Haters, Baiters and Would-Be Dictators

Anti-Semitism and the UK Far Right

Nick Toczek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138853508
• eBook ISBN: 9781317525875
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Fascism & Totalitarianism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For fifty-five years, from 1919 until 1975, The Britons published Jew-hating literature. For the forty years until his death in 1948, the founder and president of The Britons, Henry Hamilton Beamish, devoted his life to touring the world as an obsessive preacher of this hatred. Using material he has collected over the past thirty years, Nick Toczek tells their story. This is the first complete history of The Britons, which was the most prolific and influential advocate of extreme prejudice against all things Jewish – not least as the publishers of that notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Likewise, his is the first biography of Beamish.

Putting both The Britons and Beamish into context, this book also examines and explains their precursors, their contemporaries and their legacy. Here, then are detailed accounts of hundreds of anti-Jewish organisations and individuals. These include the late-Victorian anti-Semitism of Arnold White and the British Brothers League; the curious life of Rotha Lintorn Orman who was the unlikely founder of British Fascisti, Britain's first fascist party; Anglo-American supporters of Hitler; the lives and roles of extreme haters such as Arnold Leese and Colin Jordan; and the whole history of The Protocols, including the key role played by American motor magnate, Henry Ford. This shocking history of hatred takes us from South Africa to Nazi Germany, America to Rhodesia.

1

THE LIFE OF HENRY HAMILTON BEAMISH

For bigotry to thrive, rather than merely persist, it requires the steady sustenance of justification. To achieve this, it needs to build itself a culture, one within which prejudice has the appearance of rationality and reason. And, for those who would have it evolve into hatred, that culture must be all-embracing. It has to have its own literature, history, art, faith and philosophy. Within such an environment, even the most outlandish of views can gain the appearance of authority, authenticity and, indeed, normality. Since the 1920s, for those in the English-speaking world who have a propensity to dislike Jews, there’s just one person and one organisation which have together established this milieu more successfully than any other. They are Henry Hamilton Beamish and The Britons.

Remarkably little has been published about either of them. As an avid collector of material from and about far-right activity in Britain, I was curious. I began to pursue every fragment I could find. I started to collate these pieces, to build time lines, to plug the gaps, to fill in the details. I wanted to understand this strange and elusive man, the nature of his obsessive zeal and the story of his organisation. Before you can counter prejudice, you need to understand it.

At the root of twentieth-century Jew-hatred there is a single book, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Beamish, who had founded The Britons, based his life’s work on the content of this book. It was one of the first books that The Britons published, and for more than fifty years it would consistently remain their best-selling title. Working on this material I was gathering, I knew there was a story to be told here.

The truth is never easy. Beamish and The Britons could both be secretive. And, when they weren’t, they could and did embellish their achievements. Also, where there’s no complete story, falsities thrive, so some widely accepted details are simply wrong. Thus, for example, we are often told that Beamish was born in Ireland.

Henry Hamilton Beamish was born in London on 2 June 1873, his birth registered in the civil parish of St George, Hanover Square. He was the fifth of nine surviving children born to Blanche and Henry Beamish. His was a family with a long history of political influence. For generations, most of his male antecedents had been military or naval officers. Many went on to become notable figures in the spheres of legal, clerical or political service. Those in his paternal line had, for centuries, also been wealthy Irish landowners, although this inheritance had dissipated well before his birth, or even that of his parents. Who were they?

Henry’s mother, Blanche Georgina Hughes (1840–1904), was the granddaughter of Loftus William Otway (1775–1854), who was born in the family home, Castle Otway in Tipperary, Ireland. Like his forebears, he had an extensive and influential military career, as did his brother, Robert Waller Otway, who became both an admiral and a baronet.

Henry’s father, also named Henry Hamilton Beamish (1829–1901), was a rear-admiral and naval aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria. His was an illustrious career which almost didn’t happen. In 1871 he had been the commander of HMS Agincourt, ‘the noisiest and worst disciplined ship in the squadron’, when it ran aground on the Pearl Rock off Gibraltar and very nearly sank. He was relieved of his command, court-martialled and severely reprimanded. With the help of an inherited arrogance, he refused to let this setback hinder his progress. He had come through tragedy too. In 1864, three years before his marriage to Blanche, he had married Louisa Mary Ann Harrison. The following year she and their daughter, Louisa Esther, died in childbirth.

The Beamish men were expected to achieve greatness in serving their country. It was a long familial tradition. Go back, for example, a further six generations and you find Sir Richard Cox (1650–1733), himself born into an ancestral history of high public office. He was an Irish lawyer and judge who served as lord chancellor of Ireland (1703–7) and then lord chief justice of the queen’s bench for Ireland (1711–14).

The year after Henry was born, Blanche gave birth to Tufton Percy Hamilton Beamish (1874–1951) who followed their father in becoming a rear-admiral before entering politics. He was MP for Lewes in Sussex from 1924 to 1932 and again from 1936 to 1945, when his place was taken by his son Tufton Beamish (1917–1989), MP for Lewes from 1945 until 1974.

The couple’s surviving children – six boys and three girls – were all born in the twelve years between 1868 and 1880. In order of birth they were Robert Otway (1868–1949), Maude Louisa (1869–1951), Evelyn Frances Jane (1871–1913), Sackville Edward Cecil (1872–1947), our Henry (1873–1948), Tufton Percy (1874–1951), the short-lived Gustavus William Loftus (1875–1877), John Spread (1877–1915) and, finally, Margaret Esther (1880–1957).¹

The 1881 census tells us that, at the age of seven, Henry was the youngest pupil boarding at Romanoff House Boys’ School in Tunbridge Wells, Kent. And ten years later we find him, via the 1891 census, as a seventeen-year-old agricultural student boarding at the Colonial College in Hollesley, Suffolk. This was an establishment which specialised in taking the sons of well-to-do families, especially boys who had proved academically unfit for university.

Henry would later claim that, in his youth, it was his father who first informed him of the ‘Jewish question’, enlightening him about the ‘intrigues of international Jewry’.² That may well be true. Anti-Jewish sentiment was widespread at this time. And there is one specific piece of evidence that casual familial anti-Jewish attitudes existed between Henry’s siblings. On 17 November 1941, Sackville wrote a letter to Tufton, who devoted much of his spare time during the 1930s and 1940s in obsessively researching Beamish family history. His letter read:

My dear Tuf,

I have taken a copy of the enclosed & many thanks for it. I was glad to see you on Thursday, & as I told you then, to the best of my recollection from the old Adam & Eve bible, a big tome, practically all the younger members of Rev.^d H.H.B’s family were born at Hamilton Terrace, London with the exception, I think, of Katie Palmer.* I also think I remember our father stating that he was born at Youghal.** This would be easily possible, as the Rev.^d Spread (rector) father in law of Rev.^d H.H.B. was probably living there.*** I have discovered a resemblance between the Southern Irish and the Jews. They both clamour for independence, and both take damned good care they don’t get it.

Yrs ever

Sack.³

Notes: *Catherine Emily Beamish (1852–1930), their aunt, who married Joseph Blades Palmer in 1887.

**Youghal is an Irish seaside resort town in County Cork.

***Rev. Edward Spread (1752–1814), their great-grandfather, lived in Ireland and was father-in-law of their grandfather, Rev. Henry Hamilton Beamish (1796–1872).

Intensely aware of his family history, our Henry Hamilton Beamish reached adulthood certain that he was destined for military and political greatness. It lent him a self-righteous determination in all he attempted, together with a generous and ill-concealed combination of vanity and arrogance.

During 1891, while still only seventeen, exhibiting a wanderlust that would last him a lifetime, Henry went to Canada, where he took up wheat farming. During 1892 he is reported to have taken part in an expedition to the North Pole.⁴ In 1895 he went to Ceylon, where he worked for several years on tea plantations, and from 1898 to 1899 held the post of assistant manager on the Hope Estate in Upper Hewaheta.⁵ During the Second Boer War (1899–1902) he served as second lieutenant with the South African contingent of the Ceylon Planters Rifle Corps. They left Ceylon for South Africa on 22 April 1900 aboard the P&O SS Syria and returned to Ceylon on 15 July 1902 after just over two years’ service.⁶

During 1901, Beamish appears to have been given leave to attend his father’s funeral. The admiral, who had been ill for some time and was bedridden, had died at his home – Mount House, Braxted, Kent – on 18 July 1901. Beamish then stayed on in England, presumably to help sort out his father’s estate, which was settled that October (he left £3,465 11s. 8p.).⁷ Beamish then sailed from Liverpool on 14 November 1901 aboard the SS Staffordshire, bound for Colombo in Ceylon.⁸ It’s not clear if he rejoined his regiment, but within a year he had left Ceylon for good and was back in South Africa.

Beamish was now in his mid-thirties and living in Bloemfontein. Here, in 1903, he and a friend were running the Empire Tea Rooms.⁹ In 1904 he started the Farmer’s Advocate, one of the country’s first agricultural newspapers. This appears to have been his first venture into publishing. The paper’s full title was the South African Farmer’s Advocate and Home Magazine, it being a pair of co-published but separately edited his-and-her journals which ran from 1904 until 1933.¹⁰ (NB: Beamish appears to have based his publication on a well-established Canadian journal, also called Farmer’s Advocate and Home Magazine, which had been founded around 1865 and was owned and edited by William Weld.) He remained the owner of the Farmer’s Advocate for fifteen years. Thus, for example, when he returned briefly England in 1910, we find him described as a newspaper proprietor travelling as a second-class passenger aboard the SS Briton, which sailed from Natal and arrived in Southampton on 28 May.¹¹

Beamish seems to have been full of ideas for new enterprises. Also in 1904, he wrote as follows to the Secretary of the Industrial Commission in Bloemfontein:

Dear Sir,

I have the honour to say that I am still prepared to put down and work a modern Tobacco Manufacturing Plant in the Parys or Vredefort District, provided that the Government are willing to give me assistance in the way of a bonus or bounty on the produce of the factory.

I have made enquiries about the tobacco growing industry in the Vredefort district, and I find that the tobacco is put on the market in a very crude state.

With proper treatment and packaging a substantial trade might develop, and I believe with a good factory in the district there is every prospect of great improvement both in quantity and quality of the local crops.

I am awaiting replies to my enquiries in the United States about the engagement of an expert in manufacturing and packaging, and should certainly engage such a man should my proposal be accepted by the government.

I have the honour to be,

Sir,

Your obedient servant,

H. H. Beamish¹²

During 1905 he was also on the six-strong executive council of an Orange River Colony consortium promoting the establishment of a Bloemfontein Consumptive Sanatorium on a piece of land in the Eagle’s Nest district of Bloemfontein.¹³

It was in South Africa, during and after the Boer War, that Beamish first began to encounter the kind of extreme anti-Jewish sentiment that he would later so vehemently preach.¹⁴ There was a belief, widely held within the post-Victorian southern African ex-pat community, that Jewish business interests – particularly of those involved in gold, diamonds and broader finance – had invested in that war, promoting it and profiting from it. One author in particular wrote extensively on this theme, thereby doing much to legitimise such prejudices. He was J. A. Hobson, a journalist who, in the autumn of 1899, had a series of articles published in the Manchester Guardian. These then formed the basis of his influential book The War in South Africa: Its Causes and Effects, published in February 1900. In a chapter entitled ‘For Whom Are We Fighting?’, Hobson wrote:

A few of the financial pioneers in South Africa have been Englishmen, like Messrs. [Cecil] Rhodes and [Charles] Rudd; but recent developments of Transvaal gold-mining have thrown the economic resources of the country more and more into the hands of a small group of international financiers, chiefly German in origin and Jewish in race. Before I went there, the names Beit, Eckstein, Barnato, &c., were of course unknown to me; the very ship in which I crossed bore many scores of Jewish women and children. But until I came to examine closely the structure of industry and society upon the Rand I had no conception of their number or their power. I thus discovered that not Hamburg, not Vienna, not Frankfort, but Johannesburg is the Ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The life of Henry Hamilton Beamish
• 2 Arnold White and the British Brothers League
• 3 The Britons: the first three decades, 1919–1949
• 4 The Britons Publishing Company throughout the 1950s
• 5 The Britons Publishing Company: the 1960s and 1970s
• 6 Arnold Leese and The Britons
• 7 Colin Jordan and The Britons
• 8 The Protocols: origins, circulation and influence
• 9 Henry Ford and The Protocols 182 Postscript: the legacy of Henry Hamilton Beamish and The Britons
• Illustrations
• Appendix 1 Precursors of The Britons: 1900–1919
• Appendix 2 Peer groups of The Britons: 1920–1939
• Appendix 3 Some independent right-wing British journals
• Appendix 4 Key figures in The Britons
• Appendix 5 Draft constitution of The Britons
• Appendix 6 Publications by The Britons
• Appendix 7 Addresses of The Britons
• Conclusion
• Index