Oswald Mosley
Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet, was a British politician who rose to fame during the 1920s and 1930s when, disillusioned with mainstream politics, he turned to fascism. He was Member of Parliament for Harrow from 1918 to 1924 and for Smethwick from 1926 to 1931. He founded the British Union of Fascists in 1932 and led it until its forced disbandment in 1940.
After military service during the First World War, Mosley became the youngest sitting member of Parliament, representing Harrow from 1918, first as a member of the Conservative Party, then an independent, and finally joining the Labour Party. At the 1924 general election he stood in Birmingham Ladywood against the future Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, coming within 100 votes of defeating him. Mosley returned to Parliament as the Labour MP for Smethwick at a by-election in 1926 and served as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the Labour government of 1929–1931. In 1928 he succeeded his father as the sixth Mosley baronet, a title in his family for over a century. Some considered Mosley a rising star and a possible future prime minister. He resigned in 1930 over discord with the government's unemployment policies. He chose not to defend his Smethwick constituency at the 1931 general election, instead unsuccessfully standing in Stoke-on-Trent.
Mosley's New Party became the British Union of Fascists in 1932. As its leader he publicly espoused antisemitism and sought alliances with Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Fascist violence under Mosley's leadership culminated in the Battle of Cable Street in 1936, during which anti-fascist demonstrators including trade unionists, liberals, socialists, communists, anarchists and British Jews prevented the BUF from marching through the East End of London. Mosley subsequently held a series of rallies around London, and the BUF increased its membership there.
In 1939 Mosley was implicated in a fascist conspiracy organised by the Right Club against the British government by Archibald Maule Ramsay, albeit all evidence indicates that he soon distanced himself from them, viewing the group and its aims as too extreme.
In May 1940, after the outbreak of the Second World War, Mosley was imprisoned and the BUF was made illegal. He was released in 1943 and, politically disgraced by his association with fascism, moved abroad in 1951, spending most of the remainder of his life in France and Ireland. He stood for Parliament during the post-war era but received relatively little support. During this period he was an advocate of pan-European nationalism, developing the Europe a Nation ideology, and was an early proponent of conspiracy theories concerning Holocaust-denial.
Early life
Childhood and education
Mosley was born on 16 November 1896 at 47 Hill Street, Mayfair, London. He was the eldest of the three sons of Sir Oswald Mosley, 5th Baronet, and Katharine Maud Edwards-Heathcote, daughter of Captain Justinian Edwards-Heathcote, of Apedale Hall, Staffordshire; they had been married the year before. He had two younger brothers: Edward Heathcote Mosley and John Arthur Noel Mosley. His father was a third cousin to Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, making Mosley a fourth cousin to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.The progenitor, and earliest-attested ancestor, of the Mosley family was Ernald de Mosley, Lord of the Manor of Moseley, Staffordshire, during the reign of King John. Nicholas Mosley was a wealthy salesman in the 16th century, and was important in the development of Manchester, before eventually becoming Lord Mayor of London; the family took a violent part in the Peterloo Massacre. Two branches of the Mosley family existed – a significant cotton trading family who lived in Lancashire, and a farming family who lived in Rolleston; Oswald was descended from the former. The family were prominent landholders in Staffordshire and seated at Rolleston Hall, near Burton upon Trent. Three baronetcies were created, two of which are now extinct ; a barony was created for Tonman Mosley, brother of the 4th Baronet, but also became extinct. By the 19th century, reformers had taken control of the Manchester Court leet, which formerly belonged to the family, and the Mosleys had little influence by the latter half of the century. Oswald's grandfather Sir Oswald Mosley, 4th Baronet, was a campaigner against Jewish emancipation. Oswald noted in his autobiography My Life that he was glad to have come from an 'old English family'.
His mother wrote in her diary that his birth took 18 hours after he began to arrive at 6:00am, her own mother staying by her side for the whole duration. The family doctor, Sir John Williams, gave her chloroform and the baby was delivered at 11:40pm. Her husband, who was addicted to both gambling and alcohol, wrote a large number of letters to relatives about the event, and celebrated at the Epsom Derby; he was mostly an absent husband.
In childhood, Mosley moved from what he described as a "wayside house" to Rolleston Hall, which had been inherited in 1879 by the 4th Baronet. The Hall was a large building maintained by gardeners and servants. Biographer Stephen Dorril has suggested that the treatment of the workers at the mansion, who laboured with no possibility to become more successful, may have impressed itself on Mosley's worldview and such treatment came to be part of his fascism.
Mosley loved his mother, toward whom he felt protective; in the 1970s, he burned her diaries to avoid investigative authors depicting her negatively, using them as evidence, although he kept the entries for the first four years of his own life, and for his mother's birthday, 2 January. Likewise, she celebrated Mosley and developed his ego. His father – nicknamed "Waldie" – was an amateur boxer, a Tory and a womaniser. Mosley's father gained the image of a scoundrel, although Mosley did not find the description to be accurate. Nonetheless, "Waldie" acted aggressively towards his wife and child, which led to Mosley idolising his mother instead. In 1901, when Mosley was aged five and while his mother was pregnant with her third child, the couple split over his womanising – Edwards-Heathcote had discovered letters revealing that her husband was saying and giving the same things to his other lovers as to her.
After Mosley's parents separated, he was raised by his mother, who went to live at Betton Hall near Market Drayton, and his paternal grandfather, Sir Oswald Mosley, 4th Baronet. His mother had a small alimony, and was impoverished by comparison to the rest of the family. Mosley rarely being able to see his father, his mother became more attached to him. His grandfather took the role of a male parental figure in Mosley's life; Likewise, his grandfather disliked his father, and saw Mosley as a substitute son; the 4th Baronet was seen as a masculine figure by Mosley, and developed his own masculine image based on his grandfather, alongside various pop-cultural ideas.
Mosley studied at West Downs School in Winchester from 1906 onward, eventually joined by Edward, where Oswald developed a reputation as a debater. He then joined Winchester College in 1909 at the age of 12, a year early, and found school both hard and boring; he did not socialise. During this period he hunted extensively, shooting 50 partridges, 18 pheasants, 11 rabbits and 10 hares over the winter from 1909 to 1910, as well as fishing at Rolleston. He also became a boxer by age 15, winning a light-weight championship, and attempted to enter the Public Schools' boxing championship, but was forbidden to do so by his headmaster; Mosley then took up fencing instead. He was a fencing champion in his school days, winning titles in both foil and sabre, and becoming the first boy to win both and the youngest to win either at the Public Schools' championship. He retained an enthusiasm for the sport throughout his life.
Military service
Mosley left college in 1912, briefly staying in Brest, France in summer 1913, where he competed in fencing. After returning to England, he became keen on entering the army, entering the Royal Military College, Sandhurst in January 1914. He considered his period at the military college to be ‘one of the happiest times of entire life”, but was expelled in June for a "riotous act of retaliation" against a fellow student. John Masters made a claim that Mosley was thrown out of a window by other cadets; according to Dorril, he had actually slipped and fallen while recruiting for the retaliation against a group of cadets who had attacked him. He was sent away from the college that weekend.During the First World War, he was commissioned into the British cavalry unit the 16th The Queen's Lancers and fought in France on the Western Front. He transferred to the Royal Flying Corps as a pilot and an air observer, but while demonstrating in front of his mother and sister he crashed, which left him with a permanent limp, as well as a reputation for being brave and somewhat reckless. He returned to the Lancers, but was invalided out with an injured leg. He spent the remainder of the war at desk jobs in the Ministry of Munitions and in the Foreign Office.
Marriage to Lady Cynthia Curzon
On 11 May 1920, Mosley married Lady Cynthia "Cimmie" Curzon, the second daughter of George Curzon, 1st Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, the Foreign Secretary and former Viceroy of India, and Lord Curzon's first wife, the American mercantile heiress Mary Leiter. It was later alleged by Arnold Leese, a political rival of Mosley's in the early 1930s who founded the Imperial Fascist League and considered the BUF to be insufficiently antisemitic, that Cynthia had been "of Jewish descent", and falsely claimed that she "had had a Jewish grandfather." In March 1920, Mosley met Lord Curzon to inform him about the marriage and request his approval; ironically, in a letter written afterwards to his American-born second wife, Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston, his future father-in-law made the casually antisemitic remark that Mosley possessed a "rather a Jewish appearance."Lord Curzon had to be persuaded that Mosley was a suitable husband, as he suspected Mosley was largely motivated by social advancement in Conservative Party politics and Cynthia's inheritance. The wedding took place in the Chapel Royal in St James's Palace in London. The hundreds of guests included King George V and Queen Mary, as well as foreign royalty such as the Duke and Duchess of Brabant.
During his marriage to Cynthia, Mosley engaged in an extended affair with his wife's younger sister, Lady Alexandra Metcalfe, while also carrying on a separate affair with their stepmother Grace, who had been a widow since her husband's death in 1925. He succeeded to the Mosley baronetcy of Ancoats upon his father's death in 1928.