the early 1920s, despite some ill-health, she continued to work tirelessly to improve the domestic lives of all women, whether working-class or middle-class, advocating the need for strong family units, upstanding morals, and decent housing for all. Interestingly, some of this emphasis on unity and ‘classlessness’ can be seen in her book A Year in Public Life (1919), in which she claimed that the War had brought people together in a new way: ‘Women of all classes have been brought together – together they must remain, gaining ever greater Knowledge and a greater sympathy for each other’ (p.296).

Housewives in Action

On Wednesday, March 24th, 1926, the newly-formed British Houswives’ Association held its official foundation event and first public meeting at Caxton Hall, Westminster, in central London. Presiding at the meeting was Mrs. Beatrice Drapper, who was presented as the Housewives’ champion on the nation’s Food Council. One week before the Caxton Hall meeting, Mrs. Drapper had told the press that the main object of the new Association was to teach housewives to ‘protect themselves’. She explained: ‘We hope to form branches in every borough, so that women throughout the country can keep in touch with each other and provide an effective check on the profiteer’. Drapper added: ‘By keeping the Association non-political we hope to be able to bring in a number of women who could do much to help, but who have been debarred from joining any associations in the past because of the political element’.

The Caxton Hall meeting was presented in news reports as ‘mobilising’ women who were taking up arms ‘in the war on profiteers’, and the meeting’s key slogan and message to women was ‘Protect Yourselves’. The attendees at the meeting drew up a plan of campaign’ under the ‘generalship’ of Mrs. C.S. Peel, who had become chair of the Association. Peel told the meeting: ‘It is possible for a large union of women if necessary to apply the power of the boycott’. She added: ‘It has been done in other countries and it can be done here’. Peel also emphasised that ‘honest’ traders had no need to fear the Association and, indeed, ‘should welcome it’.

A number of campaign ideas were put forward at the meeting by Peel and others. These included drawing up ‘white lists’ of bakers who sold bread the right way; distribution of leaflets theatening concerted action if ‘abuses’ were not remedied; and the appoinment of investigators to ‘protect housewives against dishonest traders’. It was also suggested that Members of Parliament and Councillors on local authorities should be canvassed to ‘press for food reform’.

Impact?

Although the Association was good at creating publicity, and Mrs. Peel in particular was adept at making use of her celebrity reputation to further push the organisation’s agenda, it is difficult to measure the extent to which the Association had any real long-term impact. Although it continued for a while afterwards, it seems that it found it difficult to compete with the arrival and growth of various other women’s organisations in the 1920s, all of them eager to build upon the momentum created by the extension of the voting franchise in 1918 and again in 1928.

Moreover, it would appear that, despite the populist message against profiteering and ‘tricksters’, Mrs. Peel and her Association’s rather conservative core doctrine was much less appealing to new female voters than she had anticipated. The new younger female voters appeared less interested in themes associated with the War years, and the idea of settled domestic bliss seemed rather old-fashioned and suffocating. Exciting new possibilities beckoned instead. This was now the age of the ‘Flappers’ and a new hedonism.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

Note: This is an updated version of a blog previously published here.

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Doom and Decline: The gloomy world of Dean Inge

There has been some interesting coverage on social media in recent days of the views of William Ralph Inge (1860-1954), who was known as the ‘Gloomy Dean’ or the ‘Gloomy Philosopher’, and was Dean of St. Pauls Cathedral in London for 23 years.

Why was he ‘Gloomy’? This was a description first pinned on him by the Daily Mail newspaper, and it is a label that remained with him for the rest of his career. A Mail reporter had apparently attended some lectures Inge had delivered, and was shocked when Inge had called democracy ‘a superstition and a fetish’ and had argued that the Church should not cooperate with the Spirit of the Age – in other words, with the new social and other changes in society. The idea of ‘progress’ was dangerous and misleading. Inge (pictured) also feared that the population was increasing far too quickly, which would lead to the ‘decline’ of Britain’s cultural fabric and core institutions. Above all, Inge morbidly felt that there was a general ‘crisis of civilization’ and society was in a state of ‘decay’, views which appear similar to the ideas of the German philosopher Oswald Spengler.

The rise of Inge

Inge was approached to become Dean of St. Pauls Cathedral in 1911, when the British Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, wrote to Inge, who was at that time a Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University. Asquith told Inge that he wanted to ‘restore the tradition of scholarship and culture’ that had been associated with the Deanery in the past. Inge seemed the perfect candidate. He was well-read, intellectually talented, and the author of numerous books and articles.

However, when Inge became Dean, it became very apparent to others that the new man was hardly a quiet scholar in the sense that many possibly expected. Indeed, Inge held a range of very strong, outspoken and controversial views, and used his position as Dean to engage in regular journalism on a huge variety of topics, to the point where he arguably gained ‘celebrity’ status during the interwar period. While parts of the Church gave him sympathetic support, other clergymen were evidently uneasy at his ‘antics’. Inge was undoubtedly seen as a great preacher, who could draw in large and enthusiastic audiences, whether he was speaking at St. Pauls or in other cathedrals around the country. Yet, there was also the suspicion that Inge enjoyed deliberately provoking his listeners and causing uproar, which he often more than succeeded in doing.

In fact, Inge was not just a man of the cloth but was also very ‘political’ – he loved to network with the leading politicians of the day, and had many contacts in the leading professions, as well as in banking, the arts, literary circles, and many other walks of life.

Inge and his wife loved to entertain famous people at their dinner parties at home. He also became notorious for his biting wit, and was often sought out by newspapers for his thoughts on the prominent topics of the day, delivering short articles and commentaries at short notice.

However, both his sermons and journalism were strongly and uncompromisingly shaped by his deep pessimism and his clear discomfort with ‘modernity’. In 1919 he had some major publishing success with the first volume of his Outspoken Essays (which included a whole chapter devoted to a defence of eugenics) and, shortly afterwards, was invited by Lord Beaverbrook to pen a weekly column for the Evening Standard newspaper. Inge also contributed to the Morning Post and numerous other newspapers.

The ‘breakdown’ of society

Many of the ideas expressed in these writings were culturally conservative and, at times, notably reactionary. He was, for example, very pro-capital punishment and wanted it extended to include all ‘anti-social offenders’. Similarly, he said that human beings are ‘born unequal’, and expressed scepticism that women should have equal voting rights with men. Modern society, he argued, was heading in the wrong direction and was ‘breaking down’ in both its morality and the quality of population.

There were regular complaints from angry readers about Inge’s views, and if one engages in a quick survey of this extensive material it is clear why he became such a figure of controversy. Inge was a member, for example, of the Eugenics Society, and his views on ‘race’ and the quality of the population often featured in his articles. Although Darwinism had challenged the very essence of Christian faith, Inge apeared to see no contradiction in marrying his faith with a perverted form of evolutionary philosophy. He was thus a Social Darwinist and regularly warned that when ‘natural selection’ is not allowed to operate, the result is inevitably a ‘C3’ population. Too much social welfare, he warned, ‘penalized the successful while susidising the weak and feckless’.

The state, he felt, should instead intervene in matters of population for a clear and single purpose – to engage in engineering the quality of the ‘race’. He said that, ideally, the British population should consist of no more than ’20 million’, all with ‘certificates of bodily and mental fitness’.

Although Inge stepped down from his role as Dean in 1934, and retired to a house called Brightwell Manor, near Oxford, he remained active and vocal. He clearly admired aspects of the Hitler regime, especially its policy of eugenics and rejection of democracy. Remaining gloomy, though, he feared war was inevitable between Germany and Britain. Although his hopes that war could be avoided were briefly raised by Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement towards Germany, it is apparent that by June, 1940, Inge believed Britain had definitely lost the war. Controversially, by 1942, he was advocating that Britain should open peace negotiations with Germany, which, understandably, did not go down well at all with his critics, and embarrassed some in the Church.

This idea was possibly reinforced by a personal tragedy: one of his sons, Richard Inge, had resigned from the clergy to become an RAF pilot and was killed in action.

All in all, the ‘Gloomy Dean’ was a significant figure in the interwar period who, despite being highly critical of ‘modernity’, was only too happy to exploit the new mass media to communicate his ideas and become something of a modern ‘celebrity’ in the process.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History

(All images: Wikimedia Commons)

.

Did he break free? John Major’s tensions with Margaret Thatcher

There have been times when the current British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has shown evident discomfort at the antics of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and the embarrassing shadow of Johnson has undoubtedly interfered with Sunak’s attempts to put his own distinctive stamp on his time in Downing Street.

Similarly, serious tensions between former Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May and the then-PM Johnson, exemplified in Johnson rudely walking out of the chamber of the Commons while May was speaking from the back-benches, are also good examples of how Prime Ministers who have lost their grip on power are unable to psychologically ‘let go’ of their time in the top job.

These examples very much remind me of a previous time in the late 20th century when a former PM and a serving PM, both from the same party, ended up disliking each other for both personal and ideological reasons: Margaret Thatcher and John Major.

Historians of British Conservative Party history in the 1980s and early 1990s were given interesting new insights into this relationship by The National Archives (TNA) back in 2018, with the release of formerly secret government files, which provided fascinating new evidence on the tensions between Thatcher and her successor as Conservative Prime Minister, John Major. I made some careful study of this material in the TNA.

Thatcher’s Final Years as PM

Margaret Thatcher was British Prime Minister (PM) from 1979-1990, and, towards the end of her time in office, had alarmed her Cabinet by stating in an interview with the press that she intended to ‘go on and on’.

By the late 1980s and early 1990s, a significant number of the Cabinet had decided that Thatcher had developed something of a ‘bunker mentality’ in 10 Downing Street, with her refusing to acknowledge the unpopularity of some of her own cherished policies, especially the controversial Poll Tax.

Some of her Cabinet Ministers had concluded that, far from being an election ‘winner’ (she had won three General Elections: 1979; 1983; and 1987), Mrs. Thatcher was now a potential election ‘loser’. They effectively engineered her removal as Conservative leader and PM in late 1990 (she resigned in November, 1990), and a new leadership contest was held to find a fresh head for the Conservative Party and a new PM (under Britain’s unwritten constitution, power can be handed over from one PM to another without the need for a General Election). Much to the surprise of many commentators, John Major, at that point still seen as a Thatcherite loyalist (a ‘dry’ in Thatcher’s terminology), but not as very charismatic or forceful, inherited the former PM’s crown and became the new Premier.

Breaking the Chains?

However, Major, who had served periods as Chancellor of the Exchequer and also as Foreign Secretary under Thatcher, was determined not to be seen as just another Thatcherite free-market clone. He wanted to ‘break free’ from Mrs. Thatcher’s long shadow and imprint his own brand of Conservatism on the Party and country. Indeed, in private, he resented any attempt by his predecessor to be a ‘back seat driver’ (so to speak) of his new Premiership.

On the other hand, Major was still somewhat limited in how he could go about building his own distinctive version of Conservatism, as Thatcher still had notably strong support both on the Conservative back-benches in Parliament and among the wider grass-roots members of the Party. We should also remember that Major, seeking to appease those backbenchers and push on further with the Thatcher ‘revolution’, was primarily responsible for one of the most controversial acts of privatisation of the 1990s: the breakup and selling off of the rail network to the private sector, despite strong warnings from critics that this was a recipe for disaster.

As many historians are aware, Margaret Thatcher, who relished her reputation as the ‘Iron Lady’, never really recovered from her loss of the Premiership, and what she clearly regarded as a ‘betrayal’ by members of her own Cabinet. She found it very difficult to adjust to her new life as an ex-Premier.

Files newly released by The National Archives (TNA) at Kew, south-west London, in 2018, appeared to provide further confirmation of this. One file in particular included a record of a private meeting held between Mrs. Thatcher’s anointed successor, Major, and Thatcher herself, just weeks after her loss of power, where she sought to lecture the new PM on his economic policy.

Although Thatcher had regarded Major as a loyalist and as somebody who would carry on the Thatcherite ‘revolution’, she soon became disillusioned with his leadership. As the new PM, Major had quickly announced that he intended to scrap the Poll Tax and also voiced the need for a more ‘compassionate’ version of Conservatism.

Cold War?

Dismayed by this, Thatcher’s relationship with Major soon became frosty. In fact, the new evidence seemed to show how rapidly relations soured between the two. In a bid to clear the air, and to reassure her that he was not changing what he called the main ‘drift of policy’, Major invited his predecessor to a meeting in his rooms in the House of Commons in January, 1991. However, this did not go too well and there was evident tension in the room. Mrs. Thatcher, perhaps predictably, sought to offer advice on what she saw as ‘excessively high’ interests rates which, she said, were risking a recession.

She also compared Major’s economic policy to Winston Churchill’s controversial decision as Chancellor in 1925 to return Britain to the Gold Standard, which had resulted in deflation and mass unemployment. As an official Minute in the file noted: ‘Mrs. Thatcher said conditions on the economy were very tough. She believed there was a danger of repeating Churchill’s historic error’.

Major clearly resented this comment. He responded that the situation was ‘not remotely comparable’. Mrs. Thatcher, though, refusing to back down, then went on to criticize Major’s decision to abandon her flagship policy, the Poll Tax. Major appears to have hit back, telling Thatcher that the tax was not ‘politically sustainable’.

Although the meeting seems to have ended in a cordial way, Major apparently remained determined to show Mrs. Thatcher that he was now very much the main driver of policy and power in the country, and that she needed to accept her retirement with grace.

As the 1992 General Election loomed, secret plans were drawn up by the Conservative Party Chairman, Chris Patten (a close ally of Major), to ensure that Thatcher did not have a big presence in the upcoming Conservative campaign, including in the final rally of the campaign. However, according to the new files, Mrs. Thatcher’s supporters, when they found out about this, let it be known to Patten that she would be ‘hurt’ about this.

In the end, Major and Patten compromised, and Thatcher was invited to a large rally at the beginning of the campaign instead. Major could still not quite break free from the wishes of the ‘Iron Lady’.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: An earlier version of this blog was published here in January, 2018.

A History of Ken: Symposium offers new historical and cultural perspectives on director Ken Russell

Historians of film and other academic researchers were in high heaven at an event to celebrate and reassess the impact of one of Britain’s leading movie directors of the post-war period. The Courtyard Theatre at Kingston University’s Town House held an excellent symposium on the life and film career of director Ken Russell on 6th July, titled Refocus: The Films of Ken Russell – A Symposium and Book Launch.

The event saw early career researchers and a number of other scholars and experts from Britain, the USA, Japan and a number of other locations contribute a series of papers on aspects of Ken Russell’s film career, and also saw the very welcome launch of a new book from Edinburgh University Press, Refocus: The Films of Ken Russell (2023), which is edited by Kingston’s film studies specialist Dr. Matthew Melia, who also chaired some of the symposium panels.

As Matthew pointed out at one stage, the new book seeks to move our understanding of Ken Russell (1927-2011) beyond the enfant terrible image that he has often been lumbered with over the years, and has been put together to help refocus the lens and reassess Russell’s reputation.

Russell (pictured above in 1971) was a truly pioneering TV and film director, and is particularly famous for such classic movies as Women in Love (1969), The Devils (1971), Tommy (1975), Lisztomania (1975), and Valentino (1977), and media historians also rightly regard his TV documentary work as having a huge influence on a new generation of younger programme-makers in the 1960s and 1970s and, arguably, well beyond.

Since 2014 there has been some new critical momentum developing around the work of Southampton-born Russell, and his reputation as a provocateur of British post-1945 cinema has been reconsidered by academics. That reputation, historically, served to obscure the richness, originality, and pioneering nature of his artistic output. Recent academic work has thus sought to recuperate and restore his place within British (and, indeed, world) cinema, with a new wave of fresh research, publications and conferences, and exciting PhD projects. Russell’s work in both film and television, and its global reach, is ripe for reconsideration and new perspectives.

New perspectives on Ken

To this end, the symposium at Kingston saw a variety of papers on, for example, the development of Russell’s authorial-critical reputation, his performance styles and collaborations in the 1960s, the representation of architecture and social class in Russell’s work from 1956 to 1971, Russell’s relationship to romanticism, the reception of Russell’s work in Japan, the role of masculinities in his films, and new evidence from the archives on Russell’s unmade and unrealised projects.

The symposium also benefited tremendously from the attendance of Elize Russell, who was married to Ken for 10 years and has become a superb defender and publicist for his work, and Roger Crittenden, who had a distinguished career as a film editor at the BBC and worked on Russell’s masterpiece Delius: Song of Summer (which was made for the BBC’s arts series Omnibus and broadcast to critical acclaim in 1968).

From the historian’s point of view, the work of Ken Russell conveys a fascinating story of how the British film industry in the post-1945 period exhibited a markedly ambivalent attitude to cutting-edge and ‘rebellious’ directors such as Russell. Similarly, film critics of various shades also displayed a love/hate relationship with Russell’s work, and Ken often found himself marginalized because it was difficult for many critics to ‘pigeon hole’ his work. Moreover, the British media tended to misunderstand his work and, in many ways, deliberately set out to mount highly negative moral campaigns against Russell’s filmic output, ensuring that he was regularly perceived by the British public as too ‘controversial’, ‘shocking’ and ‘scandalous’. His work was often swept up in the moral panics that seemed to sweep Britain in the 1970s.

His movie The Devils, for example, was especially treated with hostility. The film, which starred Oliver Reed (see pic) and Vanessa Redgrave, was a historical drama with a ‘horror’ dimension, and was an account of the fall of a 17th Century Roman Catholic priest accused of witchcraft. Critics unfairly dismissed the film as ‘pornographic’, ‘grotesque’ and ‘corrupting’, and it was treated harshly by the censors. It was banned by seventeen local councils across Britain. It was also condemned by the Vatican and banned in a number of countries. Yet, it was one of the most popular films of 1972 at the British box office, and saw very respectable financial returns in other key markets around the world.

Russell was later able to put together a Director’s Cut of the film, which was finally screened in 2002, much to the delight of fans and aficionados of Russell’s ground-breaking work. Astonishingly, however, the full version of the movie is still difficult for the general public to view, even today.

Pleasingly, the symposium at Kingston presented a very ’rounded’ account of the life and work of Russell, providing a nice ‘circularity’ to Ken’s richly satisfying range of projects, and highlighting much of his later work, a period in his life when he was constantly in need of funds but remained full of innovative ideas for new films and projects. Above all, he remained passionately devoted to film right to the very end of his life.

All in all, the symposium was a most successful day and will undoubtedly contribute to the process of fully restoring Ken Russell’s reputation as one of the most important British film directors of the second half of the 20th century.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History

(All images: Wikimedia Commons)

Women Against the Female Vote: The anti-Suffragists in Chiswick in South-West London

Back in 2014-2015 I spent some time in the archives investigating a still relatively under-researched aspect of women’s history, the anti-Suffrage groups that had emerged in Edwardian Britain.

How did this come about? My general research on British history had focused on the collation of material on middle-class ‘defence’ and protest movements in south-west London and – when I was exploring some pre-1914 local sources – I increasingly encountered newspaper reports on the ‘direct action’ aspects of suffragette activities.

In 1913, for example, two suffragettes set fire to the Tea Pavilion situated at the famous Pagoda in Kew Gardens, completely burning it out. Just a short while later, another suffragette was arrested for setting fire to the letters in the main mail-box of the Post Office located in George Street in Richmond-upon-Thames.

But what I was less prepared for was the extent to which there was also activity by women who opposed the whole idea of votes for women. Indeed, although it might appear a very odd trend when considered now, we tend to forget that – before 1918 – not all women wanted the vote, and some were even prepared to voice their antipathy openly and mobilise other like-minded women through organised public campaigns.

As far as I could tell, although more research and scholarship is now available on the topic (especially after we recently celebrated the 100th Anniversary of women gaining the vote), there has been surprisingly little research conducted on this type of ‘anti-Suffrage’ politics.

The main group involved in this backlash against the suffragettes in the London area was the ‘National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage’, which appears to have been organised and sustained by some very middle-class women. In south-west London, a branch of this organisation was quite active in the leafy middle-class suburbs of Chiswick and the surrounding areas, with other groups at Kew and Richmond. Let me share some of my findings.

Chiswick’s Anti-Suffrage Activists

The Chiswick branch of the National League started life in mid-1909 under the title of the ‘Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League’. In October, 1909, the League held its first general meeting and reported a membership of 56. The following month, a public meeting was organised by the League at Chiswick Town Hall, where one of the women speakers, Miss Kathleen Howieson, warned gravely that the granting of suffrage to women would mean ‘class war’ and ‘Socialism’, and that – in turn – would mean ‘revolution and anarchy’.

Using a combination of further occasional public meetings, letters written to the local press, and drawing-room meetings held at private houses, together with some campaigning outside polling stations during elections, the League continued its anti-suffrage activities. At the 3rd AGM of the Chiswick branch, held in late 1911, their Annual Report claimed that there was ‘steady growth’ in the membership.

Debating Women’s Rights in Chiswick

In 1912, a ‘well-attended’ social gathering of the League held in the Hogarth Room of Chiswick Town Hall saw a number of speeches being made, all expressing notably conservative and sceptical attitudes to the whole idea of giving women greater rights. Miss Norma Maunder, for example, in her speech, asserted that man ‘was the backbone of the country and women the backbone of the homes of the country’. She said that women were ‘absolutely unfitted’ for governing a nation. The League could also draw upon anti-Suffrage literature and propaganda printed and issued at national level (see the postcard below, for example).

In November, 1913, the League scored quite a publicity coup when they organised a public event at Chiswick Town Hall to debate the following resolution: ‘That it is contrary to the best interests of the State and the Empire that women should have the Parliamentary vote’. Mrs. Norris, the President of the local branch, speaking for the resolution, argued in her address that the ‘whole mentality’ of man was better able to cope with the question of Empire than women, and women’s ‘first duty’ was to the future generation. Miss Coombs, speaking against the resolution, said she did so because she believed that women had ‘the right to be free’.

When the audience was invited to vote, 253 supported the League, and 189 were against the resolution, giving the League a majority of 64. Needless to say, the League were evidently very satisfied with this result.

Stepping Back

After the outbreak of war in 1914, the Chiswick branch of the National League sent a letter to the local press saying that, given the outbreak of hostilities, they would now ‘drop all outside propaganda work’ for the duration. However, at their 6th AGM held in November that year, Mrs. Norris warned that, while they had ceased political propaganda for the time being, ‘the political aspect was only one side’, and it was still necessary that ‘the cause’ should not be allowed to suffer.

Interestingly, this stance echoed the decisions that had also been taken by pro-Suffrage campaigners, who had also brought a temporary halt to their campaigning to win votes for women, and had adopted a ‘patriotic’ policy designed to fully help the country in all ways now that it was at war with the ‘hun’.

Compared to the suffragette movement, the available evidence suggests that the National Anti-Suffrage League remained very much a small-scale and minority organisation. However, it would be fascinating to find out more about the anti-suffrage activists, and explore the extent to which they may have been organising similar local campaigns in other parts of the country. My research on this remains ongoing.

Dr. Steven Woodbridge is a Lecturer in History and Politics

(Images: Wikimedia Commons)

Note: This is an updated and rewritten version of a blog first published here in October, 2015.