My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleyOlympia, for this is the biggest hall in London, only capable of being filled, if ever, inconnection with some stirring national crisis. Yet the Blackshirts secured an audienceof 15,000 people to pack the huge exhibition hall, and to listen to an oration by theirleader which went on for more than two hours.'Not all listened sympathetically; a considerable contingent of Communistsmanoeuvred an entry into the building by dubious means, with a view to organisingsuch disturbance as would frustrate speech. Their failure to do so was due toexpulsory methods which several spectators have described as brutal in the extreme.This statement is challenged by the promoters of the meeting. It is difficult to explainwhy the fury of the champions of free speech should be concentrated so exclusively,not on those who deliberately and resolutely attempted to prevent the publicexpression of opinions, of which they disapproved, but against those who fought,however roughly, for freedom of speech.'Personally I have suffered as much as anyone in public life today from hostileinterruptions by opponents determined to make it impossible for me to put my casebefore audiences. Naturally, therefore, I have an antipathy to that class of interruption,and I feel that men who enter meetings with the deliberate intention of suppressingfree speech have no right to complain if an exasperated audience handles themrudely.'The facts about the Olympia meeting, which are much in our favour, have been onrecord for many years, but have never been told; facts, too, are subject to the greatsmother. Legends of every kind are circulated about this meeting, bearing no relationto truth. For instance, in support of the ridiculous charge that I preferred a fight tomaking a speech, it is often stated that I stopped speaking for a considerable periodand had the searchlights diverted from the platform to various fights which weretaking place in the hall. If this were true, I should indeed have been an orator ofunexpected modesty. In fact, the loudspeaker wires were cut, and for a period I wascompletely silenced until they could be repaired. As for the searchlights, they werenothing whatever to do with me and I had no control over them; they belonged to thenewsreel companies, which were present in force. Directly I was silenced, theypreferred to take pictures of the fighting. I had no means of obliging them to keep thelights directed on the platform, short of using force, which would indeed have been anoutrage.Was the speech I made after the blackshirt stewards had restored order, so provocative,so inflammatory, such a menace to the life of the State that a highly organised,virtually military operation could conceivably be justified to stop its utterance whileauthority looked the other way? The speech was almost entirely about economics. Forinstance: 'Between 1929 and 1933 the decline of our export trade amounted to no lessthan £200,000,000. We must set about systematic building of our home market.' Itstressed the need for change: 'Our people are weary of socialism, which in the nameof progress sets the interests of every country before its own. They are weary ofconservative reaction, which keeps things as they are in the interests of the few.Today, they demand a new creed, a new spiritual movement which unites theprinciples of patriotism and progress, which loves king and country and is determinedto build a country worthy of its people.'249 of 424