My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosley1939 with only temporary fluctuations.The active membership was not always the same; a very large number of men andwomen passed through our hands and were only temporarily active, but on the wholewe did not lose them as the Communist Party did. We found that the few memberswho turned against us had usually some acute personal reason. Normally, men andwomen after intense activity would become inactive in a kind of moral exhaustion,but they nearly all remained with us always; complete and permanent loss was rare. Ithas been a saying of our movement, based on truth: once with us, always with us.We lost a few leading figures in the inevitable shocks and trials which all newmovements undergo, but the majority stood firm throughout. In May 1937 we neededto dismiss one-hundred-and-one out of a total staff of one-hundred-and-forty atHeadquarters, owing to a sudden financial crisis. Only four of the hundred-and-onedismissed turned against the party; the others remained entirely loyal. Those whostayed firm were headed by Raven Thomson and those who deserted were headed byWilliam Joyce. He was not a man to mind losing a job, but he was intensely vain; aquite common foible in very small men, as Bacon shows in his essay on thediminutive. It was a shock to his vanity that I retained chief organisers like Francis-Hawkins and dropped him.Francis-HawkinsJoyce did his best to create a revolt in the party, which I overcame without difficulty.He was expelled and founded a new party. Beginning with about sixty, mostly260 of 424