Irene went with Tom’s mother and brother to the inaugural meeting of the New Party in the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, on March 5, 1931. So many people turned up that the overflow was put in another room and more than a thousand were turned away. The only person missing was the one for whom they were all waiting—Tom had developed raging pleurisy. W. J. Brown, another good orator, was also ill, and the burden of putting across Tom’s message to a noisy and controversial audience fell upon Cimmie, backed up by Strachey and Forgan.
Irene recorded: “Cim was magnificent and undaunted by two ghastly hecklers, a communist and a drunken Labourite. She dealt with them and the crowd finally got livid with them and wanted them evicted. She gave dramatic touches and Forgan drab stuff. Countless questions followed.”
The repercussions over Cimmie’s resignation continued for some time. On the evening of March 6 a special meeting of the Stoke, Fenton and Longton Labour Party called upon her to resign her seat in Parliament: of the twenty-one delegates present, only three voted against this motion. The secretary for the Labour Party in the constituency, who had also been Cimmie’s election agent, fell on his sword, and his resignation was instantly accepted.
Not so Cimmie. Three nights later, speaking to a meeting of three thousand at the King’s Hall, Stoke, with queues outside the door, she made it plain that she did not intend to resign her seat. She plunged into the attack straight away.
“I want to say this as to the demand—of which I have received no notice—that I should resign my seat. I look upon it as the most tremendous cheek and humbug [cheers]. When I came to Stoke the Labour vote was twelve thousand. At the last election I brought it up to twenty-six thousand.”
“You won’t get it again!” shouted a voice from the balcony. Swinging around, she shouted back indignantly: “Well, give us a chance!”
There were such constant interruptions that at one point she shouted, “Please, please, please give order!” before she made her final point.
“If it came to a break with the Socialist Party I would rather go on with my fight than stick to a government that is not doing its job,” she said. “I am just as much a socialist as I have ever been, and even more so.”
On March 13 the Stoke, Fenton and Longton Divisional Labour Party passed a resolution stating that in view of the resignation of Lady Cynthia Mosley, MP for Stoke-on-Trent, from the Parliamentary Labour Party, they confirmed the action of the executive committee in requesting her to resign her seat. Their anger was understandable, as was their feeling that she should either vacate the constituency or fight it as a member of the Labour Party. But neither Mosley wished to leave Parliament.
Immediately after her immense effort on behalf of Tom at the inaugural meeting Cimmie had come down with a bad cough, but, with the New Party to nurse, she had to get up to continue campaigning. Tom was still ill, his temperature spurting up to 105 at times; all through the spring of 1931 Cimmie, Strachey and Robert Forgan undertook a series of meetings up and down the country, all three making speeches that were constantly heckled. When Cimmie spoke in Birmingham to launch the New Party the first question from the audience was: “Have you brought your money bags?” In Dundee the three of them joined arms and led the audience in singing “The Red Flag.”
At the end of March Tom went with Cimmie and Baba—still recuperating after the birth of the twins—to convalesce at Lord Beaverbrook’s villa in the South of France. While there, he heard of the first chance to test the New Party publicly: a by-election at Ashton-under-Lyme, a Lancashire cotton town with 4,690 unemployed, caused by the death of the sitting Labour member, whose majority was 3,407. The election was to take place on April 30—yet Tom remained in Monte Carlo and perforce another candidate, Allan Young, was chosen.
The New Party needed all the help it could get. One of the most effective speakers it hired was the former miner, laborer and trade-union official Jack Jones, who used the back of a lorry as his platform. “When I presented myself at the headquarters of the Party it was to find the political flotsam and jetsam of 1929 floating around,” he wrote. “Ex-candidates of all parties, and to give the thing tone, one ex–Cabinet Minister in the person of Sir John Pratt [a former Liberal junior lord of the Treasury].”
Jones, a tough former agitator, had little time for the New Party toffs who stayed in comfort at the Midland Hotel, arriving by car for meetings. But he had a great admiration for Cimmie, who joined him on the road: “The two most willing workers were Cynthia Mosley and Strachey’s American wife. Mrs. Strachey was by no means an effective speaker, but she could hold a crowd long enough to rest some of those whose throats were wearing [out].”
Most of the speaking took place in the large cobbled marketplace. Here Jones and two ex-communist assistants tried to pull in the crowds in competition with the Conservative and Labour speakers. First to emerge from the hall would be Cimmie, to be helped onto the loudspeaker lorry by Jones, where she would take her turn speaking. Her fearlessness, and her readiness to face the noisy crowds—many of whom were Labour supporters angry with the Mosleys for splitting the vote—deeply impressed Jones.
Cynthia Mosley was both able and willing. With me she must have addressed at least a score of very big outdoor crowds during the campaign and also scores of “in our street” talks to women. Whilst her husband and Strachey and the others of the first flight were looking important in the presence of reporters or talking about the hooking of the floating Liberal vote, the cornering of the Catholic vote, and preparing their speeches for the well-stewarded big meetings indoors each evening, Cynthia Mosley was out getting the few votes that were got. It was her work that saved our deposit, for she worked like a Trojan. She always answered my SOS’s for speakers.
Six days before the by-election Tom made his first appearance in front of a crowd of almost seven thousand at an indoor meeting, but even the famed Mosley eloquence failed to win the seat. On the night of the poll the market square was filled with people waiting to hear the result. When it was announced—Conservatives 12,420 votes, Labour 11,005 and New Party 4,472—a howl went up from the furious Labour supporters who blamed the New Party for allowing the Conservatives into a safe Labour seat. When they caught a glimpse of Cimmie and Tom they booed and hissed.
So great was the crowd’s anger that the police advised Tom to slip out through the back of the town hall. Never lacking in courage, he refused, though he told Cimmie to let the police smuggle her out to shelter in the house of a local supporter while he faced the angry crowd, described by Jack Jones as having all the appearance of an American lynch mob.
I looked at Mosley sideways [wrote Jones]. Certainly didn’t have the wind up. More savage than frightened. White with rage, not fear; he showed his teeth as he smiled contemptuously out onto the crowd that was howling at him and calling him names—many of which I had been called in my time.
“Come on,” he said impatiently. We others packed around him and the police packed around us as we plunged into the crowd. Men cursed, women shrieked and spat at us. We got through to the shelter of the hotel and the first thing Mosley did when he got there was to rush to the phone to make inquiries about his wife’s safety.
Few of Tom’s friends cared much for his new associates. “Lunched Tom and his not very nice satellite Allan at Carlton,” wrote Georgia Sitwell on May 19. “Talk of politics. Find Tom a little disappointing as a political figure. He is too preoccupied with Freud. It may be a joke but it goes too far.”
Baba, now taking an interest in politics, was torn between fascination and disapproval, while Irene had rushed back to her own preoccupations. The sufferings of her maid Lena, perhaps her closest confidante, made her miserable, she was involved with various unsuitable men and Baba, in her direct way, had told her she was drinking too much. One May evening, when Irene had joined friends at the Savoy, she wrote: “I got nervy and started to faint and Lefty [Flynn] took me home in a taxi. I know Baba thought I was drunk. It is now such a mania with me that I fear
if I say anything dramatically they will say I have had a couple.”
In June 1931 came the news they had all expected. Grace was stony-broke and the bailiffs owned everything in Hackwood and Carlton House Terrace; her only hope was to live with her son Alfred on his four thousand pounds a year. Grace’s other son, Hubert, had already bailed his mother out to the tune of fifty thousand pounds, at which he drew the line, much to her annoyance. Gracie’s abuse of her children for not helping her failed to enlist sympathy: her wild extravagance was all too well known.
Distraught though she was over Lena, Irene continued with her social life. Baba, her powerful personality emerging from the chrysalis of youth, did not hesitate to give Irene advice whether it was wanted or not. Confident in her own impeccable chic, she tried to tone down Irene’s flamboyant, colorful, hit-and-miss style for the grand ball given by Lord and Lady Crewe on June 14. “I only had last year’s black lace dress and was implored by the family not to wear my bohemian jewelry or sequin cap but Mummy’s pearls and be enormously dignified.” Her efforts paid off: next day Baba rang Irene up in rare complimentary vein.
At the beginning of June 1931, Tom held a “weekend school” at Savehay Farm. John Strachey, whose left-wing principles were drawing him more and more in the direction of communism, seized the moment to make a thoroughly Marxist speech, applauded loudly by Cyril Joad and Allan Young, who were furious at Tom’s decision to create a “youth movement” to keep order at meetings: a development which smacked uncomfortably of Germany’s fastest-growing new party, the National Socialist German Workers Party. This had seen its 2.6 percent share of the votes cast in the Reichstag in the election of 1928 rise dramatically to 18.3 percent of the popular vote in 1930. The Strachey speech heralded an unbridgeable split in the New Party.
Two weeks later, Tom acquired a notable adherent. Harold Nicolson, whose popularity as a writer, historian and broadcaster was soaring, left his well-paid job editing the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary to edit the New Party paper, Action.
This gain was soon to be counterbalanced by a damaging loss. When Tom announced at a meeting in the Cannon Street Hotel on June 30 that his movement was trying to create a new political psychology, a concept of national renaissance, of new mankind and of vigor, his disciple John Strachey became so alarmed that he announced that he was against authoritarianism. Tom’s response was a stinging public rebuke, describing Strachey as a “pathological socialist,” after which he left the meeting with some of the new and physically powerful friends who had been attracted to the New Party’s brand of militant politics: the East End boxer Kid Lewis, the Oxford rugger player Peter Howard, and Peter Cheyney, a crime novelist. This band of toughs had begun to follow Tom around like a kind of unofficial bodyguard. Though Tom never lacked courage, feeling against him in the Labour Party as a deserter and vote-splitter was bitter.
The New Party was in a state of flux. Some of its founder members were veering sharply to the left—Strachey later became a communist—and Tom himself believed that Liberals such as Lloyd George and Winston Churchill might approach him for support if a National government were formed in response to the dire economic situation. However, his underlying belief that power should be concentrated in the hands of the few, and by implication himself, was so apparent that on July 17 Harold Nicolson was noting in his diary: “I think Tom at the bottom of his heart really wants a fascist movement but Allan Young [the secretary to the New Party] and John Strachey think only of the British working man.”
The split was not long in coming. On July 20 Strachey produced his own memorandum, “The New Party and Russia,” which insisted that trade with Russia should be preferred to trade with the dominions. Britain could afford to allow Russia long-term credit, Britain should make “a progressive break with that group of powers (of which France and the USA are the leaders) which is attempting to restore the pre-war form of capitalism.”
Tom rejected Strachey’s memorandum, since its thesis was contrary to his own program. Strachey, Young and Joad resigned from the New Party in a blaze of publicity, declaring that “Mosley is adopting a conservative or fascist attitude.” Joad added that he did not want to belong to a party that was about to “subordinate intelligence to muscular bands of young men.”
At this time, the Curzon sisters’ oldest, closest friend Nancy Astor was grappling with bitter news. Her son by her first marriage, Bobbie Shaw, Baba’s old love, had been arrested for homosexual offenses. For Nancy, ignorant of this form of sexual behavior, it was a double blow: learning of “beastliness” as well as the shattering knowledge that the being she loved best in the world was to go to prison (although homosexuality per se was not a criminal offense, proven homosexual acts were).
Bobbie’s life had seemed glittering. A glamorous, witty, popular officer in the “Blues” (the Royal Horse Guards), he was a natural leader and in that regiment of horsemen one of the best: he twice won the Grand Military Gold Cup as well as many other steeplechases. Although his closest friends must have guessed his sexual orientation, such things were never discussed and, provided a homosexual was discreet, were never likely to be.
If Bobbie had formed a discreet liaison with someone of his own class few would have been any the wiser and the cardinal sin of scandal would have been avoided. But in 1929 he was found guilty of a homosexual act with a soldier. To preserve his reputation and that of the regiment, he was reported drunk on duty. His commanding officer told him to resign his commission or face a court-martial. It was given out that he had to leave the army for drunkenness, socially a far more acceptable alternative.
His family believed the lie—especially as, demoralized by the loss of the life he loved, he began to drink more. Nancy agonized constantly over his behavior, but worse was to come. On July 13, 1931, five days before Nancy and Waldorf planned to visit Russia with the writer George Bernard Shaw and Nancy’s devoted admirer Lord Lothian, Bobbie was told by the police that he was about to be arrested for a homosexual offense.
He had already been warned twice about importuning guardsmen—naturally enough, he knew the pubs they frequented near the barracks. The police told him that they would not be issuing the warrant for his arrest for four days, which would give him plenty of time to leave the country. After a year or so, the charges would be dropped and he would be free to return. But Bobbie decided to go to jail, perhaps through some mistaken idea that this would “purge” him of his “sin.” When Nancy heard this she lost control completely, weeping hysterically and clutching the curtains. It was not long, though, before her iron will and talent for practicality reasserted themselves.
As the Astor family owned both The Times and the Observer, she and Waldorf were able to ensure complete silence in the press—even her enemy Lord Beaverbrook kept it out of his newspapers. Meanwhile, Nancy had to go to her constituency of Plymouth, first to open a big hospital fete and, the following day, to welcome the Prince of Wales there.
Baba—one of whose most salient qualities was loyalty to her friends—immediately sent a note to Bobbie. “Bobbie dear, I hear you are in trouble. I have tried to find you everywhere but failed. If I can help in any way let me see you. I am in London tonight and tomorrow.” The Prince of Wales wrote a sympathetic letter to Nancy as soon as he heard what had happened. “Baba and Fruity have told me you knew all about it at Plymouth, and so I should like to say how absolutely marvellously I think you behaved and bore up during that long day of presentations. It does seem a cruel shame that a minute’s madness should be victimised when we know of so many who should have ‘done time’ in prison years ago.”
Bobbie’s case—again thanks to family influence—was heard quickly. The morning after his arrest he was tried in the Magistrates’ Court while Baba, together with Waldorf, Nancy’s niece Nancy Lancaster and Nancy, whimpering like an animal, waited in the Astor house in St. James’s Square for the verdict. Bobbie was given four months’ imprisonment; next day Nancy went as planned to Russia.
Prison broke Bobbie. His mental collapse was such that he could not bear the idea of Nancy collecting him on his release. Baba, perfectly prepared to brave any publicity or scandal by association, met him at the prison gate at seven-thirty in the morning and took him to the Basil Street Hotel for breakfast. From there, he went to the Astors’ house at Sandwich, where he stayed for some weeks. Eventually, after trying several options—and being sent to Paris to avoid the threat of a new case—he settled in a house which Nancy had built for him in Kent.
Tom did not let the state of affairs in the New Party hinder him from his usual forms of enjoyment. The huge weekend parties at Denham continued, as did his pursuit of women, with Georgia Sitwell still in the lead. “Lunched alone with Tom at the Ritz,” records her diary for June 24. “Enjoyed it. Talked politics and ourselves.”
Politics was the dominating subject everywhere. The economy was about to reach crisis point. On July 31 the government received the report of the May Committee, set up to assess the economic situation, which was found to be far worse than originally thought. The budget deficit for 1932, expected to be around twenty million pounds, would in fact be nearer one hundred seventy million pounds. The committee recommended that taxes should be raised, the pay of all state employees, from ministers, judges and the armed services down to postmen, should be reduced and, crucially, unemployment benefits (“the dole”) should be cut by 20 percent.
For the families of working men who had lost their jobs, this meant malnutrition on a scale unknown since the worst horrors of the previous century; and for a Labour government to accede to it was unthinkable. This gloomy report caused a run on the pound and further unemployment.
Tom had come to believe ever more strongly in individual power through direct contact with the public in the fascist manner (“he conceives of great mass meetings with loudspeakers—50,000 at a time,” wrote Harold Nicolson in his diary). At the end of July 1931 he held a New Party rally at Renishaw Park, the home of his friend Osbert Sitwell. Forty thousand people were present to hear Tom declare: “We invite you to something new, something dangerous.”
The Viceroy's Daughters Page 18