- Anti-Alienism in England after the First World War – David Cesarani – in Immigrants and Minorities, March 1987
- Pressure Groups, Tory Businessmen and the aura of political corruption before the First World War – Frans Coetzee – in Historical Journal, December 1986
- Military Intelligence and the defence of the realm: the surveillance of soldiers and civilians in Britain during the First World War – David Englander – in British Society for the Study of Labour History, Volume 52, No.1, 1987
- The Ideology of the British Right, 1918-39
G.C. Webber – Croom Helm, London 1987 - Ideological Hegemony and Political Control: the sociology of Anti-Bolshevism 1918-1920 – Stephen White – in Scottish Labour History Society Journal, No.9, June 1975.
- ‘In the excess of their patriotism’: the National Party and threats of subversion – Chris Wrigley – in Warfare, Diplomacy and Politics, ed. Wrigley, London 1986
The essays by Wrigley, White and Coetzee describe, in some detail, many of the right-wing groups which appeared in Britain during the protracted crisis for British capital just before, during and after World War I. All three dovetail, more or less; continuity is carried by individuals and themes spanning the period. Patrick Hannon, Harry Brittain and Henry Page-Croft, all Tory MPs during this period, appear before the first World War and were still politically active at the start of the second.
Croft, Henry Page, 1st Bt. (1881-1947)
Con. MP Christchurch, Jan. 1910-18; Bournemouth,1918-40. Parliamentary Under-Sec., War, 1940-5. A tariff reformer who created the National Party in 1917 and was associated with almost every dissident Conservative organisation thereafter, including the EIA, the Imperial Economic Unity Group, the IDL and the anti-appeasement lobby. He was also a director of the Morning Post after 1924 and Chancellor of the Primrose League, 1928-9. His sister, Lady Pearson, was prospective parliamentary candidate for the BUF in Canterbury. Croft was described by E. T. Raymond as ‘most impressive on first acquaintance … [and] … better heard only once’ (Outlook, 31.1.20).
Hannon, Patrick (1874 -1963)
Irish businessman and Con. MP Birmingham Mosley, 1921-50. Associated with the BCU and the EIA. Vice-Pres. of the Federation of British Industries from 1925. Later a council member of the IDL.
Hannon and Page-Croft came out of the Tariff Reform League, one of the three groups – the others being the Navy League (another of Hannon’s creations) and the Anti-Socialist Union – whose sources of finance are examined by Coetzee. Coetzee concludes that none of them had the kind of funds attributed to them by rumour at the time: there were no ‘Tariff Reform League Millions’.
In Lobster 12 I reported some of Barbara Lee Farr’s research into the role of Patrick Hannon’s British Commonwealth Union (BCU) in attempts to buy off the rising British labour movement after World War I.
British Commonwealth Union
Originally estd. c. 1915 as the Anti-German Union, then as the British Empire Union. Its titular heads after WWI were Lord Derby and the Duke of Northumberland, but its chief organiser was Patrick Hannon. This was an ‘anti-Bolshevik’ organisation funded by industry. It gave birth to the Economic League and in 1926 appeared to merge with the EIA.
Alfred Milner, leader of the Round Table group, was involved in another attempt at this, the British Workers’ League (BWL).
British Workers’ League (1919-c.1925)
A ‘patriotic labour’ movement. Initially estd. as the British Workers’ National League in March 1916. This organisation grew from Victor Fisher’s anti-pacifist Socialist National Defence Committee (created 1915) but also attracted prominent Conservatives such as Lord Milner and Waldorf Astor MP. In 1918 the BWL estd. the National Democratic and Labour Party which returned 10 MPs, but the movement was practically dead by 1922 and in 1925 the organisation changed its name to the Empire Citizens’ League after which it became increasingly orthodox in its conservatism. Published the Empire Citizen.
The BWL was secretly funded by Hannon’s BCU, the money laundered through another of Hannon’s creations, Comrades of the Great War. Havelock Wilson, founder of the Seaman’s Union, one of the union leaders bought by Hannon, was Vice President of the BWL. (1)
Some of these operations were detected at the time. The Hull Times of September 28, 1918, carried a story headlined, “Hull Central Labour Party; attack on the British Workers’ League”. A Doctor Webster (correctly) “alleged that the British Workers’ League was being subsidised by capitalists and the government.”
The BWL was just one of the groups organised by Milner during the war. According to Wrigley others included the National Service League, the Royal Colonial Institute, and the Socialist (sic) National Defence Committee – this last, apparently, the forerunner of the BWL. (2)
Wrigley writes that
“Milner appears to have acted out that favourite of right-wing fantasies – immortalised in the writings of such authors as Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan – of the eminence grise working to save the nation through his public school, Oxbridge, army and Whitehall contacts.”
Were Carroll Quigley’s work on the Round Table movement known by British historians of this period, Wrigley would know that Milner wasn’t acting out a ‘fantasy’. The reference to John Buchan is really rather amusing. Buchan was a minor member of the Round Table group and one or two of his novels drop hints about the massive network that Milner was operating. (3)
Milner crops up in Wrigley’s preamble to his account of the National Party, a right-wing splinter of the Tory Party, founded by Henry Page-Croft MP in 1917.
National Party (Estd 1917)
Founded by Henry Page Croft with Richard Cooper and Lord Ampthill (elected President in 1919). An ultra-Conservative organisation designed to appeal to ‘Patriotic labour’. Manifesto written by F. S. Oliver. The party was a flop. It originally took eight MPs from the Unionist Party but two resigned early, one died before the 1918 election, another was too ill to stand, a fifth member returned to the Conservative Party, and a sixth withdrew in the face of Conservative opposition. The party eventually fielded 27 candidates in 1918. Eleven lost their deposit and only Croft and Cooper (the two remaining MPs) were returned – both without Conservative opposition. The party was disbanded in Jan. 1921 and reconstituted as the NCA. Croft and Cooper re-joined the Conservative Party in April 1921.
The National Party was something akin to a Monday Club of its day, a group of Tariff Reform League members alarmed at the growing uppitiness of the working class and their declining enthusiasm for the war with Germany. In part, like the BWL, the National Party seems to have been a response to the anti-war activities of the Union for Democratic Control – roughly, very roughly, the CND of its day. (4)
As the crisis for British capital peaked and began to wane after 1920/21, many of the groups described in these essays, including the National Party, fizzled out. Page-Croft and his little group of MPs and Peers re-joined the Tory Party. Like the BWL, the National Party preached ‘class peace’, and these two groups, largely funded and supported by the same members of the ruling elites, are almost a right and left ‘face’ of the anti-socialist, ‘class peace’ propaganda movement which dominated much of British domestic politics in the decade after the Russian revolution. (5)
These ‘class peace’ groups form almost half of the 20 or so groups discussed in White’s wonderful essay. For some of them – the Christian Counter-Bolshevik Crusade, the Anti-Bolshevik League of Great Britain, the Moderate Party – little more than the name appears to have survived, and White concentrates on three of the better documented: the British Empire Union, the Liberty League, and the Middle Class Union.
Middle Classes Union (Estd 1919)
Pres., Lord Askwith. Founded ‘to withstand the rapacity of the manual worker and profiteer’ (The Times, 7.3.1919) and to provide essential services during a general strike. In 1921 it became the National Citizens’ Council and by 1926 this had become the National Citizens’ Union.
Liberty League (Estd March 1920)
An ‘anti-Bolshevik’ organisation headed by H. Rider Haggard (author of King Solomon’s Mines etc.). Rudyard Kipling and Lord Sydenham. It collapsed within a year because the treasurer ran off with the money. It was subsequently incorporated within National Propaganda which was run by Admiral Hall.
White wants to distinguish between the hard-right anti-socialist groups and the ‘class peace’ campaigners.
I would be happy to accept White’s suggestion that the ‘class peace’ and the hard right groups were funded by different sections of British capital, but we need more evidence. It’s a nice idea, though, and the conflict between the Confederation of British Industry (remember Beckett’s speech about a ‘bareknuckle fight’ with the government?) suggests that the kind of distinction White wants to make may still be meaningful. The Thatcher wing of the Tory Party certainly represents the revival of a militant, anti-socialist, anti-working class strand in the party which had almost disappeared – gone underground – in the 1950s, to re-emerge in the 1960s as the Monday Club. Mrs Thatcher would have felt very comfortable in the Tory Party of the 1920s – something that comes across very strongly in Webber’s book.
Table 1
Taken From White’s essay
| Name: | Foundation: | Directorships (directors identified): |
Interests represented by directors: |
Methods: | Objects: |
| National Alliance of Employers and Employed |
1916 | 63 (13) | predominantly engineering, banking and railways; many prominent members of FBI |
propaganda, literature, social meetings, ‘economic education’ |
class peace and constructive reform |
| Industrial League and Council | 1919 | 78 (22) | manufacturing, metallurgy, chemicals, brewing |
propaganda, formation of works committees etc |
Whitley councils, industrial harmony, constructive reform |
| Reconstruction Society | 1908 | 32 (7) | foreign manufacturing, oil, mining and assurance; also coal, mining and railways and the Daily Express |
propaganda, literature, meetings | opposition to socialism, defence of the Constitution, ‘true social reform’ |
| British Empire Union | 1916 | 16 (3) | colonial oil and mining, landowning |
patriotic propaganda, intervention in strikes |
opposition to Bolshevism and aliens |
| Middle Class Union | 1919 | 14 (4) | foreign manufacturing, engineering |
propaganda, lobbying | representation of middle class interests, opposition to Bolshevism |
| National Security Union | 1919 | 12 (3) | colonial oil, mining and navigation; the National Review |
propaganda, policing | ‘to combat Bolshevism’ |
| Liberty League | 1920 | 9 (2) | colonial land, tea, rubber investment and banking |
propaganda | opposition to Bolshevism and aliens, ‘constructive reform’ |
Sources:
- Directory of Directors 1919, 1920;
- Who was Who;
- Stock Exchange Yearbook;
- Worker 19 July 1919 (for M.C.U.);
- Workers’ Dreadnought 6 January 1923 (for B.E.U.)
A constant feature of the Tory right-wing has been its xenophobia. Since the Monday Club’s appearance the targets have been black and brown people in Britain. Before the second World War it was the Eastern Europeans in general and the Jews in particular. These were the ‘aliens’. Immediately after World War I, the Tory right found itself in the ecstatic position of being able to conflate all its hate figures: socialism, bolshevism and the ‘alien menace’ were all perceived to be Jewish.
Mrs Thatcher has described socialism as ‘an alien creed’, a theme which reappeared in the Tories’ 1987 election campaign. Are these echoes of the Tories’ themes of the 1920s and 1930s deliberate? Henry Page-Croft’s National Party, the Monday Club of its day, was part of the ‘anti-alien’ agitation which Cesarani shows was much more wide-spread and politically respectable in the 1920s than most commentators have previously acknowledged.
Cesarani shows how, after the forced repatriation of Germans, Austrians, Hungarians and Russians – maybe 40,000 in all – in the decade straddling the war, ‘alien’ became virtually synonymous with Jew – and almost with left-wing Jew. The deportations of this period he describes are reminiscent of the ‘Palmer Raids’ in the United States at this time, and Cesarani even has quotes from one or two people on the right in this country who seem to have seen the ‘Palmer Raids’ as a model to be copied here.
Much of this anti-Jewish activity was encouraged by the Tory Home Secretary, Joynson-Hicks, and Cesarani produces enough evidence to justify this conclusion:
“It is almost a truism among historians of anti-Semitism in England that the state and the political parties were immune from contamination. Yet the evidence of ‘anti-alienism’ shows that the politicians openly manipulated an ‘anti-alien’ sentiment that was entirely identified with the Jews and that ministers of state and senior civil servants consciously operated policies that discriminated against Jews on the basis of racial criteria… the harsh anti-Jewish atmosphere in the post-war years prompts a revaluation of the 1930s and Mosley’s movement in particular. It had been suggested that there was nothing new about Mosley’s appeal. The history of ‘anti-alienism’ reinforces this view; political parties and the state had already pre-empted much of his programme and enough of his violent language to make him seem to some extent, passe.
This may account for the limits of his success. It surely necessitates a re-reading of the relations between Mosleyism and British politics. In the light of ‘anti-alienism’, Mosley was not just a flash-in-the pan, an aberration that serves to affirm the essential stability of the liberal state and its political system. The state was, itself, already deeply incriminated in anti-Jewish discrimination and political parties had already experimented with a national chauvinism defined largely against the Jews.”
In the crisis of the 1970s the military rewrote their manuals on counter-insurgency and talked of coups they might run. In 1920 the Army had just finished three years of being responsible for “monitoring and managing industrial and revolutionary unrest in the UK”.
“From the close of 1917 to the start of 1920 it was the Army that was responsible for monitoring and managing ‘industrial and revolutionary unrest in the United Kingdom’. The intelligence organisation created for this purpose consisted of an Intelligence Branch of the General Staff located at General Headquarters, Great Britain, with Intelligence Officers at all Command Headquarters. Intelligence networks reporting direct to GHQ and Commands were also established at ‘centres of possible aggravated disturbance’. “
David Englander’s essay, from which this is taken, is absolutely fascinating, but is just a beginning. He describes the structure of this operation but is as yet unable (I presume) to evaluate it. A string of interesting – but isolated – anecdotes is not enough. For example, he flatly asserts that “the ACMA’s (Authorised Competent Military Authorities) were both conduit and catspaw of MI5”, but gives only one example. (Do we even know how big MI5 was at this point?)
Part of this national surveillance effort was done by “an elite corps of volunteer observers under the supervision of the Security Services.” How many? We don’t seem to know. And this is strikingly similar to the FBI’s attempt to use the American Legion as an informer network in post World War II America. (6)
Webber’s book is the first attempt at a survey of the inter-war period from the point of view of the British right. As the sections I have used from his brief ‘Who was who’ appendix suggest, he has touched many of the known bases – and some entirely new to me – though some of the information has to be dug out of the book’s wonderful footnotes. This is a revised PhD and a lot of the detail – and its the detail that is interesting – has been shovelled off into footnotes, presumably in the interests of narrative clarity. As this is the first crack at the subject this will be invaluable to anyone interested in the field or the period.(And how much more valuable it would have been had the notes been included in the indexing process!). However, at £22.50 for less than 200 pages, this might be a library and photocopier job.
Steve Dorril and I heard Webber give a paper at a conference on the British right during the summer. The conference was well over-subscribed – the subject is exploding – and I had the wonderful experience of being in a room with people who know a great deal more about this subject than I do.
Richard Thurlow was also speaking. He presented what amounted to a precis of a large chunk of his recent book Fascism in Britain (Basil Blackwell, 1987) delivered in a frenetic mumble which rendered about half of what he said unintelligible. However, it was apparent that he had already revised one of the key sections in his book, the account of Captain Ramsay MP, the Right Club, Nordic League and the ‘coup’ being planned in 1939/40. While in his book Thurlow accepts the received version that the ‘coup’ was nothing more than a pretext on MI5’s part to justify putting them in detention, there is now some evidence that the ‘coup’ was somewhat more serious than that. Most of this evidence has been put together by John Hope, another of the speakers at the conference, and Thurlow should have acknowledged this fact.
Robin Ramsay
NB The boxed sections which punctuate this essay are from the ‘who was who’ appendix in Webber’s book.
NOTES
- Barbara Lee Farr, The Development and Impact of Right-wing Politics in England 1918-39 unpublished PhD thesis, University of Illinois, 1976. (Available in the UK through the public library system.) p169
- There is a little confusion here. Wrigley attributes the SNDC to Milner, while Webber say it was founded by Victor Fisher. The answer may be simply that Fisher fronted Milner’s money and connections.
- Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, McMillan, US, 1966; and The Anglo-American Establishment, Books in Focus, US, 1981
- The only full-length account I know of is The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics during the First World War, Marvin Swartz, Oxford, 1971.
- It isn’t that difficult to follow the trail of Milner’s ‘class peace’/corporatism right through to the present day: Round Table – Council on Foreign Relations – CIA – right-wing Labour Party revisionists – Social Democratic Party. But demonstrating it ……
- The FBI and the American Legion Contact Program, 1940-66, Athan Theoharis in Political Science Quarterly Summer 1985