Tudor Ghosts in Black Shirts: The British Union of Fascists, Nazi Germany and the Quest for Musical Greatness in Britain^*

Abstract

In May 1934, a music critic named John Fielder Porte penned an article in Fascist Week, a publication of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), entitled ‘“Merrie England”: A Lovable Opera of National Music’. In this article, Porte deplored the ubiquity of German and Italian operas in British theatres, performed by ‘foreign singers’ and supported by an ‘audience of aliens’ that shut out Britons who aspired to the musical professions. He longed for a great work of music that the British people could regard as their national statement. ‘British operas’, Porte suggested, ‘are curiosities, like the wild cats of Scotland …Why did the greatest British composer, Elgar, write no opera? Well, one very good reason is that he would have been very lucky to have ever heard it produced in a worthy manner—at the Grand Season at Covent Garden. Perhaps it was as well that he spared himself the humiliation of writing an opera which would not have been considered good enough to rank with the array of imported “stars” in the capital of his native country’.¹ Porte then turned his gaze enviously to Germany, which, he wrote, ‘[has] a glorious opera that reflects the spirit of the German people and is known to all Germans, whether musical or not. It is entitled “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg,” by Richard Wagner. We, of course, know that delightful work and love it almost as much as the Germans do’. Who could be the British Wagner, and what work could do for Britons what Die Meistersinger did for Germans? Porte proposed the comic opera Merrie England (1902), a period piece recounting Walter Raleigh’s secret affection for a lady in Elizabeth’s court, with music by (the unfortunately named) Sir Edward German.²Merrie England, Porte hoped, would be ‘the start for real national opera in a future national England … It should be known to every Englishman, woman, boy, and girl’.

This was far from Porte’s first protestation at the state of British music, nor the first time that he alternated between veneration and suspicion of the magnetic German world. As early as 1921, he had written, in a hagiography of the Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford, the lament that ‘[f]ew [in the nineteenth century] believed in British music as being of any value, and not without reason, for there was little brought forward that was not second-rate German classicism in spirit. The great days of Henry Purcell, Byrd, Blow, Gibbons and others had been forgotten during the couple of centuries of Teutonic influence’.³ Like others in the BUF, Porte exhibited a constantly vacillating relationship with the Germans, finding that people a source of both inspiration and intimidation. German culture, long familiar to the British, had prompted conflicting emotions and replies from the United Kingdom, ranging from the highest esteem to rank mistrust of the ‘cunning Teutons’, especially during wartime.⁴ Britain had historically suffered the reputation of being an ‘unmusical nation’ that had lost the spark once stirring the court composers of Elizabethan times, and this self-consciousness had produced more than a little envy of Germany’s world-renowned musical tradition.⁵ ‘We let Handel overshadow us like a beech tree’, rued the musicologist William Henry Hadow in 1918, ‘under whose spreading and magnificent foliage nothing prosperous can grow’.⁶ Wagner himself remarked, after witnessing the performance of a Handel oratorio in London, that the concertgoers ‘[held] a Handel piano score in the same way as one holds a prayer book in church’, so gladdened were they that the Baroque master thought highly of Britain.⁷ ‘In every self-respecting German town’, wrote the columnist R. Saw in the BUF organ The Blackshirt, ‘[there is a] municipal theatre or opera house’ that played the music of that country; but in British towns that lacked these institutions of culture, ‘traditional English music is now seldom heard outside the churches … the music which was good enough for the men who fought the battles which made England feared and respected throughout the world’.⁸ The impulse to emulate the Germans, and umbrage at the very fact of that impulse, had been a recurring motif in many areas of British life, and music was no exception.⁹

Dominated by the skilled orator and demagogue Oswald Mosley, the BUF ideated a decaying British society overrun by racial saboteurs and raged daily against forces within and without believed to be at the root of the malaise.¹⁰ For British fascists in the musical profession, Britons’ long-standing, passive acquiescence to the label ‘unmusical’ was the origin of a pervasive cultural rot that had allowed jazz, experimental modernism, ‘negro melodies’, ‘international rubbish’ and an inundation of foreign performers to colonise the British musical world.¹¹ The BUF’s vociferous resistance to these (perceived) trends, and especially its promise of a racially homogeneous artistic renaissance under fascism, produced an energetic nationalist musical scene that drew an idiosyncratic range of characters from 1930s Britain. Among those involved were the American expatriate poet Ezra Pound, who contributed commentaries on music to the Mosleyite newspaper Action; Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, fourteenth baron Berners, a wealthy nobleman, friend of Igor Stravinsky and Faringdon eccentric who composed music for the BUF at Diana Mosley’s request; the aspiring conductor Reginald Goodall, who, after the war, achieved fame as Britain’s leading interpreter of Wagner; Joseph Holbrooke, a composer of the late Victorian mould who resented his ostracism by the British musical establishment; numerous musicians and critics of humbler stature, such as the highly pugnacious baritone Cuthbert Reavely, the composer R. Selwyn Watson, and John F. Porte, a member of the Incorporated Society of Musicians; and an assortment of pseudonymous columnists going by names such as Anglus, Musicus and Bluebird. The leaders of the BUF exerted significant effort to include music in party activities, establishing a fifty-member orchestra, several male and female choirs, a great number of marching bands, and even going so far as to produce, advertise and sell gramophone records of BUF songs.¹²

As these Blackshirts and fellow travellers enunciated and attempted to act upon a vision of musical renaissance in the British Isles, the German experience always occupied a central place in their imaginations. This was, in the first place, due to admiration of Germany’s rich cultural inheritance and the prominent role that music played in that country’s public life. Commanding repertoires in symphony halls and opera houses alike, German music was part of daily routine for musicians across Europe, shaping their educations, careers, leisure time and intellectual lives in myriad ways. Beyond this, however, Germany offered an example of concrete fascist governance that the BUF could not help but keenly observe. Following Hitler’s ascendance to the German chancellorship, British fascists recognised in the Nazi Party an enticing model of national rejuvenation: the assertion of racial pride, declared The Blackshirt in July 1934, by a ‘great and powerful nation [that] has suffered more than its share of sorrow in the past fifteen years’.¹³ BUF musicians were certainly intrigued and excited by the cultural policies of Nazi Germany—especially Joseph Goebbels’s attempts to regulate jazz and institute protections for native German performers—which, they hoped, could be emulated in a ‘Greater Britain’ under Mosley’s leadership. But most impressive to these British admirers was the Third Reich’s highly visible cult of Richard Wagner, which by the mid-1930s had established the famous composer as one of the best-known symbols of fascist culture worldwide. Nazi Wagnerism was a dramatic example of how a fascist regime could lionise and exalt a historical composer as the ultimate symbol of race and nation, and prompted British Blackshirts to ponder which composer, or school of composition, could fulfil such a role in their own country.¹⁴

Never conclusively settled, this discussion revolved around two possibilities: first, the generation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British composers that included Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Frederick Delius and Edward German; and secondly, Elizabethan masters such as William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, John Wilbye, Thomas Weelkes, Robert Jones and John Dowland, as well as the Restoration composer Henry Purcell. By imprinting the Wagner cult onto the British past, the BUF began to reframe the musical history of Britain along novel racial-nationalist lines. The Blackshirts were not the first on the British right to admire Wagner, nor to romanticise and appropriate the Tudor era, but they distinguished themselves from their forebears by reimagining British composers as symbols of state in a hypothetical Mosley regime. If, for Victorian critics, the celebration of indigenous musical genius was a stepping-stone toward the construction of an English race, the BUF sought to convert that genius into an instrument of British authoritarianism. The Nazi example on which Mosley’s Blackshirts trained their attention was, in this respect, both a source of empowerment and insecurity: the former, because it offered a blueprint or guide for cultural policy in a fascist Britain; the latter, because it summoned old worries about Britain’s apparent lack of a composer comparable in stature to Wagner.

The few studies hitherto conducted of BUF musical culture have typically been concerned with its practical side: the marches, political hymns and martial anthems that are among the most recognisable tools of fascist mobilisation. In his survey of the BUF’s use of music in party strategy, Graham Macklin examines how

music serves as an integrative mechanism through which [fascist] activists are socialized and radicalized, their ideological commitment reinforced, and collective identities forged. It underpins party mobilization strategies … [that,] while reinforcing ‘collectives of emotion’ among participants, are also intended to induce a sense of ‘shock and awe’ in unaligned spectators who, suitably impressed, might join its standard.¹⁵

Most comparisons of BUF and Nazi music culture are also attentive to the mechanics of fascist recruitment and the tools used by these parties’ paramilitary wings to reinforce in-group unity, though such studies do usually reference the shared reactionary artistic-cultural philosophy that animated both political movements. David Machin and John E. Richardson, among others, have commented that the ‘BUF Marching Song’ (also named ‘Comrades, the Voices’), the main anthem of the party, is structured around the same melody as the Third Reich’s ‘Horst-Wessel-Lied’, and use this fact to underscore the inevitable derivativeness that resulted when an upstart fascist party observed the methods of one already established in a seat of power.¹⁶ Other junior fascist movements, notably the Spanish Falange and the Vichy Milice française, also used the ‘Horst-Wessel’ melody.¹⁷

Although the study of music as a component of totalitarian method is an important, indeed essential, direction of research, this emphasis can have the downside of overlooking the more philosophical, self-reflective and historical dimensions of artistic-cultural discussion within the fascist world, especially in a body like the BUF that operated on or close to the margins of British society and never imposed its worldview on the nation. A rare treatment of these themes may be found in a chapter by Roger Griffin which explores at some length the Mosleyite invention of Tudor history, glamourisation of the early British empire, espousal of the Victorian-Edwardian musical corpus, and attempts to reimagine Shakespeare as a militant anti-communist and warmonger.¹⁸ Griffin usefully focuses on the ‘ideological matrix underlying the BUF’s diagnosis of the state of the theatre and musical arts’, namely the palingenetic binaries of moral decay and national resurgence.¹⁹ In doing so, however, he reflects only in passing on the ways that Nazism may have influenced British Blackshirts’ perspectives on their own cultural heritage, and omits to mention the role of Britain’s ancestral reputation for unmusicality in firing the BUF’s ultranationalist rhetoric. Much also remains to be written about the Blackshirts’ encounter with the Nazi cult of Wagner, whose towering presence, Macklin reminds us, ‘looms large in the history of fascism’ across Europe.²⁰ Both as artist and historical personality, Wagner attained a unique status in the 1930s as a transnational icon of far-right politics, and for this reason alone his importance to the Mosley movement deserves a thorough accounting.

Rather than concentrating on the day-to-day activity of BUF musical life—its many concerts, lectures, marches and choir sessions—this article focuses instead on the party’s printed discourse about music: the opinions, reviews and debates on this subject published in the BUF press over the course of the 1930s. Examination of these materials will help us understand how British Blackshirts appraised the musical history of Britain and its relationship to the fascist political project, and will elucidate the role that Germany played in this intellectual process. Publications consulted include Fascist Week, printed from 1933–34; The Blackshirt, the party’s primary newspaper until 1936; and Action, which became the BUF standard-bearer in 1936 and remained so until the disbanding of the party in May 1940. The article’s key objectives are to explore the BUF’s multivalent schemes for music policy in an authoritarian Britain, to identify the Nazi categories that influenced them, and to document the BUF’s racialisation—even Nazification—of the British musical inheritance.

The study is structured in five sections. The first provides an overview of the BUF’s musical discourse, describing how it fitted into the party’s broader cultural vision of Britain and highlighting some of the debates and disagreements that were visible in the fascist press during the 1930s. The second section introduces and elaborates on the concept of Britain as an ‘unmusical nation’, reviewing attempts by earlier nationalists to refute this long-standing stereotype and scrutinising its influence on the BUF’s rhetoric and aspirations. The third section recounts how Blackshirt musicians perceived Nazi Germany, appraised that regime’s musical policies and expressed hopes of reproducing such measures under Mosley. Examined fourthly is the BUF’s relationship to the Nazi cult of Richard Wagner and the ways in which that phenomenon served as a hypothetical model for the glorification of a national composer in Britain. Finally, a fifth section considers the pools of candidate composers discussed by British Blackshirts: figures of the Victorian-Edwardian ‘English Musical Renaissance’, on the one hand, and the Elizabethan and seventeenth-century masters on the other. Advocates for the latter solution, notably, positioned England’s early modern composers as symbols of a virile, inventive and energetic early British Empire that prevailed over the Spanish Armada owing to a supposed absence of commercialism, effeminacy and relativist acquiescence to foreign pressures.²¹

I

The history of British fascism, formally constituted, begins in 1923, when the First World War veteran and fervid anti-communist Rotha Lintorn-Orman cobbled together a Mussolini-inspired organisation known as the British Fascisti, later anglicised as the British Fascists (BF). Functioning more as an anti-democratic breakaway wing of the Conservative Party than as a genuine totalitarian movement, the predominantly female BF sought to ‘combat the Red elements which were beginning to get a strangle-hold on the Empire’ and (despite much in-fighting) generated an embryonic ultranationalist discourse anticipating many of the themes that preoccupied Mosley’s Blackshirts.²² Lintorn-Orman’s group advocated ‘a gradual purification of the British Race’, venerated ‘Empire builders [of] the past’ such as Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, and recognised the power of art and music to organise, discipline and inspire.²³ Mass meetings featured recitals of such patriotic poems as Henry Newbolt’s Vitaï Lampada (1892) and the performance of marches composed by BF members, among them ‘For England’ and ‘Love God and Honour the King’.²⁴ The BF eventually melted into a jumble of splinter groups. The most vocal was the Imperial Fascist League (IFL) headed by the camel veterinarian-turned-fascist Arnold Leese, who personally wrote the lyrics to the nominal League anthem, ‘St. George Our Guide’, beseeching ‘Men of the Nordic strain / take up your load again’.²⁵ One also finds evidence of a robust musical life in the literature of the New Party (1931–2), the BUF’s immediate predecessor organisation, alongside conspicuous envy of ‘the hero-worship of Wagner in Germany’.²⁶ Even within these modest movements—IFL membership numbered in the hundreds at best—disagreement over musical matters percolated: Leese’s anthem seems to have been coolly received by others in the League, and was never mentioned again in party documents after its May 1933 premiere.²⁷

Active between 1932 and 1939, the BUF was both a rival to and successor of these earlier attempts to articulate a British fascism. Mosley’s party often revised its strategy and rhetorical emphases but always retained the same basic aspiration: to achieve a ‘resurrection of Britain’ that would demolish the (supposedly) immoral and stultifying condition of national affairs.²⁸ The BUF adopted the Spenglerian view that nations are ‘biological organisms with their own evolutionary life cycles’ and believed that Britain was nearing a great inflection point in this eternal process.²⁹ As their internal foe, the Blackshirts identified an ‘old gang’ of ageing politicians who had ensnared the country in war, devastated the British economy and allowed the national culture to slip into degeneracy and prurience.³⁰ This acrimonious critique of British society in the 1930s was the mark of an aesthetic revulsion with consumer capitalism and the aimless, self-absorbed and self-hating citizenry it allegedly created.³¹ In this respect Mosley’s followers were far from alone, as fixations on cultural degeneracy appeared in all of the early twentieth century’s industrialised societies, and not only in extreme political circles.³² Notwithstanding Lord Rothermere’s protest in a 1934 Daily Mail editorial that Mosleyism ‘is purely British, and has no more to do with Italian Fascism than the Italian Navy has to do with the British Navy’, the BUF surely was a spawn or isomorphic reflection of international trends.³³ The many variants of European fascism—notably those of Italy, Germany, Romania, Spain and Britain—all rose to prominence by inveighing against the corruption, femininity and bourgeois myopia of liberal democratic culture.³⁴ These movements, each diagnosing their local species of social decay, proposed to solve the crises by instituting a strict social hierarchy helmed by a strongman, corporatist-protectionist economic policies subordinating commerce to the state, and a neo-traditionalist cultural programme banning or discouraging modern art, experimental film, jazz and the like. Fascist vocabularies promised a renaissance of race and nation through a syncretic ideology fusing utopian, romantic vows to recreate a past idyll with the modern technology required for the mass mobilisation of society.³⁵ Each fascist formation adopted a version of what Jeffrey Herf, writing of the German case, has called ‘reactionary modernism’: ‘[an incorporation of] modern technology into the cultural system of modern German nationalism, without diminishing the latter’s romantic and antirational aspects’.³⁶ Reactionary modernism typically amounted to a selective, racialised co-optation of popular culture and the bourgeois values underpinning it.³⁷

Those Blackshirts who were members of the musical profession—like their counterparts in cinema, theatre and the plastic arts—envisioned their lives and careers within narratives of cultural revival in a coming ‘Greater Britain’. Many, though not all, of the BUF’s musical commentariat made a living in the country’s arts industries and hence inflected their ideological analyses with the class resentments they had been nurturing in the workplace. Their picture of a fascist Britain was inseparable from aspirations for career advancement, though individual Blackshirts or fellow travellers identified a variety of obstacles to personal success. For many, the fault lay with Britain’s houses of culture, which welcomed—to the detriment of native-born performers—a deluge of ‘alien’ artists, film and theatre actors, opera singers and instrumentalists. These institutions, argued the columnist George Baker in a vituperative rant, tolerated and condoned ‘the discordant noises of a modern cacophony (as opposed to symphony), the whining idiocies of alien crooners, the monstrosities of misshapen sculpture and distorted painting, the gross glorification of thieves, murderers, adulterers, swindlers, and prostitutes’.³⁸ For others, such as the young conductor and outspoken Nazi sympathiser Reginald Goodall, the culprit was a specifically Jewish conspiracy embedded in the country’s cultural establishment, at the centre of which was a BBC ‘run by a Jewish cabal’ that stymied the livelihoods of gentile musicians.³⁹ The BUF’s director of musical affairs, the army captain Cuthbert Reavely, contributed a series of antisemitic tirades to BUF publications, with one headline blaring ‘Jews who are living lies: they cannot be British patriots’.⁴⁰ An amateur baritone who had met Mosley at Sandhurst in 1914, Reavely was preoccupied with the putative ‘filcher of jobs, the commercial vulture, the corrupt financier, and the revolutionary malcontent’ whose machinations imperilled and humiliated ‘the Englishman, down on his luck, [who] will expend the last shilling in his pocket on a clean bed, out of self-respect’.⁴¹ Such invective betrayed much personal self-doubt among musical Blackshirts, who found in the ‘invasion of aliens’ and ‘international Jewry’ the causes of their vocational frustrations. Macklin notes that Reavely, who once brought a libel suit against The Times for a negative review of his performance in Mendelssohn’s Elijah, ‘may have been motivated to join the BUF because they championed his musical abilities when contemporary reviewers did not’.⁴²

Especially in the early 1930s, when acerbic ideological debates swept the pages of The Blackshirt and Fascist Week, dialogue about British music typically dwelt upon two, frequently intertwined, issues. The first pertained to the poor lot of British artists and the government’s failure to protect their interests and livelihoods from foreign competition. The BUF press often held up Britain’s struggling musicians as embodiments of the flagging national spirit who, in their humble and tragic circumstances, soldiered on as the callous ruling class paid them no attention. One such article of September 1934, entitled ‘Music in the Gutter: The Terrible Plight of British Musicians’, described how ‘[n]ear Trafalgar Square we found a violinist standing in the gutter, playing “The Londonderry Air,” and giving the best rendition either of us had ever heard. A few pennies lay in the cap on the kerb, the man was blue with cold, his clothes were shabby’.⁴³ The second matter of concern, typically invoked as an explanation for the first, was that Britain’s commercial capitalist system generated degraded aesthetic tastes counter to the interests of native-born artists and traditional British music. ‘The commercial spirit cares not for music or any of the arts’, wrote one columnist. ‘[There is a] school of thought that declares the only test of any form of art is “Does it pay?”’⁴⁴ ‘Running through much “modern” music’, wrote another, ‘one hears discord, noises like machinery, choruses shrieking inanely … The groveling materialism of Liberal-Democratic culture has deprived most modern composers of the inspiration necessary to emulate the achievements of the past’.⁴⁵ (By which the author meant the Elizabethan past.) Some said that consumerism enabled the worst impulses of ‘neurotic postwar minds’ committed to a ‘cult of ugliness and distortion’, while others laid the blame on an ‘excessively citified and industrialized civilization’ and its ‘sham culture’.⁴⁶

Despite nearly universal consensus—at least on the printed page—that the world of British music was inundated with malign foreign influence, there were disagreements about the extent of the problem and the appropriate solutions. The ‘official’ position of the BUF may be found in the writings of the party ideologue Alexander Raven Thomson, who proposed a major reconstitution of professional life in Britain. ‘At present the professions are most unevenly organised and represented in the public life of the country … [J]ournalism, the stage, music and the arts are … scarcely organised at all, and it will be the duty of Fascism to give them an organisation and corporate sense which will raise them to the same level of public esteem as medicine and the law’.⁴⁷ There were, however, radical voices in the BUF that went much further than this, and their diatribes were not always received with great enthusiasm, even among the party faithful. One Blackshirt, George Erroll De Burgh Wilmot, personified the nihilistic streak that British fascism shared with Nazism and other sister movements on the Continent. He gained some notoriety in August 1934 for publishing a self-professedly anti-intellectual article entitled ‘Our First Duty to “Culture” is to Destroy It’. Comparing modern culture to the Black Death, the essay questioned whether art had any value at all and accused ‘those whose concern for Fascism is bound up with the rebuilding of “culture”’ of being ‘the victims of a mental, moral, and physical decadence which prevails to-day in Western civilisation’.⁴⁸ De Burgh Wilmot, needless to say, anticipated and received several forceful replies.⁴⁹

Shortly prior to this exchange had been another set of disagreements pertaining to whether operas should be sung in their original languages or in English, whether foreign stars should be allowed on the British stage, and even whether foreign operas should be performed at all. Some, objecting to the radical tone that the BUF press had been taking with respect to these matters, implored moderation and worried that excessive invective against foreign culture would give fodder to the movement’s enemies. One self-described ‘ardent Blackshirt’, a J.G. Noire from Ardleigh, Essex, cautioned readers that ‘Fascists would exclude all foreign opera stars and distort the German and Italian opera by singing it in English … We want to give our people the very best of everything, and it is essential to hear grand opera rendered as it was written’.⁵⁰ Alma D. Tolley, of Hammersmith, concurred enthusiastically:

It is with great pleasure that I see someone is at last protesting at the attitude put forward in the Blackshirt with regard to world music and artists … Let us have British music and opera with all British artists (if we have them) by all means, but never exclude the foreigners’ music or artists, for we shall lose half the beautiful of the world, and half our national stories, for is not Wagner’s greatest work our own epic story? Why then exclude it because it was written in German by a German? What I suggest is best music and artists for Britain at better prices, but don’t let us be so narrow as to attempt to confine our thoughts of art in appreciation of one country’s efforts.⁵¹

Immediately below Tolley’s letter was a riposte to Noire by ‘Anglus’, questioning whether the former really was an ardent Blackshirt, as claimed, given his ‘haste to fawn on every foreign performer … [H]e would have British artists to compete with any and every alien who cares to come here—welcomed with publicity and patronage denied to the native of this country’.⁵² These quarrels revolved around contrasting definitions of patriotism and national progress, with some adopting an exclusionary jingoism and others considering foreign heritage, if controlled and curated, a valuable addition to the British nation. While never decisively concluded, the debates exposed significant rifts within the BUF about the ideal direction of music performance and consumption in Britain, which would probably have been amplified even further had the BUF ever attained the power necessary to implement cultural policy. If the trajectory of the Third Reich is any indication, it is likely that the De Burgh Wilmots of the BUF would have circulated radical proposals during the period of regime consolidation before yielding to a more pragmatic arrangement which implemented racial preferentialism without completely excluding foreign performers.

II

Let us now reach back to the domestic roots of the Blackshirts’ musical Weltanschauung: Britain’s reputation as ‘the land without music’ and the struggle to vanquish that enduring stigma.⁵³ If the BUF mirrored and emulated Continental fascist parties, it also inherited from the British fin de siècle a set of distinctly English anxieties, honing a lexicon that stretched and distended that era’s neuroses. Understanding these antecedents, if not of British fascism directly then certainly of its motifs, will help us discern what, specifically, was distinctive and new about BUF musical discourse, and why aspects of Nazi cultural policy proved such alluring templates for it.

Mosleyism’s principal idées fixes (decadent urbanism, imperial decline, effeminacy, racial impurity), as well as the solutions to these crises (pastoralism, nostalgia, hypermasculinity, eugenics and the expulsion of foreigners), together comprise a species of political reasoning descended from late Victorian pessimism.⁵⁴ The Britain of that age, though still a prime mover of world events, experienced numerous attacks of self-doubt anticipating, if not quite predetermining, the nation’s inter-war disorientation. A dread of social degeneration extended as far back as the 1830s, antedating the Darwinist revolution, but by 1880 various sanitarian, ruralist, anthropological and anti-poverty discourses were coalescing into a ‘heavily scientistic, racialized and medicalized image of a degenerate urban residuum’.⁵⁵ Obsessions with the death of empire were also manifest by the 1880s and only multiplied with the American and German challenges to British hegemony.⁵⁶ At the turn of the century there was much consternation that neither imperial nor industrial enterprise had benefited labouring Britons and a foreboding prompted by the flagging Boer War (1899–1902).⁵⁷ ‘Every society’, vented a panicked H.H. Asquith in 1901, ‘is judged and survives according to the material and moral minimum which it prescribes to its members. What is the use of an Empire if it does not breed and maintain … an imperial race?’⁵⁸ Despondency swelled further amid the immense human and financial costs of participation in the First World War, the renegade threats of the Soviet Union and Comintern, and the ascendance of American industry, finance and culture.⁵⁹

During times of uncertainty it is often the habit of societies to scour the past for shards of stability and national inspiration. In late nineteenth-century Britain that impulse expressed itself as a revived interest in the Tudor era, imagined as the dawn of the British Empire, the peak of English artistry, and, to many on the right (though not exclusively so), a moral resource for shoring up a slackening resolve to preserve and govern Britain’s vast global domain.⁶⁰ Neo-Elizabethanism was partly an elaboration of earlier trends, including the quasi-religious idolisation of Shakespeare and the Tudor revival in architecture, but in the main it served Victorian and, especially, Edwardian intellectuals in their quest to refine a British mythology that could buttress a modern, (ethnically) cohesive nation.⁶¹ Among the developments of these years was an energetic rediscovery of the Tudor musical patrimony by British composers and critics, many of them faculty or graduates of the recently chartered Royal College of Music (est. 1883), whose founding aim had been ‘to enable [Britons] to rival the Germans’.⁶² Champions of early music included the composers Hubert Parry, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Charles Villiers Stanford, Herbert Howells and Gustav Holst; the critic John A. Fuller Maitland; and the musicologists Cecil Sharp, Richard Terry, Samuel Royle Shore and William Henry Hadow.⁶³ (Edward Elgar was a notable detractor who mustered little interest in the Elizabethan ‘museum pieces’.)⁶⁴ Vaughan Williams’s famed enthusiasm for modal harmonies produced such noted works as the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910), the Phantasy Quintet (1912) and the Mass in G Minor (1921), as well as the influential English Hymnal collection (1906) that included music by Tallis, Orlando Gibbons and William Lawes.⁶⁵ Vaughan Williams, Holst and especially Sharp were also zealous collectors or arrangers of British folk music, from which, together with the Tudor heritage, they hoped to glean an essential ‘Englishness’ that could stand tall against the German (read: Wagnerian) titan.⁶⁶ That quest was an elusive and heterogeneous project, subject to each thinker’s idiosyncrasies, but it typically presented as a fusion of pastoral and historical idealism; in Alain Frogley’s recounting, ‘both Tudor and rural England offered an antidote to the ills of urbanization, which threatened to undermine nation and empire’.⁶⁷ Even to sceptics of musical nation-building such as the critic Ernest Newman, these composers’ sincerity had a compelling and, at times, overpowering charm, summoning fantasies of the timeless English hamlet and its bucolic environs. Wrote Newman in the Manchester Guardian: ‘When I muse in the lovely green and quiet English fields in summer-time I do so with a host of greatly loved English poets from Chaucer onwards; and when Vaughan Williams joins the company with certain compositions of his I find that this music is English to its very marrow’.⁶⁸

Like the Mosleyites who would later appropriate and imitate them, members of the so-called ‘English Musical Renaissance’ exuded a resentment of Britain’s typecasting as ‘the land without music’.⁶⁹ This is an old auto-stereotype that has been attested as far back as the seventeenth century and is connected to the persistent cliché that the English are a colourless and doggedly commercial people, exhibiting a ‘sullen resistance to innovation, thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character’, as Edmund Burke put it.⁷⁰ ‘Unmusicality’ was a favourite lampoon of British caricaturists who revelled in drawing farcical pictures of rotund prima donnas, bellowing male choirs and yelping dogs and cats all gathered round a piano.⁷¹ In a tract of 1691, the English master Henry Purcell averred that:

Poetry and Painting have arriv’d to their perfection in our own Country: Musick is yet but in its Nonage, a forward Child, which gives hope of what it may be hereafter in England … being farther from the Sun, we are of later Growth than our Neighbour Countries, and must be content to shake off our Barbarity by degrees.⁷²

The German poet Heinrich Heine, recalling an 1827 journey to London, was not so generous: ‘There is verily nothing on earth so terrible as English musical composition, except English painting’.⁷³ The specific formulation ‘land without music’ (‘Das Land ohne Musik’), which continues to surface in the present (and found its way into Nazi anti-British propaganda), is attributed to a manifestly derisive 1914 book of this name by the German social critic Oscar Schmitz.⁷⁴ He wrote:

Nowhere … is music held in higher esteem than in England. The slightest knowledge of playing the piano or singing may suffice to make someone the lion of a ‘weekend’ in the country. With what perseverance one often hears an English miss practicing, but one soon discovers: this eagerness with so little talent can only be explained by the fact that she is completely unmusical, otherwise she could not stand her own tinkling … It is also characteristic that England has no opera. During the season, stars from all countries come over for huge fees and sing against each other under mediocre direction and accompaniment without a unified effect.⁷⁵

By the early twentieth century, the reputed unmusicality of the British nation was well established on both sides of the English Channel and proved a stubborn impediment to British musicians and composers who felt condemned to obscurity and second-rate status. In 1912, Vaughan Williams wrote a doleful essay entitled ‘Who Wants the English Composer?’. ‘Nobody’, came the answer:

he is unappreciated at home and unknown abroad … The English composer is not and for many generations will not be anything so good as the great Masters, nor can he do such wonderful things as Strauss and Debussy. But is he for this reason of no value to the community? Is it not possible that he has something to say to his own countrymen that no one of any other age and any other country can say?⁷⁶

If Vaughan Williams, Holst and Cecil Sharp—all socialists, Frogley reminds us—proffered milder rebuttals to ‘English unmusicality’, some of their contemporaries toyed with draconian answers.⁷⁷ Dan Stone has persuasively shown that a considerable helping of Edwardian discourse could be termed proto-fascist in nature, already making use of such familiar concepts and phrases as ‘aliens’ (read: Jews), ‘race regeneration’, ‘Nordic stock’ and even the arrestingly sinister ‘lethal chamber’.⁷⁸ This eugenic phraseology was politically fluid and deployed by various thinkers of left, right and syncretic orientation, George Bernard Shaw among them.⁷⁹ The Edwardian musical world was not immune from the racial currents of the age. An ardent promoter of the Tudor heritage and Britain’s self-appointed ‘doorkeeper of music’, James A. Fuller Maitland nurtured a restrictive conception of Englishness and from the 1880s penned many polemics targeting composers he thought unworthy of that label.⁸⁰ Arrogating to himself guardianship of musical purity, he accused Frederick Delius (born to German parents) of being insufficiently English, and, according to Meirion Hughes, may have projected animosity toward Frederic Hymen Cowen for antisemitic reasons.⁸¹ Fuller Maitland’s influential writings about ‘the glorious days when England was chief among musical nations’ prefigured and probably inspired similar BUF refrains, as did his derision toward Continentals, jazz and any whiff of the ‘progressive’.⁸² Musical chauvinism intensified during the First World War and continued to enjoy professional respectability for the duration of the inter-war period.⁸³ As Erik Levi has written: ‘[t]rying to win the British public over to the idea that its own musical talent deserved recognition over and above that of the Continent … was a battle that exercised the minds of the entire musical profession’, though opinion differed about the optimal degree of exclusion.⁸⁴ Cyril Scott, Arnold Bax, and Julius Harrison became outspoken musical xenophobes (Bax advocated for the expulsion of all foreign musicians, excepting Americans), and it was not beneath Stanford and Vaughan Williams to submit their own, more muted, reprovals of ‘foreign’ influence.⁸⁵ A culmination of these trends was the Independent Society of Musicians’ November 1931 issuance of a controversial manifesto decrying the supposed advantages that foreign musicians enjoyed over British ones.⁸⁶

These long histories of self-deprecation, overcompensating jingoism and sensitivity to foreign contempt were the essential mise-en-scène to the ultranationalist discourse of the BUF and its strident rebuke of ‘alien’ opinion. In their nostalgia for a ‘younger’ and ‘virile’ Elizabethan creativity, hopes of expelling foreign performers, lurid fixations on degeneracy and racial pollution, and most certainly in their love–hate relationship with Germany, the musical Blackshirts magnified and aggrandised the early twentieth-century currents to which I have alluded. BUF musicians and composers devoted much ink to resisting and overcoming the pigeonholing of British music as uninspired, derivative and clumsy. In this regard the party was often more aggrieved by the indifference of Britons than by the presence of foreign influence per se. The ultimate blame for the ‘tragedy of the concert hall’ lay with the British impresarios and poseur concertgoers who spurned their countrymen to satisfy a pretence of cosmopolitan refinement.⁸⁷ Elgar, bemoaned John F. Porte, suffered at the expense of an ‘international fetish … obstruction, neglect and rebuffs which would have broken the heart of almost anyone but an Englishman’, while Stanford ‘tasted deeply the bitterness of lack of recognition that British composers of serious intent have always more or less suffered from’.⁸⁸ The composer Joseph Holbrooke, who lost favour with the press and audiences after the First World War, captured the general tenor of discussion in a scathing letter to The Blackshirt: ‘[w]hen the dilettante [sic] of Britain do open their purses for music, it is for foreign music … the dilettante who has an income has a free field for his distorted prejudice’.⁸⁹ The stigma of musical inferiority was all the more rankling to the BUF because of that organisation’s penchant for racialising the relationships between peoples. Blackshirts typically interpreted the unmusicality epithet as an affront to the creative powers of the ‘British race’—a vague concept that elided distinctions between the four countries of the United Kingdom but usually served as a euphemism for England.⁹⁰ ‘The hitherto sedulously fostered belief that the British people are ipso facto musically inferior to the other European races’, wrote an unnamed columnist in Fascist Week, would soon be demolished by the BUF’s cohort of patriotic young composers. For these Blackshirts, fascism augured a long overdue reawakening of British culture that would restore the country to artistic greatness and self-confidence. Mosley’s ascension to power, predicted a supporter from Hertfordshire, would swiftly result in a ‘tremendous musical renaissance … [refuting] much bunkum and hot air talked about us not being a musical nation’.⁹¹ The hopes were that a fascist state would codify preferences for British artists over foreigners; mitigate the effect of mass reproduction technology—such as the gramophone, radio and sound film—on the careers of local musicians; and, more broadly, work to eliminate the stigmas that hampered the careers of native-born performers and composers.⁹²

Inherent, however, in the expectation of a musical renaissance was a fascist appropriation of historical British musical traditions that would guide and inspire the renewal of the near future.⁹³ Such an appropriation would be attentive to ill-defined ‘racial characteristics’ (in Ezra Pound’s phrase) of the music that exemplified the spirit of the British people.⁹⁴ It is here where aspects of BUF discourse can be differentiated from earlier patterns of musical nationalism. Let us revisit by way of example Porte’s commentary on Edward German’s Merrie England, with which I began this discussion and to which I shall return near the close. Porte envisioned that work as a symbol of state; a ‘national opera in a future national England’, akin to the role that Die Meistersinger fulfilled in the Third Reich. It therefore followed that German should assume the status of state composer in a fascist Britain. If Mosley’s supporters failed to produce a doctrinally definitive statement on this matter, they motioned toward a transcendence of earlier nationalisms by programmatically envisioning various British composers as Nazi-esque mascots of the polity. The problem was which tradition, composer or work would serve this purpose, and by what methods a Mosley government would glorify and promote racial emblems of the nation. In seeking the answers, it was perhaps natural that British Blackshirts would turn to existing models of fascist music policy on the Continent, and of these, it was Germany’s that attracted the most interest. This was due in no small part to BUF members’ admiration of the Nazi cult of Wagner, but also their approval of Hitler’s cultural policies, such as the Reich Music Chamber’s prohibition of jazz on German radio.⁹⁵

III

Parallels and interconnections between Nazism and British fascism have long been discussed and debated, but it should firstly be said that BUF–Nazi ties were but one strand of a larger web of networks that linked these inter-war societies. At one level, observation and discussion of Nazi Germany in pre-war Britain was simply a reflection of geopolitical reality: the Third Reich’s shadow was inescapable, irrespective of one’s orientation toward Hitler or his policies. Indeed, notes Stone, ‘virtually the whole of public debate over the future of Britain took place in the light of the European experience of fascist dictatorship, so that Nazi Germany served as a backdrop to many debates that are not directly “about” the merits or otherwise of that system’.⁹⁶ Nevertheless, sympathy for Nazism, or at least a tendency to speak favourably of public policy in the Third Reich, was visible in many quarters of British society throughout the 1930s. It was especially pronounced among the aristocracy and in veterans’ organisations like the British Legion, where a ‘brotherhood of the trenches’ had some purchase.⁹⁷ Some tolerated German expansionist behaviour on account of the ‘Versailles guilt’ that had been germinating in Britain since 1919, while others expressed varying degrees of interest in Nazism’s promises of ‘regeneration from within’ and the measures taken to achieve it.⁹⁸ Sensing these currents of sympathy, the Nazi leadership viewed the securement of an alliance with Britain as a key foreign policy priority until at least 1936 and pursued this end by establishing organisations such as the Deutsch–Englische Gesellschaft (German–English Society), inviting the British Legion and the London Philharmonic to Berlin, and courting noblemen such as Philip Kerr, eleventh marquess of Lothian, and Wilfrid Ashley, first Baron Mount Temple.⁹⁹ The ultimate failure of the Reich’s charm offensive, contends G.T. Waddington, rested in part on Joachim von Ribbentrop’s mistaken impressions that the aristocracy remained influential in London’s decision-making, that the monarchy actually wielded executive power, and that pro-Nazi views ran deeper in elite circles than they really did.¹⁰⁰

As a general matter, the BUF’s disposition toward the Hitler regime was a friendly one, though the aims of the two political movements were not always aligned and their similarities should not be exaggerated. Unlike the bellicose fascist parties of the Continent, the BUF did not advocate European interstate warfare as a path to national glory and revitalisation. Many rank-and-file British Blackshirts were veterans of the Great War who held pacifist or isolationist views, though their non-interventionism did not extend to the colonial realm, where the BUF was prepared to undertake whatever struggles were required to preserve the British Empire.¹⁰¹ Mosley and others in his circle were, moreover, initially sceptical of the Third Reich’s fixation on ‘the irrelevant Jewish Question’, sensing perhaps that there would be limited utility in making antisemitism a dominant theme of the BUF agenda (though, as shown in examples above, the party’s newspapers did become markedly more antisemitic in tone by 1934).¹⁰² Mosley tolerated Jewish supporters during the BUF’s early years, and, remarkably, even allowed a Jew by the name of William Joseph Leaper to be editor of The Blackshirt until the beginning of 1936.¹⁰³ Leaper had previously stood as a candidate for Shipley in Mosley’s New Party, had co-founded the BUF’s branch in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1932 and was featured in a group photograph with Mosley as late as December 1935, though he left the movement in the following year.¹⁰⁴

If Mosley took care to avoid excessively tying his public image to Hitler’s, Alexander Raven Thomson, Arthur Kenneth Chesterton and other subordinates routinely expressed public endorsement of the Nazi state’s actions, including in matters of economic and trade policy, youth organisation, aid for veterans, the treatment of Jews, and Germany’s resistance to a Soviet Union hoping ‘to link up the China Sea with the Atlantic’, in the words of the BUF chief of staff Ian Dundas.¹⁰⁵ Mosley’s sycophants, such as the prolific ideologue E.D. Randall, often drew toadying comparisons between the BUF leader and the fascist dictators of Europe who ‘had known the free and courageous comradeship of the War, and in that spirit of spontaneous unity have built up the great movements of patriotic regeneration’.¹⁰⁶ The former suffragette and feminist paramilitary Mary Allen, another devoted acolyte, secured meetings with Hitler, Goering and Franco wherein she impassionedly advocated for the BUF’s place within a ‘fascist international’.¹⁰⁷ Mosley himself cultivated contact with the Nazi authorities and considered his political project akin to theirs, though evidence uncovered by a wartime parliamentary inquiry suggests that his wife, née Diana Mitford, was more intriguing to Hitler and Goebbels than her husband had been.¹⁰⁸

BUF assessments of Nazi musical life betrayed more than a little imitation of the Nazi Party’s völkisch vocabulary. These commentaries formed part of the BUF’s broader espousal of Nazi cultural initiatives and the regime’s denigration of ‘degenerate art’ (entartete Kunst) and ‘degenerate music’ (entartete Musik)—though we would be ill-advised, as Griffin cautions us, to file away BUF discourse as ‘the simple cloning of Nazi aesthetics’.¹⁰⁹ Still, Mosley’s followers not only signaled approval of Germany’s new catalogue of artistic values, but in a sense had been encouraged to do so, since Goebbels, via institutions such as the Permanent Council for International Co-operation among Composers (est. 1934) and the International Film Chamber (est. 1935), was hard at work constructing a pan-European movement united around the repudiation of cultural modernism.¹¹⁰ British delegates attended the Permanent Council’s inaugural gathering at the September 1934 Venice Biennale, where, in a symposium chaired by Richard Strauss, they spent three days sequestered in a room at the Palazzo Ducale attempting to nurture an ‘international coalition of musical nationalists’ alongside representatives of various European countries.¹¹¹

From a policy perspective, the two main points of attraction for the BUF’s musical cohort were, firstly, the Nazis’ support for musicians of German ethnicity, and secondly, their campaigns against jazz and modernist composition. Regarding the former, an April 1934 article in Fascist Week by John F. Porte, bearing the title ‘Unemployed Musicians: Contrast With Berlin’, submitted the following account:

[I read] a speech by Dr. Richard Strauss in Berlin. He was expressing his delight in the new life which was opening up for German musicians in Germany. Posts had been vacated by alien musicians and German unemployed orchestral players were once more able to earn a living in their own country. Incidentally, Strauss saw no signs of inferior standards arising because music in Germany was being performed by native musicians. I thought then that it was rather a pity that we in England have always been shy of holding similar views … In Berlin Dr. Strauss has been congratulating himself that the problem has been solved. In London we have got as far as pleading with our Government.¹¹²

The passage likely refers to Strauss’s address of 18 February 1934 to the German Composers’ Meeting in the performance hall of the Berlin Philharmonic, much fêted by Reich media as Strauss’s definitive statement in his capacity as benefactor and defender of German artists.¹¹³ The above-quoted specimen of BUF propaganda is exaggerated, for the reality of the music economy in Nazi Germany was a difficult one and government support for performers was limited and uneven.¹¹⁴ The supposed expulsion of ‘alien musicians’ is also overstated, at least in the sense of gentile foreigners (Jews, as internal ‘aliens’, were indeed banished en masse from the German cultural world). Nazi Germany regularly hosted guest performers from countries within and without the Axis alliance; the Berlin State Opera employed a cosmopolitan cast of singers and staff even beyond the outbreak of war in 1939, including the Bessarabian-born Romanian soprano Maria Cebotari, the Greek tenor Vasos Argyris and the Russian émigré set designer Vladimir Novikov.¹¹⁵ Of the sixty works scheduled for the opera house’s 1939–40 season, some twenty-six were by non-German composers, among them Massenet, Gounod, Bizet, Smetana, Gotovac, Glinka and Mussorgsky, alongside Italian masters.¹¹⁶ Still, Porte’s article is a good illustration of how the BUF press marshalled embellished stories of the Nazi state’s care for its artists to pillory Westminster’s supposed lack of interest in helping the struggling musicians of Britain. Especially significant is Porte’s reference to Strauss’s defence of the musical quality produced by all-native ensembles: an example for British readers of how a policy of racial solidarity would be a viable alternative to market-driven determinations of value.

The BUF’s praise of the Nazi campaign against jazz was a similarly enthusiastic endorsement of the Hitler regime’s ‘reactionary modernist’ position on artistic matters. Jazz was a perennial racial bugbear of all the major fascist movements of the 1930s, but the BUF’s disdain for this ‘product of an American negroid population’ was perhaps doubly intensified by insecurity about Britain’s own level of musical development.¹¹⁷ Disparaging the ‘hordes of alien trumpet tooters’, as one polemicist memorably put it, was almost a daily preoccupation of British fascists who considered jazz an archetypal manifestation of decadence and racial impurity in Western society.¹¹⁸ Reavely, writing about Hitler’s attempts to curtail the presence of jazz in the Third Reich’s public spaces, therefore assured readers that:

Hitler’s ban upon jazz may seem a little drastic, particularly to the younger generation, some of whom, before the advent of the wireless, had but little opportunity to hear much real music. Yet the move is a wise one. The relentless ‘plugging’ of jazz is due, solely, to the fact that jazz is commercial. There is relatively little immediate cash to be made out of our lovely old English melodies, except by way of nefarious copyright ‘arrangements,’ and even the light, tuneful classics are beset with greater difficulties—a fair standard of artistic perception in presentation and rendition, for example—than the average purveyor of modern ‘music’ is prepared to face … Fascists, fortunately, have no need to subject themselves to this ignominious bondage, particularly now that their own musical enterprises are being launched with such signal success. If we look around, we shall find plenty of beautiful melodies to supplant this degrading negroid cacophony.¹¹⁹

Another article, trumpeting the claim that ‘[in Nazi Germany] there is no jazz. Hitler has strenuously discountenanced it’, compared the musical form to neurasthenia and St Vitus’s Dance (chorea minor).¹²⁰ These assertions, too, depicted as real what was mostly illusory: the German Propaganda Ministry never systematically extirpated jazz from the country’s clubs and record shops, and new groups dedicated to the form were still being established in Berlin in 1934.¹²¹ Fearing popular irritation if the regime prohibited access to leisure music, Goebbels gave informal consent for German radio to continue broadcasting swing, including in wartime; he also hoped to replace jazz with a ‘New German Dance Music’ that contained some simplified elements of that genre, though this particular attempt at popular culture engineering ‘was doomed to failure from the start’.¹²² In general, Nazi music policy was never as consistent as its BUF admirers imagined it to be.¹²³ Goebbels and Rosenberg, the regime’s final authorities on musical matters, could not agree upon a coherent set of principles and generated edicts ‘riddled with ambiguities, compromises and inconsistencies of outlook’, leaving the country’s musical life far more heterogeneous than Nazi propaganda would suggest.¹²⁴

What is notable about Reavely’s response to Nazi gestures against jazz is that he took the opportunity to promote a resuscitation of long-suffering ‘old English melodies’. This choice, given the context, was certainly inspired by the Nazi Party’s völkisch dogma and its glorification of folk source material that purported to capture the spirit of the German people. In essence Reavely was Nazifying the folksong revival launched by Sharp and other partisans of the Edwardian ‘Renaissance’. National Socialist musical discourse had imparted to some British Blackshirts the lesson that a völkisch appropriation of traditional melodies could help unite a racially pure community in ‘Greater Britain’. (BUF musicians rarely pondered how Britain’s many regional subcultures would respond to such a homogenising project.)¹²⁵ Other Blackshirts, however, found English folk melodies an unsatisfying groundwork for the imminent rebirth of the nation. Of this, the unnamed Fascist Week columnist—betraying the fears of derivativeness that attended the BUF’s gravitation to European models—remarked that ‘[t]he coming of Fascism to Britain has led inevitably to the demand for music which is both British and Fascist. To utilise old English melodies would be to supply but one half of the demand, whereas to gather up wholesale and turn to our own purpose the Fascist music of Italy and Germany would [be] shirking the task’.¹²⁶ Folk melodies alone, the article implies, were a valuable heritage, but not quite ‘aflame with the spirit of Fascism in Britain, and the steely brightness and eagerness of youth’.¹²⁷ More appropriate inspiration would be a great British composer whose work (presumably incorporating folk material) could serve as a benchmark for the process of musical renewal. For this purpose, it was not the Nazis’ völkisch lexicon, but their cult of Wagner, that proved most intriguing and appealing.

IV

‘There is no more imposing high priest in the cult of national socialism than the Meister of Bayreuth’, an American critic remarked in 1942.¹²⁸ For British fascists, too, no figure of the German musical canon loomed quite so large as Richard Wagner, the de facto national composer of the Third Reich. According to a tabulation by David B. Dennis, the chief Nazi newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, published nearly two hundred and fifty articles about Wagner—more than double Beethoven’s number—and invoked his name in every imaginable ‘cultural, social, economic, military [and] racist’ context.¹²⁹ (The mania was less evident in non-party broadsheets and musical journals, where Beethoven tended to be preferred.)¹³⁰ Wagner’s music and legend were venerated in Nazi propaganda and played a significant role in diplomatic affairs: foreign dignitaries attended Wagner performances at Hitler’s behest and homages to the composer were a mainstay of Soviet and Italian overtures to Berlin.¹³¹ The Nazi dictator’s enthusiasm for the composer’s music and annual pilgrimage to Bayreuth were among the most recognisable features of the regime, and were widely known internationally.¹³² Wagner’s descendants, owing to their control over the Bayreuth Festival, enjoyed privileged access to the Nazi elite, a fact exploited by Mosley to gain audience with the Third Reich’s leadership in the mid-1930s.¹³³ Prior to the war, the Mosleys had been on friendly terms with Winifred Wagner, the English widow of Siegfried (the composer’s son) and a close associate of Hitler.¹³⁴ In a Home Office hearing of 2 July 1940 in which Mosley appealed against his recent internment by the Churchill government, the former BUF leader testified to his interrogators that ‘my wife is passionately fond of music and she is a great friend of Frau Wagner’, and described the Wagners’ involvement in arranging meetings between the Mosleys and the Nazi bosses.¹³⁵ By 1935, Diana Mitford and her younger sister Unity (Mosley’s future sister-in-law) had both ingratiated themselves with Hitler and were personal guests of the Führer at a variety of state functions, including the Bayreuth Festival and the Berlin Olympics.¹³⁶

Given the composer’s status as a byword for racial nationalism, the spectacle of the Nazi Wagner cult was attractive to British fascists who imputed racial characteristics both to British ‘national’ culture and to its (real and imagined) enemies in the communist movement, the ‘international Jewry’, the ‘negroid’ culture of America and the ‘hordes of aliens’ overrunning Britain. Indeed, amid the general opprobrium heaped upon Continental music, Germany’s heritage usually received a warm treatment from the BUF. The party’s ensembles, such as the fifty-member ‘BUF symphony orchestra’, were quite fond of performing Wagner extracts, with the overture to Tannhäuser being a particular favourite.¹³⁷ The energetic BUF composer R. Selwyn Watson, who wrote settings for several of the party’s marches (such as the anthem ‘Mosley’, with words by E.D. Randall), penned a series of thirteen articles in Action between 1936 and 1937 under the title ‘The Groundwork of Music’, and took the opportunity in many of them to exalt Wagner for his ‘infallible instinct for the most dramatic harmonies’, his mastery of counterpoint and the ‘heroic heights’ of his operas.¹³⁸ And Reginald Goodall, who after the war became the United Kingdom’s most celebrated interpreter of the Ring cycle, was enamoured with ‘the land of Bayreuth’ and made several visits to the Third Reich with his associate, the Baltic German baritone Reinhold von Warlich.¹³⁹ Preoccupied with anxiety about Jewish interference in his personal life, the mercurial conductor was attracted to Wagner’s antisemitism and the Nazi state’s use of his legacy to pursue its campaign against Judaism.¹⁴⁰ As late as 1947, remembered one outraged acquaintance, Goodall would ‘[fall] to talking about Wagner and Germany’ before proceeding to disbelieve ‘[t]his concentration camp nonsense’.¹⁴¹

British Blackshirts were enticed by Wagner, who even in life was ‘already the unprotesting object of a cult’, for many of the same reasons that their German counterparts were.¹⁴² The composer’s central place in German identity, fascination with Nordic mythology, totalising personality, forceful iconoclasm, racialised views of history and symbolic value in opposing ‘the onslaught of cultural Bolshevism’ were all robust nourishment for the transnational fascist universe that was emerging in the 1930s.¹⁴³ Some of Mosley’s followers took interest in Wagner’s tumultuous life, filled with anti-establishment exertions, and probably saw in the composer’s career a metaphor for the BUF’s own hostility toward the ‘old gangs’ and their surrender to commercially driven fashions. In a March 1937 profile of Wagner in Action, Watson wrote that ‘[b]oth as a man and a musician Wagner was a revolutionary. He suffered poverty and derision, invective and abuse, yet lived to see the complete vindication of his ideals, and to have a special opera house built in his honour at Bayreuth’.¹⁴⁴ Others—like Hitler, who admired Rienzi, Siegfried and perhaps Wotan—detected in certain of Wagner’s characters a glint of self-recognition, as is apparent in an April 1936 review of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: ‘I am always enthralled with “The Mastersingers.” … Is there not something symbolical of Fascism in this opera, in the striving of Walther to overcome the stick-in-the-mud methods of the old mastersingers, and finally emerging triumphant with his new and up-to-date methods? Somehow or other, this opera always soothes one and leaves one with a feeling of ultimate triumph’.¹⁴⁵ Wagner, in his life and drama, thus appealed to the BUF for a range of racial, political and emotional reasons, and served as an example of what a national composer ought to look like.

But lurking amid this groundswell of interest in Wagner—and, to a lesser extent, other German, Austrian and Italian masters—were the old insecurities about Britain’s musical inferiority. The Wagner cult suggested a compelling, and, some hoped, replicable model of fascist cultural programming that could be emulated in Britain. Yet the BUF’s appraisal of the Third Reich’s Wagnerism may have had the paradoxical effect of compounding self-doubts about Britain’s unmusicality. ‘We have no Wagner to write flaming manifestos justifying his viewpoint’, lamented Watson in August 1936, and indeed it would not prove so easy to determine who could do for Britain what Wagner did for Germany.¹⁴⁶ No consensus ultimately emerged within the BUF about which composer would be most suitable for this role and discussion of the matter often amounted to a listing of possibilities rather than sustained advocacy for any particular figure. But the larger importance of this conversation, beyond the specific disagreements over who best fitted the mould of the ‘British Wagner’, was that awareness of the Third Reich’s package of cultural policies encouraged British Blackshirts to rummage through their own musical heritage for prospective state composers.

V

Throughout the 1930s, BUF commentators expended much energy questing for a musical personality suitable for reimagination as an exemplar of the mythical British race. Discussion of this matter typically followed two lines of argument. The first solution consisted of promoting and defending the work of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British composers, some of whom were still active in the 1930s, against the ‘disloyal fetish worship of everything foreign’.¹⁴⁷ The second solution was a glorification of the Elizabethan era as the time when Britons ‘were the supreme and acknowledged leaders of the art of music’, as Watson claimed.¹⁴⁸ This latter tendency was reflective of the BUF’s general penchant for glamourising sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England as an era of great achievement whose legacy could be tapped for inspiration in a fascist Britain.¹⁴⁹ Sometimes BUF writers directly cited German Wagnerism as an example of how Britain might revere a national composer, and at other times the influence of Nazi thought is detectable in more indirect ways. Whatever the chosen method, the entire discussion was saturated with the mission of racialising Britain’s musical heritage and positioning it within the framework of fascist national legend.

‘If we were not musical’, queried a reader from Harpenden, Hertfordshire, ‘why is it that great composers, such as Elgar, Bax, Delius and Vaughan Williams still persist?’¹⁵⁰ This sort of rhetorical question was typical of many BUF vindications of the ‘English Musical Renaissance’: the generation of British composers that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century. Others typically listed alongside the above four included Stanford, Edward German, Holst and, more occasionally, BUF-affiliated individuals such as Lord Berners. Drawn to their emphasis on traditional British songs and melodies, Blackshirt commentators alluded to these composers as proof that Britain had already seen a recent musical reawakening that could rival activity on the Continent. Many of the brief essays dedicated to this project, however, tended to be unfocused and simply asserted the existence of a great British oeuvre without mounting a systematic attempt to co-opt one or more of the ‘Renaissance’ generation’s members as Wagnerian mascots of the BUF.

One noteworthy attempt to progress beyond the listing of names was that of John F. Porte, who cited Edward German’s Merrie England as a British analogue to Die Meistersinger. This opera, with libretto by the lyricist Basil Hood, premiered to great acclaim in 1902 at London’s Savoy Theatre and soon became a favourite of amateur companies. In the opera, Walter Raleigh is in love with Bessie Throckmorton, one of Elizabeth I’s ladies-in-waiting, but cannot marry Bessie because the queen also has affection for him. When Bessie misplaces a love letter from Raleigh and it comes into the queen’s possession, she expels Raleigh from the court and locks Bessie away in a tower of Windsor Castle. In the end, the queen relents and allows the lovers to marry, and in the opera’s finale, the royal court performs a play-within-a-play re-enacting Robin Hood’s marriage to Maid Marian. Thus reads Porte’s defence of the work as a genuine article of English national music:

The British have a most lovable opera that reflects the Old English spirit and, despite its not being admitted to the most exclusive musical circles in opera, is fairly well known to the ordinary music-loving people in this country … I cannot say that the Germans know and love ‘Merrie England’ as we do their ‘Mastersingers,’ for we are not an exporting musical country as they are. [But it is] the start for real national opera in a future national England. ‘Merrie England!’ It should be known to every Englishman, woman, boy, and girl … When I think of one or two of the airs in ‘Merrie England!’ I grow impatient for its time to draw near … How many provincial and suburban choral societies have given performances of the work? And how many military bands and light orchestras play a selection from it? Fortunately the answer is legion, and thus ‘Merrie England’ is kept alive, waiting for its day, in spite of ‘international’ opera.¹⁵¹

Porte’s choice is a logical one, as Merrie England is animated by much the same impulse as Die Meistersinger; the dream of an idealised, simplified and romantic distant national past, free of modern corruptions, which can aid the manufacture of identity in the nation-state. Die Meistersinger is also a natural model for a critic seeking to repudiate ‘international’ influence, as it contains at the end of the third act a famous moment in which Hans Sachs, leader of the guild of mastersingers, issues a warning about the debasement of German art by outsiders:

Cited ad nauseam by the Nazis and their völkisch progenitors as proof of Wagner’s atavistic ‘Nordic soul’, the surviving drafts of this speech demand a less straightforward reading of the composer’s intentions: Wagner had hesitated to include the first eight lines and reputedly had only done so in acquiescence to the wishes of his wife, Cosima.¹⁵³ In any case the oration of Hans Sachs surely resonated with Porte; one could smoothly substitute ‘English’ and ‘British Empire’ into the text and preserve the original meaning. After referring to ‘the cobbler poet, Hans Sachs’ and his ‘panegyric of national [art]’, Porte made a special effort to inform readers that German’s opera carried no evidence of foreign contamination, and in this regard duplicated—intentionally or otherwise—the language of Nazi critics who considered Die Meistersinger Wagner’s consummate ‘struggle against foreign domination of the soul’.¹⁵⁴ In his reference to Merrie England’s ‘Waltz Song’, for instance, Porte felt the need to ‘point out that it is written in a good English idiom and has no trace of the Viennese-cum-Johann Strauss tang about it’. Porte, to his credit, admitted to readers that Edward German was in fact of Welsh descent, but explained away this slight complication by asserting that ‘[German] has certainly made his spiritual home in English music’.¹⁵⁵ Herein lay one of the BUF’s many unresolved quandaries: figures like Porte were transparently English nationalists, but struggled to summon coherent narratives of racial-cultural purity within a fascist movement that claimed, nominally, to represent all of the United Kingdom’s countries.

If Porte was not quite sure whether Wales qualified as a ‘foreign mist with foreign conceits’, the English racialist overtones of his article are unmistakable nonetheless, especially in view of the BUF’s broader history of using the phrase ‘Merrie England’ to advance its vision of a homogeneous and revitalised nation.¹⁵⁶ This term—which has seen widespread use in many corners of English society, literature, music and politics for centuries—was appropriated by the BUF as one of its slogans, typically to evoke bucolic scenes of the countryside as well as the myths of a harmonious medieval England.¹⁵⁷ ‘Our minds travel back to the Christmases of “Merrie England” at the dawn of our nation’s greatness’, Mosley said in 1934, ‘then forward to the Christmases of the future, to a nation reborn’.¹⁵⁸ In a 1941 book entitled The Story of a Norfolk Farm (which quotes Mosley in the epigraph), the environmentalist, Nazi sympathiser and BUF member Henry Williamson used the term to imagine a country cleansed of cultural, and by implication racial, impurity: ‘Everything should be light and airy: no more gloom and decadence. Our farm-house and our land should become part of Merrie England once more’.¹⁵⁹ This is very much the connotation that Porte intended. Earlier in his article, he decried the domination of English music by ‘international financiers’, a typical antisemitic gesture, and railed repeatedly against Italian, French and, ironically, German ‘alien’ performers in the nation’s opera houses.¹⁶⁰ (Elsewhere, Porte had questioned whether the operatic form itself was really ‘English’, though he seems to have made up his mind by the time he penned his article about Merrie England.)¹⁶¹ Porte thus gazed upon Edward German’s opera with multiple political lenses: he interpreted it, on the one hand, as a counterpart to Die Meistersinger as the forerunner and cornerstone of an ethnonationalist musical fascism, and on the other, as rich material for the BUF’s co-optation of Tudor legend.

BUF musicians were clearly interested in romantic works that affectionately honoured the Elizabethan era in the way that Wagner honoured the guild society of Renaissance Nuremberg. But the Blackshirts also turned their attention to the actual Elizabethan musical legacy in hopes of detecting the essence of British national character in primordial form.¹⁶² Among the composers cited for this purpose were William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, Orlando Gibbons, John Wilbye, Thomas Weelkes, Robert Jones and John Dowland, as well as Henry Purcell, who flourished in the second half of the seventeenth century.¹⁶³ That the BUF would express interest in these composers is unsurprising, as their work is widely held to represent a high point of English musical excellence and a worthy counterpart to the country’s literary golden age.¹⁶⁴ At the same time, these men lived in a world far removed from 1930s Britain and were preoccupied with rather a different set of political problems and aesthetic objectives than the Blackshirts who invoked their names. Much of their music is sacred or liturgical, and their secular works were generally written for performance in the English court, making use of archaic instruments such as the virginals (a variant of harpsichord), the viol (a chordophone ancestor of the double bass) and the Renaissance lute. Elizabethan composers were neither ‘nationalist’ nor racially conscious artists in any modern sense, and the BUF’s attempt to construe them in this way was very much an imposition of twentieth-century contrivances onto early modern England.

As when referring to Victorian and Edwardian composers, the general approach taken with respect to the Elizabethan masters was to list their names and assert that they were worthy forebears to the coming musical rejuvenescence. Such commentaries were always shadowboxing with the stigma of British unmusicality: the Elizabethans were proof that Britain had once been a great musical nation and could become so again. ‘People who know no better’, declared Porte, ‘still try to tell us that the natural home of music is in Germany, or in Italy or in Vienna, which is on a level with saying that the natural home of potatoes is in France. It is astonishing when one thinks of the Elizabethan age, when England was almost, if not the, leading musical nation in the world’.¹⁶⁵ How much the music of those times would actually be used by the fascist movement, as opposed to merely pointed to in writing as a symbol of English greatness, was generally not specified. Some did seek a genuine revival of old English music: in the autumn of 1926, the composer, conductor and future Mosleyite Alexander Martin Gifford had staged Purcell’s 1691 semi-opera King Arthur, with libretto by John Dryden, in Woolwich.¹⁶⁶ (Gifford later boasted in The Blackshirt that he had been only the second conductor to have performed King Arthur in the twentieth century, though he elided the fact that Dennis Arundell’s 1928 production in Cambridge had proved more successful.)¹⁶⁷ Others, however, betrayed doubts that sixteenth-century court music could quite measure up to the dynamic needs of an authoritarian nationalist movement in the 1930s. In the tenth article of his ‘Groundwork of Music’ series, Selwyn Watson allowed a note of puzzlement at inscrutable Tudor madrigalists ‘who, at this far distance, speak to us still in a language sometimes feckless, sometimes sophisticated’.¹⁶⁸ Elsewhere, though professing high esteem for the Elizabethan composers, Watson felt it necessary to clarify that Britain’s fascist music would be of a different temperament:

For those who still think that a musical inferiority is something indigenous to the British character, let them remember that in the Elizabethan era—the Golden Age of Britain—we were the supreme and acknowledged leaders of the art of music. The men who defeated the Armada prided themselves on their singing of madrigals: and although we of Fascism are of necessity concerned at present with the more challenging sounds of martial music, let us reflect that with the dream of a Greater Britain—a dream so surely materializing—we can well expect British music again to be paramount and indomitable.¹⁶⁹

Where Porte envisioned Merrie England serving a practical Wagnerian function as the national opera of a fascist Britain, Watson pictured the Elizabethans more as mascots whose legacy would inspire, rather than directly edify, the British people. Watson recognised, perhaps, that Elizabethan music would be inaccessible to many listeners, and thus opted to frame its composers as a pantheon of great Britons whose overall success, rather than specific contributions to British art, would be what counted.

Watson’s reimagination of English court composers as proto-fascists bespoke the BUF’s hankering after the Tudor era as the origin point of British imperialism and paranoia that modern Britons’ torpor would allow the Empire to disintegrate.¹⁷⁰ The BUF joined many other authoritarian movements in romanticising the military confidence of early modern polities, a trend that included Himmler’s fancying the SS a latter-day Order of Teutonic Knights, Japanese lionisation of Tokugawa-era samurai and Stalinism’s rehabilitation of tsarist generals.¹⁷¹ British fascism’s neo-Tudor dogma was also the fruit of male insecurity, though not exclusively so, since the women of Lintorn-Orman’s BF had found their own uses for Elizabeth’s reign as a reference point for female patriotism and ‘undiminished pride in Britain’s imperial might’.¹⁷² Both the BUF and its less successful predecessors offered ‘an outlet for unreconstructed imperialism’ in a post-1919 world where the rampaging machismo of a Rhodes or a Kitchener had been stuffed somewhat back into the cage.¹⁷³ Mosleyism projected fantasies of ‘rougher days’ in which daredevils such as Raleigh and Drake served their young empire without hesitation, while Mosley, the man, supposedly carried on the legacy of these Elizabethan ‘men of action’ in an otherwise decaying body politic.¹⁷⁴ ‘Who in our day’, enthused Raven Thomson, ‘except Sir Oswald Mosley, has the personal glamour, the virile courage, to take his place beside Drake, Raleigh, Essex and other of the Tudor aristocrats in saving the great Empire which they founded?’¹⁷⁵ In his 1932 party manifesto, The Greater Britain, the BUF leader himself waxed nostalgic for ‘the days before the victory of Puritan repression’, which, he assured his followers, ‘coincided with the highest achievements of British virility and constructive adventure’.¹⁷⁶

Though not alone in seeking comfort from the memory of Britain’s golden age, British fascism was distinctively brazen in its conscription of Elizabethan icons as masculine role models and raging anti-communists, settler colonists, and racial nationalists. The BUF commentariat imagined in the sixteenth century an attractive union of male energy, martial prowess and artistic creativity: visible, for instance, in Watson’s assertion that the English sailors of 1588 were singers of madrigals, in the comment of R. Saw that the Empire’s early architects were admirers of traditional English music, and in the opinion of one Elizabeth Gill that only the BUF could worthily inherit ‘the glories of Elizabethan England … a race of warriors, poets, sailors and statesmen’.¹⁷⁷ Analogous Nazi pronouncements no doubt had a hand in shaping the BUF’s neo-Tudor rhetoric; one thinks of Hitler’s injunction of March 1933 to German artists that ‘respect for the great men of the past must once more be hammered into the minds of our youth, it must be their sacred heritage’.¹⁷⁸

BUF racialisation of Elizabethan music itself was often implicit, but sometimes could be articulated openly. Ezra Pound, the American expatriate poet and future wartime propagandist for Mussolini, celebrated the Tudor and Restoration composers as pure expressions of the English spirit before its ruination by ‘Shylockracy’, Pound’s sneering antisemitic shorthand.¹⁷⁹ ‘[M]any continentals consider [Purcell] the greatest English composer’, Pound wrote in a July 1938 article in Action. ‘At any rate a very English composer. The music of Dowland and Purcell is certainly soaked with racial characteristics. It cedes to no foreign music’.¹⁸⁰ This claim is, of course, entirely ahistorical, since most of the templates these composers used originated in Italy, including the madrigal choral form for which Morley, Wilbye and Weelkes achieved lasting fame. (‘Tis now learning Italian’, reported Purcell of English music in the 1690s, ‘which is its best Master, and studying a little of the French Air, to give it somewhat more of Gayety and Fashion’.)¹⁸¹ In any case, Pound stated plainly what others conveyed with the use of historical metaphor. Watson paired his allusion to Elizabethan music with a reference to the defeat of the Spanish Armada, presumably to conjure a picture of an independent and virtuous England that dealt a crippling blow to the ‘hordes of aliens’ marauding in the sixteenth century.¹⁸² This was the essence of the BUF’s propaganda about the Elizabethan era: the fantasy of a Britain free and pure from outside contamination. If the epithet of unmusicality was a slight against the racial strength of the British people, the supposed freedom and cleanliness of the old masters offered a tempting reply. The reader from Harpenden, after praising ‘Wilby, [sic] our greatest madrigalist’, and ‘Purcell … one of the greatest composers of all time’, declared that ‘[w]e are just as musical as any other nation, and it is only natural that we should support our national songs, our dances, and our opera’ in the fascist present and future.¹⁸³

* * *

Who is Britain’s national composer? Which figure, or work, could provide the basis for the resurgence of the British nation? The British Union of Fascists asked and debated these questions, but no conclusive answer emerges from the texts the party has left behind. Witness to the Nazis’ idolisation of Richard Wagner, the BUF mined the English past for comparable figures, but could not arrive at a consensus prior to the party’s forcible disbandment in the early months of the Second World War. Nevertheless, the BUF’s unfinished musical project has much to tell us about how British Blackshirts viewed themselves, their country’s history, and their German neighbours. In one sense, it could be said that the BUF’s musical journey began at the same starting point as the Nazi one. Like its German and Italian counterparts, the Mosley movement considered itself the harbinger of a Britain reborn. Much of the BUF’s rhetoric about cultural matters consciously imitated the Nazis’ völkisch jargon and hinted at the emergence of a transnational fascist worldview in the 1930s. And yet, at bottom, the BUF’s musical discourse was the hostage of a peculiarly British insecurity: the stubborn notion of British unmusicality that had long been a reflexive assumption on both sides of the English Channel. This insecurity ensured that, although the BUF did follow the script of the Nazi Party, the tone of the former’s musical project was always a defensive and self-justifying one, much different in character from the aggressive, intolerant and outwardly self-confident musical culture of Nazi Germany. The Germans knew who their national composers were; the British did not. Beneath the bluster of Reavely and Watson, and behind the BUF’s attempt to racialise English heritage, was simply a desire for Britain to be seen as the equal of its neighbours on the Continent: to be ‘just as musical as any other nation’.

Footnotes