My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleywith certainty that they would be thrown out, and the snakehouse was rife withrumours that they might lose their fangs in the process. The opposition believed theirown stories and were scared stiff. They were not the first politicians to fall victims totheir own eloquence. Peace and order soon reigned; there was little further disorder atour meetings before the war, and they might have become like church services wherethe interruption which aids the speaker is impious, had it not been for the continuallyincreasing enthusiasm of the audiences.Oswald Mosley oration to Blackshirts in Hyde Park 1935The blackshirt movement in the thirties was the only guarantee of free speech inBritain, and a spirit which was banished from our country, with results now all tooplain, may merit some further examination. It all began in a characteristically Englishfashion, we improvised to meet attack, to meet an existing situation. When fivehundred roughs were imported in coaches from all over the Midlands to smash ameeting of twelve thousand friendly people in the Birmingham stronghold myleadership had created for the Labour Party in five years, after sixty years ofConservative domination; when we were attacked on Ashley Green, Glasgow, by asimilar force armed with razors after I had addressed an orderly crowd of sixtythousand; when we were threatened with lynching, after the count at Ashton, by asimilar imported force after a three-week campaign of large and orderly meetings;when during my illness my wife's meetings were broken up in similar fashion all overthe country, we felt quite simply that we had to do something about it. I begangradually to collect a regular body of stewards, young men in plain clothes who actedas chuckers-out in the traditional English fashion, as I had seen Tories thrown out of251 of 424