Rothermere to Mosley

GREAT BRITAIN

Rothermere to Mosley

Off galloped the London Daily Mail, lead horse of Lord Rothermere's huge team of British newspapers, last week on a Fascist crusade. Pear-headed Lord Rothermere wrote the Mail's clarion call to young Britons "to break the stranglehold which senile politicians have so long maintained on public affairs." The man to do it. he said, is Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, leader of Britain's Fascist Black Shirts, a man '"willing to act with the same directness of purpose and energy of method as Mussolini and Hitler have displayed." Predicted Lord Rothermere who has long felt like playing Dictator himself: ''There will be a prolonged swing either to the Right or Left. At the next vital election, Britain's survival as a great power will depend on the existence of a well-organized party of the Right."

Though Lord Rothermere's frequent gallops rarely get anywhere, a ride with darkling, vivacious, rich Sir Oswald was bound to be interesting. In 1918 he, a War veteran, moved into the House of Commons as a Conservative. Two years later he married Lady Cynthia, daughter of the Marquess Curzon. He began drifting Left, to the Independents, to the Laborites, to the rebel Laborites. In 1932 he swung violently back, past his original Conservative friends, to a new Right extreme, the "British Union of Fascists" whose members he fitted out with black shirts and badges but no anti-Semitic program. Mussolini gave him a black banner. When his able wife died last May stricken Sir Oswald redoubled his efforts, counted Lord Rothermere as his greatest conquest to date.

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