“As the only man who went to the Houses of Parliament with the right intention,” declared the British Union of Fascists (BUF), “Guy Fawkes is the Patron Saint of Fascism.”
A 17th-century Catholic conspiracist who has been ritually burned for centuries might seem a strange hero for the British far right. But not only did the BUF celebrate Fawkes at dances and events, but he became central to their media campaigns. And though the British fascist movement led by Oswald Mosley in the 1930s might be best understood as a media phenomenon – as AJP Taylor witheringly observed, “Oswald Mosley sought to be The Great Dictator. Sir Charles Chaplin played the role better” – few know the story of British fascist film. Or even know that there is a story to be told.
Mosley did not just try to play the Great Dictator – he used film to try out a variety of political characters. To find a persona that would stick, he sifted through a series of national archetypes. Having attempted to blow up the existing political compact by leaving the Labour Party, Fawkes became one of the important parts that he played. Tatler published a cartoon with Mosely as Fawkes and in 1934, with a screening of Guy Fawkes, an educational short clipped together from old fictional films, the cinema of British fascism flickered into life.
In a manner entirely typical of his class, the first introduction of Mosley and his first wife Cynthia to the cinema came through his fundraising work. Before his formation of the British Union of Fascists, film screenings served as focal points publicising the Mosley’s philanthropic campaigns: a way of raising money for the unemployed and war veterans, and of being seen to do so. But what began as a slightly tiresome obligation quickly became a fashion to be followed. In a manner akin to today’s establishment courting social media influencers, the socialites of the age began paying Chaplin to shoot short films at their weddings. Film became something that you just had to be interested in.
Oswald and Cynthia were creatures of the inter-war film club. The network of film societies set up by artists, educators, and politicians interested in exploring film to its full potential. Private societies became the home of “alternative cinema”, especially avant-garde work from Soviet Russia and Weimar Germany, otherwise pushed to the margins by censors and commercial imperatives. “The national film society movement helped to create an audience of cinephiles in every city and many towns across the country during the 1930s,” says the Sight & Sound critic Henry K Miller. “Although it was outwardly non-political, the London Film Society was in the vanguard of the fight against censorship since they prized perhaps above all other movies the Russian films of the 1920s, such as Battleship Potemkin.”
Impressed by the work of directors such as Sergei Eisenstein, film humoured Mosley’s fantasies of a transformed British politics, of which, naturally, he would sit at the apex. According to his biographer, Robert Skidelsky, Mosley bought a camera to make home movies and “one summer even directed a horror film based on Fritz Lang’s expressionist techniques”. Wesley Kirkpatrick, a film scholar who is currently writing a book on Mosley and fascist film, has discovered that Mosley collaborated with the writer and broadcaster Harold Nicholson to make Crisis (1931). Contrasting footage of MPs asleep in the chamber, with the deprivations of Britain during the Slump, Crisis followed the production and distribution of the New Party’s newspaper (entitled Action) as it sparked a mass uprising across the UK. After it was banned by the BBFC in the run up to the General Election, Crisis acquired a certain amount of cachet and encouraged Mosley that “[Crisis] is definitely effective.”
While reproductions of the Daily Mail’s 1934 front page, “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”, have become an amusing fixture of today’s social media, Mosley was only briefly backed by Britain’s media elites. (The Daily Mirror was also momentarily enthusiastic about the BUF.) Against the backdrop of Hitler’s ascension to power Mosley would be completely banished from the mainstream. But the consequence of the ostracisation of British Fascism was their embrace of alternative media. “Oswald Mosley was a pioneer of modern political communication,” says Dr Stephen Dorril author of Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism, “making innovative use of bill posters, film and radio.” With “unorthodox politics” programmatically marginalised by the newsreels and the BBC under the watchful eye of the security services, Mosley began to seek alternative routes into the mass media.
According to Kirkpatrick, with an eye on appropriating the derring-do image of Hollywood stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn, Mosley made multiple media appearances as a fencing instructor. Indeed, fencing became an important component of the New Party’s youth programme, with Mosley often leading classes himself. Eventually, the breeches and asymmetric buttons of Mosley’s fencing attire would morph into the BUF’s first blackshirt uniform: Guy Fawkes with an épée. “The New Party and then the BUF mixed a sort of arcane buccaneering Elizabethanism with high modernity,” says Dorrill. “It was their attempt to close one of the central contradictions they faced between a modernising tendency and a backward-looking politics.”
As both a revolutionary and something of a folk hero, the figure of Guy Fawkes was usefully Janus-faced. “As the fireworks crack and the rockets rush up to the sky in memory of Guy Fawkes, the first great British attack upon effete parliamentarianism is launched,” as the BUF propaganda had it. Yet at the same time as asserting that “parliament and the whole rotten democratic political system must, in effect, be blown sky high”, they also insisted that “we are not going to sneak into the cellar of the House of Commons; we are going by right of election into the Chamber itself”. Parliamentary corruption would be destroyed once and for all in a way that was fully consistent with due democratic process.
Having established an in-house production company to “record the activities of British fascists”, perhaps surprisingly the BUF were able to attract several interesting figures from the film industry to their cause. While in broad strokes the cinema was booming, the transition to sound had pushed an older generation into early retirement and this generation of talent proved a fertile recruiting ground.
Yet there was often also an ideological commitment to the BUF, with many of Mosley’s recruits migrating from the political left after Ramsay MacDonald split the Labour Party by joining the Tory-dominated National Government. The actor and screenwriter Maurice Braddell, the star of Zoltan Korda’s Men of Tomorrow, had been a communist before joining the BUF. Indeed, much of the BUF’s critique of the film industry was indistinguishable from left-ish sentiment. Namely, the malign influence of American culture, the poor quality of low budget “quota quickies” – by 1935 a fifth of the films shown at the box office had to be made in Britain – and the industry’s appalling pay and conditions.
Meanwhile, the BUFs opposition to “monopoly interests” such as the absorption of local cinemas into larger chains, gave an anti-Semitic undertone (ODEON were a Jewish-owned company, for instance) to pro-worker sentiments. Yet for all the assembled talent, the impact of the BUF’s films was negligible. While it briefly brought new blood into the organisation, the formation of the National Government shut out all political opposition for a decade, making Mosley’s Keynesian economics irrelevant. The jobs created by rearmament drained working-class support.
Cut off from the mainstream, it became difficult for Fawkes to retain his salience as the BUF visibly came to rely on German funding. Alongside classics of interwar German cinema such as Metropolis, the BUF seem to have hosted some of the only pre-war screenings of Leni Riefenstahl’s film of the Nuremberg rally, Triumph of the Will. By this point, the BUF’s political support had both moved up the social scale and shrunk to a small rump mainly concerned with keeping Britain out of the looming war. It arguably existed alongside German cutouts like the Anglo-German Society.
The cinema was supposed to project a vision of Mosley as a self-styled man of action, but as George Bernard Shaw put it in an essay entitled “In Praise of Guy Fawkes”, the BUF leader would instead become “a very interesting man to read”. Unlike Riefenstahl, whose revived work was central to the campaigns of postwar anti-totalitarianism, Mosley’s film career is a study in deplatforming avant la lettre. Despite other efforts to form an alternative media base – by buying Radio Luxembourg or broadcasting from Sark – the press barons, newsreel companies, and the BBC were successful in pushing Mosley out of the public eye. While Braddell subsequently starred in Warhol’s Flesh, and finished his career feted in the New Yorker, only two of the BUF’s film productions are known to have survived.
“The reason why Guy Fawkes, the old-timer revolutionary, is periodically burned, is not because he attempted the destruction of the House,” as the BUF put it, “but because he failed.” Ironically, it was a fate that they would soon share.
[Further reading: The vindication of V for Vendetta]
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