Introduction
The Greenshirt Movement for Social Credit - to give its full and official title - is the only example, in twentieth century British history, of a movement made up of members who were regularly in uniform, and suspected of being at the fringes of the law, throughout the interwar period. During that time, the character of the movement altered radically. Its 1930s manifestation as a shirted political movement, marching on the streets, agitating amongst the unemployed in favour of the heretical social credit theories of the Scottish engineer, Major C.H. Douglas1, had travelled some distance from its 1920s origins as a left-wing, peace-and-woodcraft alternative to mainstream scouting.
The Movement, and its supporters, appear in this edited collection because their activities cast an illuminating light upon two of its central preoccupations: the borderzone between legal and criminalised activity and the dilemmas and potentials which qualitative methods of enquiry provide in its exploration. This chapter focuses upon the response of the Movement to the 1936 Public Order Act and its aftermath. The Act transformed the hitherto entirely legal activity of appearing upon the streets of Britain dressed in the uniform of a political organisation into a criminal offence. In order to make sense of that response, however, it will be necessary to sketch in some brief account of the Movement, its attitude towards acting within and without the law and the response which these activities had already evoked from the authorities.
The account which follows draws upon an extensive archive collected by members of the Movement in the 1970s and 1980s and held at the London School of Economics. It also includes extracts selected from more than twenty in-depth, qualitative interviews carried out over almost twenty five years with surviving members. The nature of this interview material is discussed in more detail later in the chapter. The Archive itself contains material which may be divided into a number of distinct categories. It includes a large number of formal, public documents both produced by the Movement - annual reports, periodicals, newspaper articles and so on - as well as public domain material written about it by others. This category of material intended for public consumption also contains material of a broader nature, dealing with the Movement or its ideas in a wider context. Examples include the dozen or so books written by the Greenshirt founder, John Hargrave, as well as pamphlets and other supportive documents from a range of supporters in the literary world, as diverse as Compton Mackenzie, Ezra Pound and Dorothy L. Sayers! A final set of papers which might be listed under this heading are to be found in collections of ephemera - playbills, notices of public meetings and so on - which, while in full public circulation, were not intended to form any permanent record.
A second category may be defined as material which, while not possessing any claim to confidentiality, was nevertheless not intended directly to be placed in the public domain. Examples include internal memoranda, tickets for meetings to be attended only by members of the Movement, minutes of routine meetings, drafts of documents intended for later publication and so on.
A third category includes documentation which, at the time of its generation, was - implicitly or explicitly - of a private or confidential nature. These include letters between individual members, diaries, minutes of private meetings, correspondence between Hargrave and his leading followers, internal financial assessments and membership records. For the purposes of this chapter, this material also includes the set of documents held at the Public Record Office in London and which includes police and special branch accounts of Movement surveillance which continued throughout its existence.
This chapter aims to make use of information from all these sources. In terms of considering the use of qualitative methods, and in exploring the boundaries of semi-legal and criminal activity, however, it draws most heavily on interview material and upon the contemporary internal and confidential documents in which these questions were discussed and decided upon.
The Greenshirts
The Founder and animating spirit of the Greenshirts was its Leader, John Hargrave. The youngest of Baden-Powellâs Scout Commissioners, Hargraveâs wartime experience as a stretcher-bearer at Gallipoli had made him resolutely opposed to the semi-military character of the early Scouting movement and the many retired Generals who formed its controlling circles. In 1921, at the home of the Labour activist and leading Suffragette, Emmiline Pethick-Lawrence, he founded the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, a mixed sex, anti-war youth movement, dedicated to internationalism, an anti-industrial ecologism and - above all - the demand that Youth should supplant the failed policies and personnel which had led the world to the ruin of the Great War.2
From the earliest stages, the Movement attracted attention through its deliberate assault upon the conventions of its time. Vera Chapman, an early feminist member, recalled its ethos in this way:
It was full of exuberance and excitement. It was taken out of this world altogether by a sense of enchantment. You were lifted right out of this world ⌠It was a magical and religious atmosphere. It was the religion of the spirit which you could not deny, out there under the sky.
Within this atmosphere, the purpose of the Movement appeared to be one of,
peace and better education and the breaking open of various taboos; the taboo against discussing sex, the taboo against throwing off your clothes in camp and the taboo against discussing anyone elseâs religion. People would be surprised now at what an awful lot of fuss there was at taking off your clothes in camp. People thought us terribly shocking. Well, we broke the taboos against sex, religion and politics which were absolutely sealed down. We broke the seals and brought them into the daylight.
It is not surprising, perhaps, that such flamboyance came to early official notice. Baden-Powell had quite certainly complained to the Home Office about Hargrave - whom he described as âswollen-headed and communisticâ - at the time of the Kibbo Kiftâs foundation. He hinted darkly to any Scouts who were thinking of following Hargrave into the KK that the Movement and its leaders were under the official surveillance of the security services. In fact, the Public Record Office at Kew holds a large Kibbo Kift file containing reports of Home Office and Special Branch interest in its affairs throughout the interwar period and beyond. An early example, dated 23rd May 1925, arose from a complaint made by an employee at the Central Office of the Conservative and Unionist Party who complained that the Kibbo Kift was part of an expanding youth movement conspiracy to undermine the social order, full of âsingularly repulsive typesâ, much given to âthe singing of German songs - (and of English ones as an afterthought)â. The Special Branch Report prepared for the Metropolitan Police made it clear that, âwe watched the Kibbo Kift very closelyâ, before concluding that, âany undue publicity would only help the organisation to expandâ.
Indeed, while the Kibbo Kift continued to attract public and more covert attention throughout the 1920s, it was not until the conversion of the movement into its Greenshirt phase in the first half of the next decade that its relationship with the forces of law and order became problematic. The activities of the Movement were essentially street-based, involving large-scale street comer meetings, sale of the Greenshirt newspaper, Attack!, and participation in unemployed worker demonstrations and rallies.
While it is not part of this chapterâs purpose to discuss the scale and scope of the Movement, its membership, at its height, was numbered in thousands, rather than hundreds. Members were concentrated in London and the industrial North of England, but contained members and branches as far apart as Cardiff, Glasgow, Belgium and Brisbane. In the public discussion of the Public Order Bill, for example, it was cited by the daily Reynolds News as, âby far the most numerous wearers of political uniforms in this countryâ (25.2.34.). In its one foray into electoral politics, at South Leeds in the General Election of 1935, it outperformed any other Shirted and any non-parliamentary party during the whole of the inter war years. In the twenty days of campaigning 3642 electors had been persuaded to vote for the Greenshirt candidate, representing 11.01 per cent of the votes cast.
Hargrave always stressed publicly that the Movement should operate entirely within the law and that disciplined conduct would, by itself, separate the Greenshirts in the public mind from its more notorious rivals, the fascist Blackshirts and the red-shirted brigades of the Independent Labour Party. The stance was pragmatic as well as principled, however. Despite their ambitions to recruit amongst the unemployed, the core Greenshirt leadership continued to be drawn from the peace-activists of the Kibbo Kift days. While members were, almost by definition, prepared to behave in ways which drew attention to themselves, they remained essentially mild-mannered and anxious about their reputation. When members carried out a carefully planned demonstration at a Test Match, for example, they waited until the lunch interval so as not to cause any inconvenience to other spectators!
Nevertheless, as the climate of physical antagonism between the shirted movements deepened in the mid 1930s, the level of planned and unplanned violence was also on the increase, especially at street level. The atmosphere of competition and its potential outcome were described by as respectable a figure as Andrew Carden - a Greenshirt and public school man who was later to become a distinguished architect - in this way:
The Fascists and the Communists were trying to hold meetings in the East End, with quite a lot of threatening stuff there. We used to go down there in groups and stand behind the fencing and the results were quite satisfactory. It was intimidation of a sort. I broke a Fascistâs jaw once, although that was by accident. They never succeeded in breaking us up on the streets although down in Clerkenwell and one or two places like that they tried a bit of it.
The Public Order Act 1936
The Greenshirts were first discussed in the House of Commons, in a public order context, when the Labour M.P. for Durham, Mr Leslie, asked the Home Secretary, âwhether in view of the recent raid by a body of Fascists upon the rooms of the Social Credit Party at Liverpool, and the attack upon three lads - two of whom had to be removed to hospital - and in view of other acts of violence by Fascists, he would consider the suppression of the Fascist organisationâ. Sir John Simon replied, noting that four people had been committed for trial as a result of the attack and preferring to wait for the outcome before taking any further action (New Age 4.6.36.).
At the end of August 1936 widespread publicity, in newspapers and on radio, was given to an attack on a body of uniformed Greenshirts who had taken up position at the head of an Ex-servicemanâs Demonstration Against Fascism in central London. Similar reports were forthcoming from other parts of London and the North of England. During the early autumn, the Government intention to introduce a Bill prohibiting political uniforms was widely canvassed. By October, when it was clear that action was to follow, the Greenshirts began to prepare their defence. On the 10th October, the General Secretary, Frank Griffiths, issued a Press Release which contained the essential argument upon which the Movement was to rely in its protest ag...
