Action Replay - Jeffrey Hamm (1983).pdf

(649 KB) Pobierz
FOREWORD
In the introduction to his autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand! Sir
Osbert Sitwell says: 'The hour has now struck for me to start on this
journey to recapture the past. Already I am nearing fifty and the grey
hairs are beginning to show. I have reached the watershed and can see
the stream which I must follow down hill toward the limitless ocean ...
It is indeed time to begin.'
As yet I have no grey hairs, but I have passed the fifty mark, and so
must start on the same journey myself. But why, it may be asked,
should I want to write an autobiography at all? To this I answer that, in
my opinion, every human life ought to hold enough of interest to merit
some record, if only as a contribution to family history. But because the
greater part of my life has been spent in the service of the political
movements founded and led by Sir Oswald Mosley, both before and
after the war of 1939—1945, and because for several years I was
closely associated with Sir Oswald as his private secretary, up to his
death in December 1980, I believe that the story of my life has a wider
interest, and that I write as a witness of events of more than passing
significance.
In writing of my wartime experiences in the Falkland Islands and South
Africa I have drawn on material contributed by me to The European, a
magazine of the nineteen-fifties. For the verification of dates and other
points of detail I have relied chiefly on My Life by Oswald Mosley and
Oswald Mosley by Robert Skidelsky. My grateful thanks are due to
Father Brocard Sewell for helpful advice and for kindly preparing and
editing the original typescript, which has subsequently been
considerably amended.
Jeffrey Hamm
CHAPTER ONE
"Never apologies; say it again and be ruder the second time!" was the
advice the elder statesman Lloyd George gave to the young Oswald
Mosley, Conservative, Independent and Labour M.P. and junior
Minister before founding the British Union of Fascists. Many years
later Mosley passed this piece of homespun advice on to me. I trust I
have never been unduly rude, but I have certainly never apologised for
my membership of British Union and of the post-war Union Movement,
nor for being private secretary to Mosley up to his death in December
1980. This book will examine the facts as distinct from the myths and
the reader may well agree with me that my life has been a source of
modest pride rather than regret.
A holiday in London in 1934 changed my whole life. One Saturday
evening I came across a Blackshirt speaker shouting above the din of a
howling mob on the corner of Brondesbury Road and Kilburn High
Road. I naively asked a particularly noisy interrupter why he did not
keep quiet and listen to the speaker. He gave me a reply that set me
thinking: "We haven't come to listen to the meeting. We've come to
smash it!" At the end of the meeting the Blackshirts marched away to
their local headquarters, and I fell in behind them. That was the
beginning of a long march which led me to some very strange places: to
prison without any charge or trial, and to hospital when I forgot the
golden rule of any sport — never to take your eye off the ball. On that
occasion the ball was a brick which struck my head and laid me low for
several days.
At the end of my holiday I returned to my home in Pontypool in South
Wales and subscribed to all the current British Union publications,
which I devoured avidly. In one of them I read the striking challenge —
'Those who are not for us are against us' — and I had to decide on
which side of the fence I stood. I have never been a mugwump, which
has been defined as someone who sits with his mug on one side of the
fence and his wump on the other. So in March 1935 I filled in an
application form to join the British Union of Fascists, which Sir
Oswald Mosley had launched in October 1932 in the hope of creating a
modern movement that would achieve — as the old political parties
seemed powerless to do — the economic reconstruction that the
country so badly needed, through a great programme of economic
measures on Keynsian lines, which would solve the unemployment
problem through large-scale projects of public works. A number of
well-known and respected names in British politics were thinking along
these lines and it was not until the later years of pre-war and wartime
propaganda that a man or woman holding 'fascist' opinions was
generally assumed to be a villain.
What was Fascism? As it was an intensely nationalistic creed it varied
considerably from one country to another, and I shall concern myself
primarily with the British variety to which I subscribed. Some years
ago I was invited to lecture at Sunderland Polytechnic on the origins
and development of this 'British' Fascism. It was necessary to discuss
Fascist movements in Britain which had preceded the British Union of
Fascists. In 1923 a Miss Rotha Lintorn-Orman had founded the British
Fascists, joined a year later by the late Arnold Leese, who in 1929 had
broken away to form his Imperial Fascist League. So in chronological
terms these were the forerunners of British Union, but to what degree
did the Mosley movement owe its origins to them? The British Fascists
gained some strength during the General Strike of 1926, to which they
were strongly opposed, in that age when it was fashionable for
Oxbridge undergraduates to drive buses and lorries in strike-breaking
activities. But what was Mosley doing during that strike? Leading the
Labour Party in Birmingham and addressing innumerable meetings in
support of the miners, justifiably striking in protest against cuts in their
then miserable wages. This is the first answer to the myth that Fascism
was a right-wing movement. It was in fact a movement of protest
against the gross injustices of the capitalist system, and against that
communism which attacked it only to substitute its own state
capitalism for that of private enterprise.
Arnold Leese certainly had no influence on Mosley, whom he detested.
I shall later examine the allegations of anti-semitism, but Leese had no
doubt on the matter: he always referred to Mosley and to those of us
who followed him as "kosher Fascists", alleging that we were paid by
Jewish interests to propagate a false brand of Fascism, while he
personified its pure and undiluted form !
What of the allegation that Mosley's Fascism was copied from
Mussolini and Hitler? Mosley's first election address, as a Conservative
candidate for Harrow in 1918, contained the extraordinary phrase
'socialistic imperialism', years before anyone had heard of Hitler's
'national socialism.' But if either of these European Fascists had
exercised any influence over Mosley, would it have been from the right
or from the left? Mussolini had been Editor of a socialist newspaper,
and what does the dreaded word 'Nazi' mean? It is, of course, an
abbreviation of the long and cumbersome name of the German party,
translated into English as 'The National Socialist German Workers'
Party'. Nothing very right-wing about that!
But where did British Fascism originate? I profoundly believe the
answer I gave the Sunderland students: in the trenches of the first
World War. Mosley had served with distinction there and in the air, in
the Royal Flying Corps which later became the Royal Air Force. He
lost most of his dearest friends in that holocaust and dedicated the rest
of his life to attempt to save a future generation from the horrors which
he had experienced. He was later joined in British Union by men
typical of that flower of British manhood who had not waited for
conscription to be introduced, but had volunteered to fight in the war to
'make the world safe for democracy'.
His comrades included the distinguished author Henry Williamson,
who wrote so vividly of his war experiences, which left their mark upon
him for life. He had taken part in that Christmas Day truce of 1914,
when British and German soldiers had cautiously ventured out of their
respective trenches, to chat in broken versions of their kindred
languages, and to play football, before such dangerous fraternisation
was sternly forbidden by the brass-hats in both of the High Commands.
On another occasion he had heard a voice crying weakly from a muddy
shell-hole and had crawled down to investigate. There he had found a

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika:

Zgłoś jeśli naruszono regulamin