Fascist in the Family

John Beckett was a political chameleon: first at one with the fist- clenching left, then in awe of the goose-stepping fascists. He was also a Walter Mitty so who really knows? This author does. Francis Beckett’s personal partiality doesn’t blunt his fine journalist’s pen nor cloud his judgement and integrity; but the pain shines through. He writes with compelling candour about his father. It is as moving for the reader as it must have been painful for the author. Alastair Stewart OBE, ITV News

The youngest Labour MP in 1925, by 1940 John Beckett was in prison as a danger to the war effort. His son has written a coura- geously honest, moving and sensitive account of a socialist who ended up despising the workers, a Jew who ended up hating Jews, a democrat who became contemptuous of democracy. It is a pene- trating analysis of the political times in which he lived, not least because it illuminates the conditions that can – if freedom is not strong, vigilant and purposeful – breed bigotry and fascism. It is a valuable history as well as an instructive biography. Neil Kinnock, Leader of the Labour Party 1983–92

A fascinating insight into the unsavoury practices of the security services, and a moving portrait of a talented, wayward father who denied his Jewishness at great cost to himself and all around him. Paul Routledge, political biographer and commentator for the Daily Mirror and Tribune magazine, UK

John Beckett was a Labour MP who later took up with fascism. In Fascist in the Family his son Francis, journalist, historian and playwright, engages in the difficult task of tracing his father’s tempestu- ous and ultimately unfulfilled life. His readable, researched,well- questioning and honest biography serves as a British equivalent of My Nazi Legacy. Colin Holmes, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Sheffield, UK This page intentionally left bank FASCIST IN THE FAMILY

John Beckett was a rising political star. Elected as Labour’s youngest MP in 1924, he was constantly in the news and tipped for greatness. But ten years later he was propaganda chief for Mosley’s fascists, and one of Britain’s three best-known anti-Semites. Yet his mother, whom he loved, was a Jew. Her ancestors were Solomons, Isaacs and Jacobsons, originally from Prussia. He successfully hid his Jewish ancestry all his life – he said his mother’s family were “fisher folk from the east coast”. His son, the author of this book, acclaimed political biographer and journalist Francis Beckett, did not discover the truth until John Beckett had been dead for years. John Beckett left Mosley and founded the National Socialist League with William Joyce, later Lord Haw-Haw, and spent the war years in prison, considered a danger to the war effort. For the rest of his life, and all of Francis Beckett’s childhood, John Beckett and his family were closely watched by the security services. Their devious machinations, traced in records only recently released, damaged chiefly his young family. This is a fascinating and brutally honest account of a troubled man in tur- bulent times.

Francis Beckett is an author, journalist, playwright and contemporary historian. His eighteen books include biographies of four Prime Ministers, the first of which is about his own political hero, Clement Attlee. He has written for several national newspapers, but mostly for the Guardian, for which he was a regular feature writer and reviewer for many years. His plays have been performed on radio and at the London Fringe. He is a former president of the National Union of Journalists and a Labour Party and trade union press officer and editor, and is currently editor of Third Age Matters, the national magazine published by the University of the Third Age. Routledge Studies in Fascism and the Far Right Series editors: Nigel Copsey, Teesside University, and Graham Macklin, Teesside University

This book series examines fascist, far right and right-wing politics within a historical context. Fascism falls within the far right but the far right also extends to so-called ‘radical-right populism’. Boundaries are not fixed and it is important to recognise points of convergence and exchange with the mainstream right. The series will include books with a broad thematic or biographi- cal focus suitable for students, teachers and general readers. These will be available in hardback, paperback and e-book. The series will also include books aimed largely at subject specialists which will appear in hardback and e-book format only.

Titles include: Cultures of Post-War Fascist in the Family British Fascism The Tragedy of Nigel Copsey and John Beckett MP John E. Richardson Francis Beckett

France and Fascism What Did You Do During February 1934 and the the War? Dynamics of Political Crisis The Last Throes of the British Brian Jenkins and Pro-Nazi Right 1940–45 Chris Millington Richard Griffiths Anti-Fascism in Britain Searching for Lord (2nd Edition) Haw-Haw Nigel Copsey The Political Lives of William Joyce Right-Wing Terrorism in Colin Holmes the 21st Century The ‘National Socialist Farming, Fascism and Underground’ and the History Ecology of Terror from the Far-Right A Life of Jorian Jenks in Germany Philip M. Coupland Daniel Koehler FASCIST IN THE FAMILY

The tragedy of John Beckett MP

Francis Beckett First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Francis Beckett The right of Francis Beckett to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Beckett, Francis, 1945– author. Title: Fascist in the family : the tragedy of John Beckett M.P. / Francis Beckett. Other titles: Rebel who lost his cause Description: Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016012317| ISBN 9781138907669 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138907874 (paperback) | ISBN 9781315686738 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Beckett, John, 1894–1964. | Great Britain–Politics and government–1910–1936. | Great Britain–Politics and government–1936–1945. | Fascism–Great Britain–History– 20th century. | Right-wing extremists–Great Britain–Biography. | British Union of Fascists–Biography. | Political prisoners–Great Britain–Biography. | Politicians–Great Britain–Biography. | World War, 1939-1945–Great Britain. Classification: LCC DA566.9.B375 B43 2017 | DDC 941.082092 [B] –dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012317 ISBN: 978-1-138-90766-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-90787-4 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-68673-8 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear CONTENTS

Introduction 1

1 Eva Solomon and the Yeomen of Cheshire 8

2 The legacy of war 20

3 Major Attlee and Corporal Beckett 33

4 The theatre and the general election 52

5 Labour’s youngest MP 63

6 The 1926 general strike 77

7 A complicated life 89

8 The death of hope 109

9 Lifting the mace and playing to the gallery 123 viii Contents

10 1931 136

11 Dying on stage 146

12 A life in ruins 156

13 Anne 170

14 The streetfighter 191

15 Following the bleeder 204

16 Jew-baiting and standing by the king 217

17 The National Socialist League 228

18 The anti-war faction 238

19 Prison 254

20 Mr Morrison’s prisoner 271

21 A birth and a hanging 288

22 Indian summer 309

23 The Catholic Church and the soul of the far right 320

24 A family in freefall 340

25 Struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more 353

26 Legacy of a Jewish anti-Semite 362

For further reading 373 Index 376 INTRODUCTION

John Beckett was just 30 when he became Labour’s youngest MP in 1924, and he was seen as one of the Party’s brightest rising stars. He was on intimate terms with the greatest political names in the land, as well as the friend and confidant of all those who, two decades later, were to run the 1945 government, especially its Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. By 1929 he had become the most extreme, most newsworthy left- wing Labour rebel of his day. He was more than once physically thrown out of the House of Commons, and in 1930 he seized the Mace from the Speaker’s table and ran off with it, the first person to do so since Cromwell. In the early 1930s he managed London’s Strand Theatre, knew all the leading actors of his day, made money and went bankrupt. And then he became a fascist. His career, which had looked so promising in 1924, ended in the squalid wastelands of neo-Nazi politics, and in prison for nearly four years, for fascists were interned during the war. It’s the stuff of fiction, and at least two popular novels contain characters based on him. In 1922 Mary Agnes Hamilton modelled one of her political agitators in her novel Follow My Leader on the 2 Introduction young John Beckett. Nearly a century later, Carmody in Anthony Quinn’s 2015 novel Curtain Call is based on him. Which is quite suitable, because the father I knew was a bit of a fantasist, though his image of himself would be rather more heroic than Mr Quinn’s Carmody. Perhaps a clean-cut hero from another age taken out of one of his beloved G.A. Henty novels; perhaps a John Buchan hero; perhaps Flambeau, looking for his Father Brown (and eventually, as we shall see, finding him). And his own life, as he chose to present it, was largely fantasy too. It was not so much that he made things up: he only did that occa- sionally, and always obeyed his own rule of giving his fiction some characteristics of the truth. It was more that he edited his life. His version, as he wrote it in his memoirs in 1938 and as he told it to me, contained heroic highlights. Researching this book has given me the chance to find out the truth about my father. The biggest lie, the strangest, the most important and inexplicable lie, was about the fundamental question of who he was. He talked of his “yeoman ancestors”, the generations of Cheshire farmers from which he had sprung. In the 1930s he embraced anti-Semitism and complained of “alien control of our country”. But he was a Jew. His mother was a thoroughbred: born Eva Solomon of a union between Mark Solomon and Jessy Isaacs. It has taken me years to find out, for she, and later he, went to great lengths to hide it. I was born in May 1945, four days after VE day and a little more than a year after the Home Secretary released my father from prison, in the small Berkshire village of Chenies, 21 miles from the centre of London. It was exactly that distance because the dangerous fascist John Beckett was still under a sort of house arrest, not allowed to travel more than five miles from his home or within 20 miles of London. He died when I was 19, and, in the late 1990s, I wrote a book about his life, The Rebel Who Lost His Cause. It wasn’t a bad book – several people were kind enough to say it was rather a good one – but I have come to see that it did not nail the man or the history through which he lived, it did not face up to what he did and said and wrote, and it did not tell the end of the story – my part of the story – properly. Introduction 3

It accepted, by and large, what he wrote in 1938 in his unpub- lished memoirs, and these were as reliable as the man. That is to say, where they misled, they kept in the vague vicinity of the truth, but they contained what he wanted the world to know about himself. There was no mention – not even a word – of either of his first two wives, even when describing events at which they were not only present, but active participants. He just wrote them out of his history. But does it matter? I have disinterred it once. Why not let my father rest in peace, even though resting in peace was always the very last thing he ever wished to do? There are several reasons. First, my contemporaries, unlike my father’s, grew up knowing that racism was something dreadful, for its results were part of our childhood. That memory ensured that most of us managed to avoid blaming people of another race for our troubles. But knowledge decays. The conditions that bred fascism are returning, and we are governed by a generation which knows little of the holocaust. The historian Richard Griffiths puts it well:

Most people, when they wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and say to themselves “I am all right; my attitudes and actions are justified.” And then some of those people go out and do, or get involved in, dreadful things. My aim, throughout, has been to try and work out such people’s reasons for action, or the justifications they make to themselves. Only thereby can we learn how to deal with such people and attitudes in the future.

My father was a racist and an anti-Semite. But – and I apologise to no one for saying this – he was not a bad man. In many ways he was a rather attractive character, as the late Fenner Brockway, among others, confirmed to me. How does such a man do the things he did? Second, when I wrote the first book, I was not ready to write about my own dysfunctional childhood. My father, without wishing to, damaged the lives of those whom he loved and wanted to protect – his three wives, his four children, his brother. My earlier book did not tell the reader what it was like to grow up with a father who had rendered himself an outcast. 4 Introduction

Third, for much of his life, my father was in prison, under house arrest or under constant surveillance by MI5. Some of this was right and necessary. But if we give the state the right to override our liberties, we should always examine whether the security services and the politicians confine themselves to what is right and necessary; and be ready to nail the moments when they start to misuse their power, to enjoy them, to use them to settle scores. There are a lot more security files open than there were in the late 1990s. Throughout my early life, long after there was any conceiva- ble security reason for it, the security services were opening all my parents’ letters, monitoring and laboriously transcribing their phone calls, following them about. My father knew it. It helped make him mad. It gives me now the extraordinary experience of seeing my own childhood from the vantage point of the man in a grubby raincoat leaning against the lamp post, the spy opening letters and finding personal secrets. I can see things as Graham Mitchell of MI5 saw them. And Mr Mitchell, as we shall see, was something of a voyeur. At a time when a new national emergency is leading to demands from the security services for more curtailment of our liberties as the price of our security, we should want to look closely at how they have used these powers in the past. I am in a unique position to shed a little light on that. Fourth, this book will have been worth the trouble of writing if it helps explain John Beckett’s extraordinary political journey, without falling into the trap – which a few readers felt the first book fell into – of becoming his apologia. It makes fascism and racism no less dreadful – in fact, perhaps it makes them worse – to see how they can sometimes come out of abused and distorted idealism. Which brings me, fifth and finally, to the hardest question of all. Part of that journey led to anti-Semitism. It is a strange enough desti- nation for a man who once genuinely championed the underdog, but almost inexplicable when you have discovered that his mother, whom he loved, was a Jew. He hid his Jewishness all his life, from me and from everyone else. No wonder he was unstable. I cannot explain thoroughly; but I offer here the best answers I can. Introduction 5

Acknowledgements and sources As before, my greatest debt is to Professor Colin Holmes of Sheffield University, whose books include Anti-Semitism in British Society and, most recently, the definitive biography of William Joyce, for his wise advice and generosity with his knowledge and contacts. Colin has been supportive of this book from the start. He has read and commented on great chunks of it, giving wise counsel and saving me from some errors and superficial conclusions, as well as letting me read his fine new book Searching for Lord Haw-Haw before publication. Other writers, researchers and academics have helped me too. Some of them came to consult me and ended up telling me more than I told them. Dr Graham Macklin, now of Teesside University and the top expert on British fascism post 1945 and author of Very Deeply Died in Black, certainly falls into this category. Richard Griffiths, whose Patriotism Perverted I have used exten- sively, has generously allowed me to make use of parts of his forth- coming book, What Did You Do in the War? I’m grateful to Jonathan Croall and Dr Rose Merkin for their expertise on theatre history, as well as Stephen Dorril, the late David Englander, Simon Fowler, Jeremy Gibson, Professor David Howell, Jeanette Rosenberg, the late Professor Brian Simpson, Alan Slingsby, Peta Steel, Nigel Todd and David Turner. For the title I have to thank my old American friend, the actor turned publisher Kelly Monaghan (known to his British friends as Ed Monaghan). This is not the first time I have been grateful for his inspired contributions to my literary efforts. My editors at Routledge, Craig Fowlie and Emma Chappell, have been constantly supportive and helpful, and I have been able to make use of Craig’s deep knowledge of the period and the subject. I always find archivists a pleasure to deal with. They take their role as the guardians of history very seriously, and try hard to help people like me to understand their holdings. This book has benefitted from the kindness and professional expertise of Jacky Hodgson at Sheffield University, which houses the British Union of Fascists archive as well as my father’s papers, Lizzie Richmond at Bath University, which 6 Introduction holds A.K. Chesterton’s papers, and especially the late Monty Kolsky, volunteer archivist at the Board of Deputies of British Jews. For the original book, back in the 1990s, the Society of Authors gave me a generous grant from one of their funds, without which I could not then have cleared enough time. Without these funds, many important books would not get written, because the economics of publishing means that writers cannot be paid enough to keep their families while they are writing them. The Board of Deputies of British Jews opened their archives for me and gave me every help, which is quite impressive really, all things considered. The Friends of Oswald Mosley helped me, even though they knew they were not going to like the result of my efforts, and I thank them sincerely for it, especially the late John Warburton and the late Bob Row. Senior politicians who knew my father helped me, though some of them guarded their secrets. They are all dead now, but I record my gratitude to Fenner Brockway, Barbara Castle, Denis Healey and Michael Foot. Others who knew my father, and talked helpfully to me, but are no longer with us, include Revd Brendan Fox AA, Douglas Hyde and Colin Jordan. I am enormously grateful to Patric Dickinson (Robert Forgan’s grandson), Bob Edmonds (Harry Edmonds’s son), Valerie Forgan (Robert Forgan’s daughter), Edward Greene (Ben Greene’s nephew), Martin Jameson (Sylvia Morris’s adopted son), Heather Joyce (William Joyce’s daughter), Daphne Stone (who knew Harry Edmonds well), Jeffrey Wallder (for insights into Mosley’s organisa- tions) and Lesley von Goetz (Ben Greene’s daughter). Patric Dickinson, as well as discussing his grandfather with me, used his professional expertise to track down my grandmother. For this new edition I have made much more use of my own family, especially Richard Knowles, my second cousin and the Beckett family’s historian, and of Jean Davenport’s comprehensive family tree. Peter Holford, on my mother’s side, helped with the Holfords and Cutmores. My late aunt, Mrs Jo Carter, provided several valuable new insights. My sister Clare Beckett has helped enormously, and kindly read and commented upon several drafts. My late half-sister Introduction 7

Lesley Beckett contributed knowledge, understanding and common sense.

The key sources for this book are John Beckett’s memoirs, covering the period 1918–38, written in 1938, plus a short account of his first days in prison written soon after the Second World War; and my own memories of what he and my mother Anne Cutmore told me. I have become quite good at knowing which parts of all this are reliable, and which are not. I have also had access to Colin Holmes’s John Beckett file. When information comes from one of these sources, I have not referenced it. Neither have I referenced sources when they are newspaper cut- tings, instead generally naming the publication in the text. And I have not referenced it when the source is an interview – I hope this is generally clear from the text. At the end of each chapter there is a note on other sources used in that chapter – books, theses, academic articles, letters. I have deposited John Beckett’s memoirs, most of his few remain- ing books, the small number of papers he left and his bound volumes of some of the publications he edited, in the library of Sheffield Uni- versity; and together with other papers collected by the university, they constitute the John Beckett collection. With them I have left my own research for this book, including my notes, and copies of documents from the Public Record Office and other places.