The internment of Oswald Mosley

On the morning of 23 May 1940 police in London detained Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, and took him to prison in Brixton. On the same day several dozen other leading figures of the movement – known since 1937 simply as the British Union – were detained, as was the Conservative MP Archibald Maule Ramsay, founder of the antisemitic Right Club. None of them was charged and none was brought before a court. The legal basis was Defence Regulation 18B, amended the previous night, which allowed the Home Secretary to imprison without trial people deemed a threat to the security of the state. The arrests came thirteen days after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister, at a time when German panzer divisions had already reached the English Channel and the British, for the first time in centuries, were seriously reckoning with an invasion of their own island.

Regulation 18B

Britain’s Defence Regulations had been drafted in Whitehall throughout the interwar years. On 24 August 1939 Parliament passed the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, which allowed them to be introduced by Order in Council, and with the outbreak of war the most stringent provisions came into force as well. Among them was Regulation 18B: the Home Secretary could order the detention of a British subject if he had “reasonable cause to believe” that the person was of hostile origin or associations, or had been concerned in acts prejudicial to public safety. A detainee could not effectively invoke habeas corpus; he could only appeal to an advisory committee, which gave the minister a non-binding opinion.

During the first months of the war the authorities used these powers sparingly. In mid-September 1939 only a dozen or so people were being held under 18B, mostly naturalised Germans and Austrians suspected of Nazi sympathies. Hitler’s best-known British propagandist, William Joyce, a former member of the British Union, had managed to leave for Germany at the end of August; he later broadcast from Hamburg as “Lord Haw-Haw”. Mosley, meanwhile, operated legally. After the outbreak of war he campaigned for a negotiated peace and called for the acceptance of Hitler’s October offer, and British Union candidates stood in by-elections, in which the main parties, under the wartime electoral truce, did not put up candidates against one another. The results were dismal: at Silvertown in London in February 1940 the British Union candidate won 151 votes, and at Middleton and Prestwich, which went to the polls on 22 May, the evening before the arrests, about 1.3 per cent. During that campaign a brawl broke out at one of Mosley’s meetings, in which the leader himself was attacked.

Fear of a fifth column

The mood changed in April and May 1940. The German invasion of Norway and the radio broadcast of Vidkun Quisling, who on 9 April proclaimed himself head of government, convinced many Britons that Germany conquered countries not only with tanks but also through local traitors. After 10 May the press was full of reports from the Netherlands of parachutists in disguise and of shots fired from windows, attributed to German agents and local Nazis; in the panic after the airborne landing near The Hague the Dutch detained thousands of suspects. The term “fifth column”, brought back from the Spanish Civil War, became the word of the day in Britain. The government began interning German and Austrian men from the coastal counties, although most of them were refugees from Nazism, and in the House of Commons MPs of all parties asked why Mosley’s followers were still allowed to operate. On 14 May, when the Secretary of State for War, Anthony Eden, appealed on the radio for volunteers for the Local Defence Volunteers, one of the new force’s tasks was precisely to round up parachutists and saboteurs.

The Home Secretary, Sir John Anderson, hesitated for a long time. He regarded the British Union as a fringe movement, believed that interning people for their opinions was unworthy of a democracy, and argued that the police and the security service had it well under observation. The pressure came instead from MI5, whose agents had long been active in Mosley’s circle and in the far-right clubs of London. The scales were tipped by an affair that was only indirectly connected with Mosley’s fascists.

The Tyler Kent affair

Tyler Kent was a cipher clerk at the United States Embassy in London. For several months he had been copying secret telegrams and taking them home to his flat, among them the correspondence between Churchill – then still First Lord of the Admiralty – and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Kent, an American isolationist and an antisemite, moved in White Russian émigré circles. Through Anna Wolkoff, the daughter of a former Tsarist naval attaché, he met Archibald Ramsay and joined his Right Club, an organisation whose purpose, as its founder himself admitted, was to oppose and expose “organised Jewry”. Ramsay entrusted Kent, who was protected by diplomatic immunity, with the ledger containing the club’s membership list. Wolkoff copied some of the telegrams, and according to the findings of British counter-intelligence at least some of them reached Berlin through the Italian Embassy. She was betrayed by an MI5 agent who had won her confidence.

On 18 May Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy agreed to waive the cipher clerk’s immunity, and at dawn on 20 May police entered Kent’s flat. They found almost two thousand embassy documents there. Wolkoff was arrested the same day. For the government the affair was exceptionally dangerous for two reasons. As an MP, Ramsay enjoyed parliamentary privilege and could have read the stolen telegrams out in the House of Commons. And the telegrams showed that Roosevelt, officially neutral and preparing to campaign for the presidential election, was secretly considering aid to Britain; their disclosure could have damaged both him and Anglo-American relations at the very moment when Churchill was asking Washington for destroyers. On 22 May the War Cabinet, chaired by Churchill, decided on sweeping detentions of the far right.

The night of 22–23 May

22 May was a day of emergency legislation at Westminster. In a single afternoon Parliament passed a new Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, which allowed the government to require any citizen to place “themselves, their services and their property” at the disposal of the state, as well as the Treachery Act, which provided the death penalty for assisting the enemy; the King gave his assent to the latter the following day. In the evening an Order in Council added a new paragraph, 1A, to Regulation 18B. It allowed the detention of any member of an organisation that was subject to foreign influence or control, or whose leaders had associations with the government of, or sympathies with the system of government of, any power at war with Britain – if the minister considered that the organisation might be used for purposes prejudicial to the security of the state. The provision was plainly written with the British Union in mind. That same night Anderson issued the detention orders.

Mosley was among the first to be detained. In the same first wave the police took from their homes his closest associates, among them the British Union’s director-general, Neil Francis Hawkins, and its chief ideologue, Alexander Raven Thomson, and, in the morning, Ramsay the MP. At the start of the afternoon sitting on 23 May the Speaker read to the House of Commons a letter from Anderson informing it that Captain Ramsay “has been taken into custody this morning and is now in Brixton prison”. A quarter of an hour or so later, answering MPs’ questions, the minister said that the previous night he had extended his powers and issued orders for the detention of a number of persons, whose names would be given once the orders had been carried out. He stressed that he had done so because of the danger that the organisations these persons led might be used for acts endangering the security of the state, “and not because of any views they held or expressed, or because of their propaganda activities”. He added that this was not the last word. The public greeted the arrests with relief; one reader of The Times noted with satisfaction that the news of Mosley’s detention had appeared in the fifth column of the page.

What came next

Mosley and his associates were not the last to be detained. In the following weeks further British Union activists were held, as were members of other far-right groups, among them the retired Admiral Sir Barry Domvile, founder of the pro-German association The Link. On 25 July Anderson told the House of Commons that detention orders had already been issued against more than five hundred members and former members of the British Union. By the end of 1940 more than a thousand people were being held under Regulation 18B. Most of them were released over the next two years, as the fear of invasion faded.

Contrary to frequent claims, the organisation itself was not banned in May. As late as 20 June MPs complained that its headquarters in Great Smith Street had reopened. The order under the new Regulation 18AA that dissolved the British Union and prohibited any activity in its name was not signed by Anderson until 10 July 1940. On 29 June, eleven weeks after the birth of their son Max, Mosley’s wife Diana, née Mitford, was detained and sent to Holloway, the women’s prison. From December 1941, after Churchill intervened, the couple were allowed to live together in a separate part of that prison.

Tyler Kent and Anna Wolkoff were convicted in November 1940 at a trial held in camera: he was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment, she to ten. Ramsay, the only MP interned under 18B, remained behind bars until September 1944. The Committee of Privileges of the House of Commons found that his detention had not breached parliamentary privilege.

Contrary to what is often repeated, the Mosleys did not spend the whole war in prison. In November 1943 the new Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, released them on the grounds of the health of Mosley, who was suffering from phlebitis. The decision caused an uproar: the trade unions and the National Council for Civil Liberties protested, but the House of Commons backed the minister by a large majority. Until the end of the war the Mosleys remained under house arrest and police supervision. Churchill, who had approved the detentions in May 1940, wrote to Morrison from Cairo at the time that “the power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government”.

Place in the war

The internment of Mosley in effect ended the history of organised fascism in Britain. A movement that in the mid-1930s had attracted tens of thousands of people, and as late as the summer of 1939 had filled great meeting halls, lost its leaders, its premises and its right to exist within a few weeks. After the war Mosley tried to return to politics but never regained any influence.

The detentions of 23 May were part of a wider wave that swept through Britain in those weeks: the internment of thousands of aliens, including many Jewish refugees from Germany and Austria and, after Italy entered the war, Italians as well; the removal of signposts; the ban on ringing church bells; and the formation of local defence units. Historians now agree that there was no organised fifth column in Britain, and that most British fascists, Mosley included, declared that they would fight for their country in the event of invasion. Churchill’s government, which in those same days was preparing for the possible loss of its entire army in France, nevertheless decided that it could not take the risk. The 18B affair has remained in British memory as an example of how far a democracy can go in curtailing civil liberties in a moment of mortal danger – and how quickly its leaders come to regret it.