The Thing Itself

THIRTY-ONE

Victor Tempest exercise book one cont.

So there we were, Ridge, Simpson and me: fascists together.

Oswald Mosley intrigued me. He’d started out Tory, then gone to Labour, then struck out on his own with his New Party when Ramsay Macdonald headed the new National Government in 1931. And the secretary of the New Party was a crime writer I liked called Peter Cheyney.

The New Party had been trounced in the 1931 general elections. On 1st October 1932 Mosley had launched the British Union of Fascists with a flag-waving ceremony in the old New Party offices at 1 Great George Street up in Westminster.

These days, fascism has terrible connotations and we associate it with the far right. But at the time it had a perfectly proper place on the political spectrum. It was just a radical movement. My leanings were actually to the left, except that I didn’t like unions.

Mussolini — who created the name fascism in Italy — was much admired, even after his ruthless attack on Abyssinia. He was admired by the upper classes for bringing firm government that held back the perceived threat of the Red Menace that the Russian Revolution had conjured up. He was admired by the young and the progressive for looking to the future, not to the past. In Italy, the trains ran on time.

Mosley took on his mantle in Britain. Although from a wealthy background, he presented the British Union of Fascists as a classless organization in which merit was the only qualification for advancement.

He presented the BUF as a youth movement against the ‘old gangs’ of British politics. He wanted to cure unemployment and prevent Britain’s economic and political decline.

I was an energetic young man, eager to get on. The police force was incredibly hierarchical — it took Charlie Ridge thirty years to rise from constable to chief constable. The BUF was for me, especially as Stanley Baldwin from the old establishment called Mosley ‘a cad and a wrong ’un’. That was almost all the recommendation I needed.

The big newspaper proprietor Lord Rothermere was a fan of Mussolini and he backed the BUF in the Daily Mail. That’s where I read about them and that’s why I joined, alongside Philip Simpson.

Neither of us fancied the uniform — we had enough of uniforms in the day — or the processions or the flag-waving but we could tolerate them.

When we joined, Mosley wasn’t interested in all that Protocols of Zion nonsense. The BUF stood for religious toleration, not anti-Semitism. Mussolini was the same, actually — it was the National Socialists in Germany who added that to the mix. In fact, other British fascist groups — and there were many factions — called the BUF kosher fascists.

It probably sounds now like I’m protesting too much. I probably am. Anyway, anybody could join and the first thing I realized was that anyone did. Philip, Charlie Ridge and me usually went up to London for our meetings, but there was a Brighton branch that we went to a couple of times that was full of eccentrics.

The Brighton meetings were something and nothing — someone would give a talk, then we’d go to the pub for a drink. There was a bloke called Tony Frederick who was a music hall performer. A dancer. He and his wife — well, he said she was his wife — performed as Kaye and Kaye. He just seemed to be down on everything, a man full of envy. His wife would join us for a drink afterwards. Her dress was a bit gaudy and she was past her best, but she was nice enough. She had a big thirst.

There was quite a lot of those types in the party — people who’d failed in life and were now trying to get in through the back door. I got friendly with a young chap called Martin Charteris who was at both meetings. He worked as an attendant in the public lavatories at the Brighton railway station — that’s what I mean about the BUF being open to everybody.

He was a sharp bloke, a couple of years older than me, with a quick sense of humour. He said he split his time between Brighton and London. He couldn’t wait to get his uniform. Mosley had designed a black shirt based on a fencing jacket — he fenced epee for Britain even though he had a gammy leg. Mosley thought the shirt reflected ‘the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace’. Charteris just fancied prancing around in his shirt and his jackboots.

The first meeting I attended, in London, Peter Cheyney gave a talk. I fancied myself as a writer — I was always scribbling on whatever piece of paper came to hand, even if it was only my diary — so I got chatting to him. He wrote crime novels. Not those Agatha Christie country house ones, though. These were what were later called hard-boiled. American pulp. Lots of violence.

Anyway, Charlie, Philip and I didn’t want to join under our real names because we were bobbies. When I told him I wanted to be a writer, Cheyney suggested I join under the name Victor Tempest, which had a good sound for a crime writer. So that’s what I did and the name stuck.

I actually went to a dance hall with Charteris in Brighton one evening. Shelleys. We both met girls and went our separate ways, and I didn’t see him again for a good few months. I took the girl to a show at the end of the pier and Kaye and Kaye were on down the bottom of the bill. They didn’t set the stage alight.

I spent most of my time off in Brighton on the seafront or I’d nip up to London. The line got electrified in 1933 and a third-class return fare was only 12s 10d. I liked the seafront best, though. The smells — all the seafood stalls and the fish-and-chip shops. The bustle — locals going about their business and visitors in big, screeching gangs.

I remember fortune tellers’ booths decorated with pictures of Tallulah Bankhead; waxwork dummies in amusement booths; cafes with signs saying ‘Thermos flasks filled with pleasure’; and my favourite — the booth promising ‘Ear piercing while you wait’. As if, at other booths, you had to leave your ears and come back when they were done.

I used to hang out in the Skylark, a cafe that was rough but attracted a lot of girls. Around September 1933, I got chatty with a regular in there called Jack Notyre. Only about five feet seven and he had a stutter, but the girls seemed to like him. In fact, he had to fight them off.

I was a bit younger than him — he was in his early twenties — but we were both single and enjoyed a joke and liked a game of cards for pennies. Then one day it turned out he wasn’t exactly single. An older woman turned up, a bit the worse for wear, and sat with him. He seemed a bit embarrassed, she being so much older. He introduced her as Mrs Saunders. They lived together.

I recognized her, though she didn’t recognize me. She’d been Tony Frederick’s dancing partner and ‘wife’.