The Mosley Riots Transcript
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The Mosley Riots Transcript Date: Monday, 17 June 2013 - 1:00PM Location: Museum of London 17 June 2013 The Mosley Riots Professor Clive Bloom I am going to talk today about Oswald Mosley, and obviously everybody knows who Oswald Mosley is, give you a little bit of background and a few maybe bits of facts that you might not remember, and afterwards, hopefully, we will have enough time for some questions and answers. I will show you some pictures first, just to get you into the Mosley mood as it were… That is Oswald Mosley in 1933 with Il Duce. He had been to Italy before, and this is the visit where he undertook to introduce to Britain what is called the corporate state, which is the state essentially under privatised but under government control. I think this has been doctored, this picture, to make him closer to Il Duce. If you look at it, it does not look right. The corner here is not quite right, so I think it has been doctored, the picture, but it is interesting. This is him shouting and screaming. He is a very handsome, as you can see. He was born in 1896, very, very wealthy. He was not born Sir Oswald Mosley – that was his father’s title which he inherited – born Oswald Mosley, and I noticed, rather bizarrely, and I am not a Fascist, but I noticed rather bizarrely he has my belt on so that is a bit worrying. He is wearing the black shirt and the black trousers, which were finally banned of course, and if you look at him, he looks like something out of a modernist painting. This is very modernist. His uniform is extremely modernist. So, he is very interesting, sartorially. This is William Joyce, who is Lord Haw-How. This was his Head of Propaganda, I believe. There is a scar here, can you see the scar there? That came from fighting. He had a degree from University College London, hated just about everybody actually, but hated Jewish people, and Communists too, and he got this at a fight, and he said of course a Jewish Commie had done it, but there was no proof one way or the other. He was Irish. He hanged of course – he should not have done, but I guess he deserved it anyway. His very last speech, by the way, which you can hear at the Imperial War Museum, he was completely drunk, completely rolling drunk, and he impersonates Churchill while he is doing it. It is quite funny. This is John Beckett, who was the publicist and editor of the Blackshirt for Mosley’s organisation, BUF. He carried on right the way through. He was an anti-Communist really, but he adopted anti-Semitism, and indeed, interestingly enough, his grandson lives in Israel. This is the famous poster. This is Mosley speaks, in East London, Sunday, 4th October 1936. There were going to be four marching columns, four great meetings. There is Beckett, there is Joyce, there is some other speakers, and they were going to come together and march along heroically. Of course, none of this happened at all. The march never took place – we will talk about that in a minute. This is where the thing took place, so to give you an orientation… Here is Leman Street. There is where the Blackshirts gathered, there, Royal Mint Street, and they stopped there. This is Cable Street… That is Gardeners Corner, which does not exist anymore. It has all been knocked down. Those of you that are familiar with the East End will know that Gardeners Corner burnt down and then it was demolished and rebuilt, and so there is nothing really to see. This is Gardeners Corner, and this is where the barricades went up. So it gives you some sense of what we are talking about. Notice, Cable Street is actually on the edge of the Jewish area, which is up here – it is not where you think it is. If you are not used to the area, it is not quite where you think it is. This is Phil Piratin, who wrote “Our Flag Stays Red”. He was one of the leaders of the Resistance, as they called it, “They shall not pass”, and here, he is actually winning the election. I do not think it is the election. I think here he is winning the ticket for the council, but after the War of course, he became one of the last of the Communist MPs, for Mile End, which does not exist anymore as a constituency. That is Phil Piratin, and he wrote “Our Flag Stays Red”, which is the most famous record of the events. This is Mosley marching. Notice the flashes – they have already got the SS-type flashes on their sleeves. This, I think, is William Joyce next to him, but it is not entirely sure, and here he is marching towards the actual event. Again, as I say, this is probably along Royal Mint Street. This is the crowds. These are the police, obviously, trying to stop things going on, a police car there, complete disorder and there is lots of these pictures. It is not all men, it looks like all men, but here is a lady, and there is a number of women in the shots if you look carefully, so women did take part. This is the very famous shot. This is Cable Street. That is one of the barricades. These are the shops along here, which were shuttered, and many of them had “Do not attack this shop, it is Jewish” or “Do not attack this shop, we belong to the trade union movement” or the Communist Party or whatever, and above, which I will tell you about later, women attacked the police from above, throwing chamber-pots of wee on their heads, so it was quite exciting stuff. It is well worth noticing the crowd, because I want to say something about the crowd: these are young, relatively well-dressed men. These are not the type of people that Philip Game, who was the Commissioner of Police, accused of rioting. Philip Game essentially told a little bit of a naughty fib. I think these images gives you a sense of what people looked like, how it went on, what the day actually physically looked like. You can of course see films of it. If you are a YouTube fan, then you can go on that and watch films, etc. I just want to start then with: what exactly is fascism? I mean, it is an obvious thing to say, but British fascism is not the same as other countries’ fascism and it developed slightly differently. The first thing to say is that, if we go back to the nineteenth Century, a famous jurist, a writer on legal history, called A. V. Dicey divided the nineteenth century into three parts, and the last movement in the nineteenth century that he divided it into was collectivism. Interestingly, what he meant by that was the rise of communism and Marxism, the rise of the trade union movement, things of that nature – people coming together as a collective. Interestingly enough, against that were a number of writers, especially people like Oscar Wilde etc., who believed in the rise of the individual, who believed in the importance of the individual, the centrality of individualism, and the revolt – and this is an important word, the revolt of individuals against the mass, the one man against the whole mass of the joined-together people that were coming together at that time. This is quite significant for Mosley. It characterises what he is about. He comes to represent the single man who is in charge of the mass. Now, interestingly enough, this was meant to be a contradiction. The mass of people in the nineteenth century, were meant to be more and more concentrated. Laws being made during this time were more and more about concentration. The individual was being squeezed out. So, Mosley, as a lot of people in the fascist organisation, tends to be a contradiction, and it is that contradiction partially which actually destroys him. So, it is not necessarily the opposition to him that destroys him, straightforwardly, it is also inconsistencies and incoherences within his own theoretical system, and he did have quite a complicated – well, straightforward but intellectually valid system of working out what he stood for and why he stood for it. Pre-War, if we go to just before the First World War, what we have is a number of the movements and ideas that emerged after the First World War in the fascist movements which rose just before Mosley came on the scene. Between 1919 and roughly 1930, there are a very large number of fascist organisations, mostly patriotic, mostly traditional, mostly king and country, mostly Eastbourne ex-Indian majors, and a very large number of very, very seriously strange ladies, who came together to bring together fascist ideology, mostly to do with anti- Semitism. Nevertheless, that was not the case of Mosley, and I want to show how Mosley developed various strands of thought and they come to fruition in him. I am not saying that Mosley was a person who consciously thought these through. I think he was an opportunist. However, it is clear that there does become a pattern in his thought. So, for instance, in the First World War, just before the First World War, we are talking about 1913, we are talking about this language… This was language that you got in many writers… Crusades.