Most articles about British fascists in the 1930s mention antisemitism sooner rather than later, and often it’s the only focus of the story. When writing the Room Z series, it is an issue I had to confront straight away. Although there is a light touch to some of Hugh Clifton’s adventures and he throws himself into them with Richard Hannay dedication, there is no light side to antisemitism.
Historically, ignorance about minorities generates suspicion and mistrust; why don’t they live like we do? What are they up to? Are they a nation within a nation? All across Europe, a thousand years of antipathy towards Jewish communities has been punctuated by bouts of appalling violence.
When writing a thriller set in Britain of the 1930s, the painful truth is that a wide swathe of ordinary and otherwise decent people in the 1930s were casually antisemitic. It went along with the casual racism, homophobia and sexism of the age. Readers of Golden Age fiction by well-respected authors will find lines that today we would find offensive, with the defence offered that these were men and women ‘of their time’.
It would be anachronistic for my whole cast of characters to be ‘woke’, but I take care that those the reader is intended to sympathise with avoid slipping into the ‘of their time’ trap. Antisemitic and racialist comments are made carelessly by characters who have never given thought to their words, and are put deliberately into the mouths of the villains. It becomes a defining line between the shades of opinion within the Blackshirt movement.
Jews are a prime example of ‘the other’, a minority who retain a culture distinctive from the mainstream. People who are not like us make excellent scapegoats for what we would now call ‘populist’ agendas, and Hitler rode this demon to its shocking conclusion.
In Britain, the tone was more subtle. The original British Fascisti of the 1920s were unashamedly antisemitic but the party never advanced beyond a fringe far-right group led by an alcoholic. A more serious threat to the Jewish community was the rise of the British Union of Fascists, created at the end of 1932 by Sir Oswald Mosley. The party was launched on the back of his essay The Greater Britain, which did not mention the Jews once in its 40,000 words. With its mix of patriotic and socialist policies, the BUF was far more interested in establishing a corporate fascist state than hounding minorities.
The veneer did not last long. Mosley claimed not to oppose the Jews as a race, but directly confronted what he saw as the power of Jewish international finance. This is akin to defences we still see claimed today against charge of antisemitism. As his party grew, it was joined by diehard antisemites who had no qualms about hiding their views, including the powerful orator William Joyce. Communists directly opposed the BUF in the streets and many Jews joined their ranks, openly becoming the enemy.
Violence at his Olympia rally of 1934, and what Mosley saw as the influence of Jewish finance in suffocating his press support led to the mask slipping for good. An urge to appease Hitler and the need for street-level Blackshirts to identify an enemy brought the ugly aspects of fascism to the fore. The party was fracturing in frustration at failure to gain power, and antisemitism provided an issue for its factions to unite around.
Mosley turned his recruiting efforts towards the East End of London, where the white working class competed for work and housing with Britain’s heaviest concentration of Jews – many poor immigrants fleeing persecution in Eastern Europe. A policy of direct provocation reached its climax at The Battle of Cable Street in 1936, which features in the opening chapters of Blackshirt Conspiracy.
There is a surfeit of books about the Holocaust and the Nazi oppression that preceded it, so it feels like familiar ground. It is easy to slip into cliches about fascists and their opponents, but I wanted to retain a range of opinions amongst my characters that reflect the real tensions in the movement about who they were and why they were marching the streets in black shirts. I’m not Jewish, I’m a straight white guy and have never been in the position of an oppressed minority. While researching the latest book I read David Baddiel’s Jews Don’t Count, an angry essay about our blind spots on modern antisemitism. It proved invaluable in adding that layer of subtlety I needed.
It would be an easy route to take to have the antisemitic narrative drive the plots of the three Room Z books, but in Britain it was always a sub-plot. To many leading fascists it was little more than a distraction, even an embarrassment. The BUF was foremost an anti-democratic party, and its plans were directed towards seizing power by whatever means necessary. In my alternative history series it is those plans that Room Z is supposed to support and Hugh Clifton struggles to prevent.
Blackshirt Conspiracy is published by Level Best Books and is available worldwide from Amazon.
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