My Life

My Life - Oswald MosleyCommittee are endless, and will surely be recounted one day in detail by other people.They underline once again the necessity for cross-examination in open court of allnarks, spies, informers, keyhole peepers and the rest of the pestilential tribe who seekto pay off old scores when fate gives them the chance. My favourite tale is worthrecounting, for it is a typical example of the trivial and the nonsensical. After severalmonths' imprisonment without question, a blackshirt came before the committee; heafterwards gave conspicuous service both to medicine and the Church. His hobby thenwas beekeeping and he kept a diary to remind him of work to be done. One entry read:'Get rid of English queen, and substitute Italian', and it was solemnly read andconsidered during his interrogation by the Advisory Committee. He was subsequentlyreleased; they had apparently nothing against him except his opinions and thisominous intent, but it was enough to get him a good stretch. So we could continuethrough the infinite absurdity of mean men who get their chance at last to exercisetheir prejudice and their silliness. It was not quite so amusing when you were in jailand every kind of story was being circulated against you outside, without any chanceto reply, except my one slander action, which was not widely reported.I was arrested on May 23, 1940, together with all the leading men of our movement,and Diana was arrested some six weeks later on June 29. The only suggestion madeagainst her from official quarters was that she had in all things supported andsustained her husband; an offence of which the wives of some statesmen are mostconspicuously free. We had spent the evening of May 22 in my house at Denham, andleft the children there on the afternoon of the 23rd to motor the twenty- odd miles toour flat in Dolphin Square. I was surprised to see obvious plain-clothes police outsidethe front door; ingenuously, it had not occurred to me that I might be arrested. Gettingout of the car, I recognised among them detectives whom I knew because it was theirjob to attend meetings where there was any chance of disorder. They informed me Iwas to be arrested and I accompanied them to the flat which was swarming withpolice. They were all most courteous throughout, and after collecting a few things Iparted from Diana and went with some of them in a car to Brixton. There I found alarge number of our people had already been imprisoned. Altogether some 800 of ourmembers were detained, and were roughly divided, according to what the authoritiesbelieved to be their status in our movement, between Brixton Prison and theconcentration camp at Ascot, which was later moved to the Isle of Man. Some of thenortherners were thrown into jail at Liverpool, where conditions were the worst of all.At Brixton we were kept in F Wing, which had been condemned as unfit for use. Iwas put in No. 1 cell and found to my mild surprise that my next-door cell companionwas a Negro. Some whimsical jackass in office probably thought it would annoy me,but on the contrary I found him a charming and cultured man. I understood that hewas alleged to have played in the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra before the war andwas arrested on account of the peculiarity of this occupation at that time for acoloured man; the facts of his case were never fully revealed to me, but he certainlyknew a lot about music and I enjoyed his company and this mutual interest. Otherwise,I was surrounded by familiar faces and the most variegated collection of bed-bugs Ihad ever encountered since the First War. Captain Ramsay, the Conservative M.P. forPeebles, was in the same wing. An ex-Guards officer, he also had a considerableexperience of that war, and agreed that the bugs were more plentiful than in any billetwe had ever enjoyed, except in some deep dug-outs at one place just behind the frontline, where both we and the Guards had been on different occasions; I think it was338 of 424