My Life

My Life - Oswald Mosleycalled Vermelles. The old familiar tramping of the massed battalions began directlywe lay down to sleep.Nearly all the men in our wing were members of our movement, except for someGermans and Italians who had been naturalised British, and a few members of the'Right Club', to which Ramsay belonged. He and some of his friends were in jail foran odd reason, if reason it can be called. Some official in the American Embassy hadrevealed correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt to outsiders, and was latersentenced and imprisoned for having done it; a woman of a well-known family offoreign origin was also sentenced to a long term in prison in connection with thisbusiness. Captain Ramsay had certainly committed no offence, or he would have beencharged. So far as I could make out, he had been informed of this matter, and as anM.P. thought it was his duty to investigate the affair and communicate the facts to hisleader, Mr. Chamberlain. The abrupt change of government during this processresulted in him being thrown immediately into jail. If his course had been bolder andhe had stood up and attacked Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, in the Houseof Commons, it would have been more difficult to silence him, but he probablythought in time of war this was an unpatriotic act.In fact, it always seemed to me that in this respect he had nothing to attack Mr.Churchill about, and that the whole thing was a mare's nest. Churchill as First Lordhad a perfect right to correspond with the President of the United States. It could evenbe argued that once we were in the wretched business of war it was the duty of allministers to seek help where they could get it and allies where they could find them.Churchill had probably told Chamberlain all about it, and, if he had not, at worst itwas a breach of etiquette. Yet the members of this right-wing group thought they wereon to something of world-shaking importance, and some of them sacrificedthemselves in the cause of a revelation devoid of meaning or purpose as far as Britainwas concerned. In America, of course, the publication of such correspondence mighthave been a sensation to an electorate whose President was then stamping the countrywith pledges to its mothers to keep their boys out of war.A distinguished Admiral was imprisoned with us, together with his wife, but neitherof them had anything to do with this group or with our party. Admiral Sir BarryDomvile, ex-chief of Naval Intelligence, was imprisoned because before the war hehad run an organisation for the promotion of Anglo-German friendship called theLink. He wrote an amusing book on his experiences entitled From Admiral to CabinBoy, a sentiment of life's vicissitudes, which at that time a number of us in varyingdegree felt we shared.Apart from the extra amenity of the bugs, we had the normal conditions of remandprisoners in jail, which are, of course, different in several particulars from thetreatment of convicted men. The prison staff on the whole were a fine lot, mostly exservicemen;one warder had been a sergeant in my regiment. The prison governor,Captain Clayton, a much-wounded soldier of the first war, was a fair and honourableman, and so was the chief warder, Watson. Our particularly disagreeable jailexperiences were in no way due to them. They had nowhere else to put us, except thecondemned wing, and orders had been given from above that this was to be ouraccommodation. We were there under war conditions with a shortage of staff, and atfirst there appeared to be a lively apprehension concerning the possible conduct of339 of 424