Henry Maitles explores the impact of the British Union of Fascists in Scotland in the 1930s and the lessons we can learn for today.

On 16 August 1,000 Scots gathered outside a refugee hostel in Falkirk to target asylum seekers. It can be tempting to assume that Scotland was less open than other nations to the attractions of racism and fascism – that ‘it couldn’t happen here’. But there are lessons we can glean from resistance to an earlier generation of Nazis and racists in the 1930s. This article examines the strategies used by the left and trade union activists in many parts of Scotland, including the Gorbals and Govanhill Jewish community, to tackle them.

Although the early fascist movement enjoyed relatively little encouragement here, Scotland was not immune to anti-immigrant xenophobia that easily spilled into racism. There had been strident demands from the Scottish trade union and labour movement for strong immigration controls in the run up to the 1905 Aliens Act. Politicians joined these calls from both the Independent Labour Party and Conservatives, along with trade unionists, and in 1919, the year of the forty-hour strikes and mass agitation in Glasgow, there were also violent anti-black riots. These involved seamen and were based on fears of jobs going to foreigners because of wage undercutting.

The British Fascists (BF) was one of the openly fascist organisations active in Scotland after the First World War. The BF were modelled on Mussolini’s Fascisti and were not noted for anti-Semitism. Under the leadership of the Earl of Glasgow, their Glasgow branch marched in the city on Armistice Day 1924. Their city centre HQ in Pitt Street became the Glasgow HQ of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) some ten years later. The BF continued until April 1926, when there was a major split over scabbing during the General Strike. However, until the 1930s, there was no organisation in Britain which could channel anti-immigration and xenophobic feelings into a political movement.

This changed with the emergence in 1931 of the New Party, originally conceived by the ex-left Labour minister, Sir Oswald Mosley, as an organisation independent of the mainstream political parties and committed to Keynesian economic strategies. The New Party campaign in Scotland was launched with a rally in the City Halls in Glasgow in March 1931, with the Glasgow Herald reporting that the interruptions were of a humorous nature. The party filled the hall and at least 2,000 people could not obtain admission. Speakers included Oswald Mosley, Cynthia Mosley, Robert Forgan (MP for West Renfrewshire), John Strachey (MP for Aston), W. Allen (MP for West Belfast) and Rosslyn Mitchell (former Labour MP for Paisley).

The electoral failure of New Party candidates under the first-past-the-post system disillusioned many of Mosley’s initial supporters, and seeing the growing strength and success of fascism in Europe, Mosley formed an out-and-out fascist party with a clearly defined programme. BUF policy was nationalist and corporatist, but quickly anti-Semitism began to take prominence in BUF pronouncements. In East London, anti-Semitism bound the BUF cadre together and played a central part in its activity and rhetoric. In Scotland, when asked about Jews at a large rally in Edinburgh in May 1936, Mosley’s answer was unambiguously antisemitic, echoing the Nazi Nuremberg Laws:

“We shall safeguard the position of the small shopkeepers by eliminating the great chain stores run by American and Jewish capital. … Our principal is that any Jew who has abused the interests of Britain will be deported. Those against whom no such charge rests will be treated as foreigners in our midst and therefore will not enjoy the rights of British citizenship. … Our charge against organised Jewry in this country is that it is organised as a racial community against the interests of Great Britain. My generation fought Germany in a British quarrel; we will never fight her again in a Jewish quarrel.”¹

After draconian attacks and banning of the German labour movement and Jews by the Nazis, attempts by the BUF to hold meetings were often met with fierce opposition throughout Britain. Further, the potential danger of the BUF became apparent when it received support from a section of British ruling class. The Daily Mail published a ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’ editorial from its owner Viscount Rothermere. Mobilisations in England were central to the BUF’s demise, culminating in the mass working class action at Cable Street, London in 1936.

The BUF in Scotland followed this pattern. The first BUF Scottish rally was at Dumfries in April 1934 and went off peacefully. Following this, meetings in Scotland’s two main cities were disrupted, and stopped where possible. In Edinburgh in June 1934 there were ‘several free fights’ between Blackshirt stewards and anti-fascists.² In Glasgow in 1934, under the headline ‘Glasgow fascists attacked – riotous scenes after meeting: Skirmish in street’, it was reported that thirteen fascists were ‘trapped’ in the headquarters in the city centre by a crowd of some 2,000 anti-fascists following a public meeting, and that only the presence and action of the police prevented ‘further trouble’.³ In Edinburgh in May 1936, the BUF bussed in blackshirt stewards from the North of England to a meeting that involved ejections, fighting, scuffles, interruptions, charges under the Public Meetings Act, and mounted police clearing the counter demonstration.

Some 11,000 of the 18,000 Scottish Jews lived in the Gorbals and Govanhill area of Glasgow. As suggested above, the BUF’s antisemitism and its admiration for Mussolini and Hitler were an existential threat to Jews. There was regular BUF activity in the south side of Glasgow. Monty Berkley, a Young Communist League member in the 1930s, remembers:

“Joyce [William Joyce, later Lord Haw-Haw] came to speak at Queens Park Recreation Ground and we organised a counter demonstration. We organised, a number of us from the working class, the Labour League of Youth, Young Communist League and other youth organisations, who all agreed to disrupt the meeting. I had the privilege of taking one of the platform legs and throwing the platform up in the air. We then had to run and were chased by the police but got away”.⁴

Berkley recalls how his own Clerical and Administrative Workers Union and most other trade unions had meetings ‘at which we discussed political as well as economic issues’, including the dangers of fascism. Morris Smith was in the Labour League of Youth and secretary of the Glasgow Workers Circle, a grouping of left-wing Jews, and Zionist and non/anti-Zionist trade unionists. He recalls that the BUF met regularly at Queens Park gates, but ‘they never got a chance as they were howled down by locals and trade unionists. They never got a turnout and I don’t think they recruited anyone. That was the line then, we had to stop them appearing on the streets’.⁵ Finlay Hart, a Communist Party full time organiser in the 1930s, maintained that the BUF did not grow ‘because of the strength of the labour movement. When the news came across about Germany, the workers and the trade unions were against them.’⁶

It is difficult to know how many members and supporters the BUF had outside the two main cities in Scotland, but there was certainly sustained activity and consequent antifascist protests. Motherwell, for example, became a pocket of BUF activity, following the recruitment of some very active members, in particular a Mr and Mrs Nixon. The branch held rallies, maintained a Fascist Hall and were somewhat bizarrely granted leasehold of the tennis courts at Calder Park.⁷ The Scottish BUF organiser claimed that ‘their leader was very gratified at the progress made in Motherwell… [which] if not the largest [branch] in Scotland would soon attain that position’. Lady Mosley (Oswald’s mother) visited the Motherwell branch in June 1934 andspoke at the tennis courts and the Fascist Hall. She was reported as saying that she ‘didn’t know of any branch of the movement that had started on such strong lines as the one in Motherwell’.⁸ There was strong opposition in this mining community. In October 1934, the Communist Party, ‘out in full force and in matters of numbers… easily superior to the Fascists’, stopped a BUF rally, hurled the BUF speaker from the stanceand held a meeting of its own.⁹ Nevertheless, the neighbouring town ofWishaw also witnessed high levels of BUF activity, involving meetings, social events and rallies.¹⁰

Aberdeen also saw a sustained effort to build a BUF organisation from 1936 until 1939. This seems not to have been a strategic decision by the BUF but was centred around the recruitment to the BUF in 1936 of one WKAJ Chambers-Hunter, a local laird, and his sister-in-law, Mrs Botha. Their joining was the beginning of three years of meetings, rallies and paper selling. There seem to have been well attended BUF policy classes in Aberdeen, at least according to the BUF, and the Aberdeen Branch was awarded the Oswald Mosley Cup for paper sales in September 1936, the first time it had been awarded to any branch in Scotland.¹¹ Opponents of the BUF responded to the threat, heckling at meetings and trying to break up rallies when they could. Street clashes in Aberdeen attracted widespread press interest. For example, in July 1937 the Aberdeen Press and Journal reported on a well publicised BUF meeting which had had to be abandoned, and BUF members protected by the police, as a crowd of 7,000 to 8,000 chanted: ‘Down with Fascist murderers… Mosley shall not pass… One, two, three, four, five, we want Mosley dead or alive’. There were four arrests by the police but bail was collected from the large crowd who were almost fighting for copies of a leaflet issued by the CP. Similar events occurred in October 1937 and on more than one occasion in 1938.¹² However, in March 1939 Chambers-Hunter and Mrs Botha resigned from the BUF on the grounds that the policy of social credit was not given sufficient profile in BUF policy, and this brought an end to BUF activity in Aberdeen.

It is important not to overstate support for the BUF in Scotland. BUF meetings attracted largish numbers, but membership has been estimated as relatively low. Webber maintains that at the high point of BUF membership in 1935 (estimated at 50,000), there were approximately less than 100 active members in Glasgow and 80 in Edinburgh, although support stretched beyond these activists.¹³ The Fascist Week claimed in June 1935 that there were active organisations throughout Scotland from Dumfries to Wick. While BUF membership claims were unrealistic and electoral results were derisory, there was clearly a significant BUF presence in various parts of Scotland during the 1930s. In Lanarkshire and Aberdeen, activist recruitment led to serious attempts to build a party organisation. Meetings, particularly when involving Mosley, could be very large. Wherever they felt it feasible, local anti-fascists countered BUF activity, particularly involving trade unions and community organisations by trying to ensure that the BUF would not get a platform. On many occasions that meant physical confrontation, in most cases led by communists, Labour Party youth, trade unionists and, particularly in Glasgow, left Jewish activists. Monty Berkley and Morris Smith claimed a key lesson from Germany was that the Nazis had to be stopped while small, and that a united labour movement was vital, involving the Communist Party, Labour Party and trade union activists. I think there are valuable lessons to draw from that.

Henry Maitles is emeritus professor of education at the University of the West of Scotland. He is a member of UCU and the SWP.

1. Scotsman, 16 May 1936, 15 ↩︎
2. Scotsman, 2 Jun. 1934, 13. ↩︎
3. Glasgow Herald, 28 Jun. 1934, 11 ↩︎
4. Monty Berkley, interviewed by author, August 1989 ↩︎
5. Morris Smith, interviewed by author, October, 1989 ↩︎
6. Finlay Hart, interviewed by author, November, 1989 ↩︎
7. Motherwell Times, 4 May 1934 ↩︎
8. Motherwell Times, 22 Jun 1934. ↩︎
9. Motherwell Times, 5 Oct 1934 ↩︎
10. Wishaw Press, 17 Mar 1933; 14 Apr 1933; 31 Aug 1934 ↩︎
11. Blackshirt, Sept. 12, 1936 ↩︎
12. Glasgow Herald, 26 Jul. 1937; Aberdeen Press and Journal, 26 Jul. 1937; Glasgow Herald, 4 Oct. 1937, 10–11; Aberdeen Evening Express, 4 Oct. 1937; Aberdeen Press and Journal, 7 Oct. 1937; Glasgow Herald, 12 Sept. 1938; Aberdeen Press and Journal, 6 Jul. 1938 ↩︎
13. G.C. Webber, ‘Patterns of Membership and Support for the BUF’, Journal of Contempo-rary History, xix (1984), 606. ↩︎