Oswald Mosley


Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet was a British politician who rose to fame in the 1920s as a Member of Parliament and later in the 1930s became leader of the British Union of Fascists. Mosley inherited the title 'Sir' by virtue of his baronetcy; he was the sixth baronet of a title that had been in his family for more than a century when he succeeded to the title in 1928.
After military service during the First World War, Mosley was one of the youngest Members of Parliament, representing Harrow from 1918 to 1924, first as a Conservative, then an independent, before joining the Labour Party. At the 1924 General Election he stood in Birmingham Ladywood against future Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, coming within 100 votes of beating him.
Mosley returned to Parliament as Labour MP for Smethwick at a by-election in 1926 and served as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Labour Government of 1929–31. He was considered a potential Labour Prime Minister but resigned due to discord with the Government's unemployment policies. He chose not to defend his Smethwick constituency at the 1931 general election, instead unsuccessfully standing in Stoke-on-Trent. Mosley's New Party became the British Union of Fascists in 1932.
Mosley was imprisoned in May 1940, and the BUF was banned. He was released in 1943 and, politically disgraced by his association with fascism, moved abroad in 1951; he spent the majority of the remainder of his life in Paris. He stood for Parliament during the post-war era but received very little support.

Life and career

Early life and education

Mosley was born on 16 November 1896 at 47 Hill Street, Mayfair, Westminster. He was the eldest of the three sons of Sir Oswald Mosley, 5th Baronet, and Katharine Maud Edwards-Heathcote, daughter of Captain Justinian H. Edwards-Heathcote of Apedale Hall, Staffordshire. He had two younger brothers: Edward Heathcote Mosley and John Arthur Noel Mosley.
The family traces its roots to Ernald de Mosley of Bushbury, Staffordshire in the time of King John in the 12th century. The family was prominent in Staffordshire and three baronetcies were created, two of which are now extinct. His five-time great-grandfather John Parker Mosley, a Manchester hatter, was made a baronet in 1781. His branch of the Mosley family was the Anglo-Irish family at its most prosperous, landowners in Staffordshire seated at Rolleston Hall near Burton-upon-Trent. His father was a third cousin to the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, father of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon the wife of Prince Albert, second son of King George V eventually becoming King George VI. Elizabeth reigned as his Queen from 1936 to 1952.
After his parents separated he was brought up by his mother, who went to live at Betton Hall near Market Drayton, and his paternal grandfather, Sir Oswald Mosley, 4th Baronet. Within the family and among intimate friends, he was always called "Tom". He lived for many years at his grandparents' stately home, Apedale Hall, and was educated at West Downs School and Winchester College.
Mosley was a fencing champion in his school days; he won titles in both foil and sabre, and retained an enthusiasm for the sport throughout his life.

Military service

In January 1914, Mosley entered the Royal Military College, Sandhurst but was expelled in June for a "riotous act of retaliation" against a fellow student. During the First World War he was commissioned into the British cavalry unit the 16th The Queen's Lancers and fought in France on the Western Front. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as an observer, but while demonstrating in front of his mother and sister he crashed, which left him with a permanent limp, as well as a reputation for being brave and somewhat reckless. He returned to the trenches before the injury had fully healed and at the Battle of Loos passed out at his post from pain. He spent the remainder of the war at desk jobs in the Ministry of Munitions and in the Foreign Office.

Marriage to Lady Cynthia Curzon

On 11 May 1920, he married Lady Cynthia "Cimmie" Curzon, second daughter of the 1st Earl Curzon of Kedleston,, Viceroy of India, 1899–1905, Foreign Secretary, 1919–1924, and Lord Curzon's first wife, the U.S. mercantile heiress, the former Mary Leiter.
Lord Curzon had to be persuaded that Mosley was a suitable husband, as he suspected Mosley was largely motivated by social advancement in Conservative Party politics and Cynthia's inheritance. The 1920 wedding took place in the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace in London – arguably the social event of the year. The hundreds of guests included King George V and Queen Mary, as well as foreign royalty such as the Duke and Duchess of Brabant.
During this marriage, he began an extended affair with his wife's younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, and with their stepmother, Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston, the American-born second wife and widow of Lord Curzon of Kedleston. He succeeded to the Baronetcy of Ancoats upon his father's death in 1928, which entitles the current holder to the prefix style Sir.

India and Gandhi

Among his many travels, Mosley travelled to India accompanied by Lady Cynthia in 1924. His father-in-law's past as Viceroy of the British Raj allowed for the acquaintance of various personalities along the journey. They travelled by ship and stopped briefly in Cairo.
Having initially arrived in Ceylon, the journey then continued through mainland India. They spent these initial days in the government house of Ceylon, followed by Madras and then Calcutta, where the Governor at the time was Lord Lytton.
Mosley met Gandhi through C.F. Andrews, a clergyman and an intimate friend of the "Indian Saint", as Mosley described him. They met in Kadda, where Gandhi was quick to invite him to a private conference in which Gandhi was chairman. They enjoyed each other's company for the short time they were together. Mosley later further described Gandhi as a "sympathetic personality of subtle intelligence".

Marriage to Diana Mitford

Cynthia died of peritonitis in 1933, after which Mosley married his mistress Diana Guinness, née Mitford. They married in secret in Germany on 6 October 1936 in the Berlin home of Germany's Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Adolf Hitler was their guest of honour.
Mosley spent large amounts of his private fortune on the British Union of Fascists and tried to establish it on a firm financial footing by various means including an attempt to negotiate, through Diana, with Adolf Hitler for permission to broadcast commercial radio to Britain from Germany. Mosley reportedly made a deal in 1937 with Francis Beaumont, heir to the Seigneurage of Sark, to set up a privately owned radio station on Sark.

Member of Parliament

By the end of the First World War, Mosley had decided to go into politics as a Conservative Member of Parliament, as he had no university education or practical experience due to the war. He was 21 years old and had not fully developed his own political views. He was driven by, and in Parliament spoke of, a passionate conviction to avoid any future war, and this seemingly motivated his career. Largely because of his family background and war service, local Conservative and Labour Associations preferred Mosley in several constituencies—a vacancy near the family estates seemed to be the best prospect. He was unexpectedly selected for Harrow first. In the general election of 1918 he faced no serious opposition and was elected easily. He was the youngest member of the House of Commons to take his seat, though Joseph Sweeney, an abstentionist Sinn Féin member, was younger. He soon distinguished himself as an orator and political player, one marked by extreme self-confidence, and he made a point of speaking in the House of Commons without notes.

Crossing the floor

Mosley was at this time falling out with the Conservatives over Irish policy, and he condemned the operations of the Black and Tans in Ireland against civilians. Eventually, he crossed the floor to sit as an Independent Member on the opposition side of the House of Commons. Having built up a following in his constituency, he retained it against a Conservative challenge in the 1922 and 1923 general elections.
The Liberal Westminster Gazette wrote that Mosley was:
By 1924, he was growing increasingly attracted to the Labour Party, which had just formed a government, and in March he joined it. He immediately joined the Independent Labour Party as well and allied himself with the left.
When the government fell in October, Mosley had to choose a new seat, as he believed that Harrow would not re-elect him as a Labour candidate. He therefore decided to oppose Neville Chamberlain in Birmingham Ladywood. Mosley campaigned aggressively in Ladywood, and accused Chamberlain of being a "landlords' hireling". The outraged Chamberlain demanded that Mosley retract the claim "as a gentleman". Mosley, whom Stanley Baldwin described as "a cad and a wrong 'un", refused to retract the allegation. It took several re-counts before Chamberlain was declared the winner by 77 votes and Mosley blamed poor weather for the result. His period outside Parliament was used to develop a new economic policy for the ILP, which eventually became known as the Birmingham Proposals; they continued to form the basis of Mosley's economics until the end of his political career.
In 1926, the Labour-held seat of Smethwick fell vacant, and Mosley returned to Parliament after winning the resulting by-election on 21 December. Mosley felt the campaign was dominated by Conservative attacks on him for being too rich, including claims that he was covering up his wealth.
Mosley and his wife Cynthia were committed Fabians in the 1920s and at the start of the 1930s. Mosley appears in a list of names of Fabians from Fabian News and the Fabian Society Annual Report 1929–31. He was Kingsway Hall lecturer in 1924 and Livingstone Hall lecturer in 1931.

Office

Mosley then made a bold bid for political advancement within the Labour Party. He was close to Ramsay MacDonald and hoped for one of the great offices of state, but when Labour won the 1929 general election he was appointed only to the post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a position without Portfolio and outside the Cabinet. He was given responsibility for solving the unemployment problem, but found that his radical proposals were blocked either by his superior James Henry Thomas or by the Cabinet.
Mosley realising the economic uncertainty that was facing the nation due to the death of her domestic industry, eventually put forward a whole scheme in the "Mosley Memorandum", which called for high tariffs to protect British industries from international finance, for state nationalisation of main industries, and for a programme of public works to solve unemployment. Furthermore, within the memorandum, it laid out the foundations of the corporate state which intended to combine businesses, workers and the Government into one body as a way to "Obliterate class conflict and make the British economy healthy again". Mosley published this memorandum due to his dissatisfaction of the laissez-faire attitude that both Labour and the Conservative party held and how passive it was to the ever increasing globalisation of the world and thus looked to a modern solution to fix a modern problem. However, it was rejected by the Cabinet, and in May 1930 Mosley resigned from his ministerial position. At the time, the weekly Liberal-leaning paper The Nation described his move: "The resignation of Sir Oswald Mosley is an event of capital importance in domestic politics... We feel that Sir Oswald has acted rightly — as he has certainly acted courageously — in declining to share any longer in the responsibility for inertia." In October he attempted to persuade the Labour Party Conference to accept the Memorandum, but was defeated again. Thirty years later, in 1961, Richard Crossman described the memorandum: "... this brilliant memorandum was a whole generation ahead of Labour thinking." As his book 'The Greater Britain' focused on the issues of free trade, the criticisms against globalisation that he formulated can be found through the critiques of contemporary globalisation. He warns nations that buying cheaper goods from other nations may sound appealing but ultimately ravage your domestic industry and lead to large unemployment as seen in the 30s. Mosley in regards to free trade argues that they are trying to "challenge the 50-year-old system of free trade which exposes industry in the home market to the chaos of world conditions, such as price fluctuation, dumping, and the competition of sweated labour, which result in the lowering of wages and industrial decay.”

New Party

Dissatisfied with the Labour Party, Mosley founded the New Party. Its early parliamentary contests, in the 1931 Ashton-under-Lyne by-election and subsequent by-elections, arguably had a spoiler effect in splitting the left-wing vote and allowing Conservative candidates to win. Despite this, the organisation gained support among many Labour and Conservative politicians who agreed with his corporatist economic policy, and among these were Aneurin Bevan and Harold Macmillan. It also gained the endorsement of the Daily Mail newspaper, headed at the time by Harold Harmsworth.
The New Party increasingly inclined to fascist policies, but Mosley was denied the opportunity to get his party established when during the Great Depression the 1931 General Election was suddenly called—the party's candidates, including Mosley himself running in Stoke which had been held by his wife, lost the seats they held and won none. As the New Party gradually became more radical and authoritarian, and as critics of the fascists in the Spanish Civil War emerged in the press, art and literature, many previous supporters defected from it. Shortly after the 1931 election, Mosley was described by The Manchester Guardian:
When Sir Oswald Mosley sat down after his Free Trade Hall speech in Manchester and the audience, stirred as an audience rarely is, rose and swept a storm of applause towards the platform—who could doubt that here was one of those root-and-branch men who have been thrown up from time to time in the religious, political and business story of England. First that gripping audience is, then stirred and finally, as we have said, swept off its feet by a tornado of yelled at the defiant high pitch of a tremendous voice.

Fascism

After his election failure in 1931, Mosley went on a study tour of the "new movements" of Italy's Benito Mussolini and other fascists, and returned convinced that it was the way forward for Britain. He was determined to unite the existing fascist movements and created the British Union of Fascists in 1932. The BUF was protectionist, strongly anti-communist and nationalistic to the point of advocating authoritarianism. It claimed membership as high as 50,000, and had the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror among its earliest supporters. The Mirror piece was a guest article by Daily Mail owner Viscount Rothermere and an apparent one-off; despite these briefly warm words for the BUF, the paper was so vitriolic in its condemnation of European fascism that Nazi Germany added the paper's directors to a hit list in the event of a successful Operation Sea Lion. The Mail continued to support the BUF until the Olympia rally in June 1934.
John Gunther described Mosley in 1940 as "strikingly handsome. He is probably the best orator in England. His personal magnetism is very great". Among Mosley's supporters at this time included John Strachey, the novelist Henry Williamson, military theorist J. F. C. Fuller, and the future "Lord Haw Haw", William Joyce.
Mosley had found problems with disruption of New Party meetings, and instituted a corps of black-uniformed paramilitary stewards, the Fascist Defence Force, nicknamed blackshirts. The party was frequently involved in violent confrontations and riots, particularly with Communist and Jewish groups and especially in London. At a large Mosley rally at Olympia on 7 June 1934, his bodyguards' violence caused bad publicity. This and the Night of the Long Knives in Germany led to the loss of most of the BUF's mass support. Nevertheless, Mosley continued espousing anti-Semitism. At one of his New Party meetings in Leicester in April 1935, he stated, "For the first time I openly and publicly challenge the Jewish interests of this country, commanding commerce, commanding the Press, commanding the cinema, dominating the City of London, killing industry with their sweat-shops. These great interests are not intimidating, and will not intimidate, the Fascist movement of the modern age." The party was unable to fight the 1935 general election.
In October 1936, Mosley and the BUF attempted to march through an area with a high proportion of Jewish residents. Violence, since called the Battle of Cable Street, resulted between protesters trying to block the march and police trying to force it through. At length Sir Philip Game, the Police Commissioner, disallowed the march from going ahead and the BUF abandoned it.
Mosley continued to organise marches policed by the Blackshirts, and the government was sufficiently concerned to pass the Public Order Act 1936, which, amongst other things, banned political uniforms and quasi-military style organisations and came into effect on 1 January 1937. In the London County Council elections in 1937, the BUF stood in three wards in East London, its strongest areas, polling up to a quarter of the vote. Mosley made most of the Blackshirt employees redundant, some of whom then defected from the party with William Joyce. As the European situation moved towards war, the BUF began to nominate Parliamentary by-election candidates and launched campaigns on the theme of Mind Britain's Business. Mosley remained popular as late as summer 1939. His Britain First rally at the Earls Court Exhibition Hall on 16 July 1939 was the biggest indoor political rally in British history, with a reported 30,000 attendees.
After the outbreak of war, Mosley led the campaign for a negotiated peace, but after the Fall of France and the commencement of aerial bombardment overall public opinion of him turned to hostility. In mid-May 1940, Mosley was nearly wounded by assault.

Internment

Unbeknownst to Mosley, the British Security Service and Special Branch had deeply penetrated the BUF and were also monitoring him through listening devices. Beginning in 1934, they were increasingly worried that Mosley's noted oratory skills would convince the public to provide financial support to the BUF, enabling it to challenge the political establishment. His agitation was officially tolerated until the events of the Battle of France in May 1940 made the government consider him too dangerous. Mosley, who at that time was focused on pleading for the British to accept Hitler's peace offer of March, was detained on 23 May 1940, less than a fortnight after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. Mosley was interrogated for 16 hours by Lord Birkett but never formally charged with a crime, and was instead interned under Defence Regulation 18B. The same fate met the other most active fascists in Britain, resulting in the BUF's practical removal at an organized level from the United Kingdom's political stage. Mosley's wife, Diana, was also interned in June, shortly after the birth of their son ; the Mosleys lived together for most of the war in a house in the grounds of Holloway prison. The BUF was proscribed by the British Government later that year.
Mosley used the time in confinement to read extensively in Classics, particularly regarding politics and war, with a focus upon key historical figures. He refused visits from most BUF members, but on 18 March 1943, Dudley and Norah Elam accompanied Unity Mitford to see her sister Diana. Mosley agreed to be present because he mistakenly believed that it was Lady Redesdale, Diana and Unity's mother, who was accompanying Unity. The internment, particularly that of Lady Mosley, resulted in significant public debate in the press, although most of the public supported the Government's actions. Others demanded a trial, either in the hope it would end the detention or in the hope of a conviction.
In November 1943, Home Secretary Herbert Morrison ordered the release of the Mosleys. After a fierce debate in the House of Commons, Morrison's action was upheld by a vote of 327–26. Mosley, who was suffering with phlebitis, spent the rest of the war confined under house arrest and police supervision. On his release from prison, he first stayed with his sister-in-law Pamela Mitford, followed shortly by a stay at the Shaven Crown Hotel in Shipton-under-Wychwood. He then purchased Crux Easton House, near Newbury, with Diana. He and his wife remained the subject of much press attention. The war ended what remained of Mosley's political reputation.

Post-war politics

After the war, Mosley was contacted by his former supporters and persuaded to return to participation in politics. He formed the Union Movement, which called for a single nation-state to cover the continent of Europe and later attempted to launch a National Party of Europe to this end. The Union Movement's meetings were often physically disrupted, as Mosley's meetings had been before the war, and largely by the same opponents. This led to Mosley's decision, in 1951, to leave Britain and live in Ireland. He later moved to Paris. Of his decision to leave, he said, "You don't clear up a dungheap from underneath it."
Shortly after the 1958 Notting Hill race riots, Mosley briefly returned to Britain to stand in the 1959 general election at Kensington North. Mosley led his campaign stridently on an anti-immigration platform, calling for forced repatriation of Caribbean immigrants as well as a prohibition upon mixed marriages. Mosley's final share of the vote was 7.6%.
In 1961, he took part in a debate at University College London about Commonwealth immigration, seconded by a young David Irving. He returned to politics one last time, contesting the 1966 general election at Shoreditch and Finsbury, and received 4.6% of the vote. After this, Mosley retired and moved back to France, where he wrote his autobiography, My Life.
In 1977, by which time he was suffering from Parkinson's disease, he was nominated as a candidate for Rector of the University of Glasgow in which election he polled over 100 votes but finished bottom of the poll.

Personal life

Mosley had three children with his first wife Lady Cynthia Curzon.
In 1924, Lady Cynthia Curzon joined the Labour Party, and was elected as the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent in 1929. She later joined Oswald's New Party and lost the 1931 election in Stoke. She died in 1933 at 34 after an operation for peritonitis following acute appendicitis, in London.
Mosley had two children with his second wife, Diana Mitford :
Oswald Mosley died on 3 December 1980 at Orsay outside Paris, France. His body was cremated in a ceremony held at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and his ashes were scattered on the pond at Orsay. His son Alexander stated that they had received many messages of condolence but no abusive words. "All that was a very long time ago," he said.

Archive

Mosley's personal papers are held at the University of Birmingham's Special Collections Archive.

In popular culture

Alternative history fiction

Comics

Film

Citations

Primary sources

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