By Dr George Venturini  

In August 1923 the Premier of Victoria, H.S.W. Lawson, was received by Mussolini. It was not really the visit of the average, insular, ignorant Australian. Lawson was a lawyer, a former Attorney-General, Solicitor-General and Minister of Public Instruction. Yet, on his return Lawson praised Mussolini as “the man whom Providence waned to lead Italy.” (The Italo-Australian, 4 August 1923).

One would not be surprised that, in 1924 – after the tragic farce of ‘elections’ in Italy, amidst the Fascist violence – the Premier of New South Wales, Sir George W. Fuller, on his return from Italy, would express his admiration “of the man who saved Italy … from Bolshevism” (A. Moore, The secret army and the Premier – Conservative paramilitary organisations in New South Wales 1930-32, UNSW Press, Sydney 1989 at 49) Fuller, too, was no ignoramus. He had been at the Bar, Member of the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales (1889-1904), Member of the House of Representatives (1910-1913), Member for Home Affairs in the third Deakin Government, and then back to the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales (1915-1928).

In December 1924 – six months only after the assassination of Giacomo Matteotti (a distinguished lawyer and socialist politician, who on 30 May 1924 had openly spoken in the Italian Parliament to denounce the fraud and violence the Fascists had committed during the recently held elections, and for that had been kidnapped and killed by Fascists) – Sir Anthony Chamberlain, then Her Britannic Majesty’s Foreign Secretary, referred to Mussolini when on a visit to Rome as “a wonderful man – working for the greatness of his country”. In later years Lady Chamberlain was often to be seen wearing the Fascio badge. (C. Hibbert, Benito Mussolini, Longmans, London, 95).

There is a good reason to speak of a long period of Antipodean Fascism.

The years of the last 1920s and early 1930s were years of preparation for Fascist military coups in Australia. Those were the years  of intense confrontation between the ‘old Labor’ forces of Jack Lang, Frank Anstey and John Curtin, on the one side, and the ‘money power’ of high finance, and their enablers, centred in London  with powerful, aggressive allies inside Australia, on the other.

In Australia, the graziers, the farmers, most of the import-export houses, banks, insurance companies, building companies, mining companies, transport companies, shipping companies – all depended on London. The City had its comprador élite in Australia. The descendants of the ‘free old English gentry’ who squatted upon Australian soil during the early part of the nineteenth century looked upon England as their spiritual ‘home’. Their outlook, their education, their adopted and phoney mannerisms, their social and business relations were as English as those of Lord Bruce, Viscount of Melbourne – born in St Kilda, Victoria!, as they will be of Sir Robert Gordon Menzies, Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports, sometime later – born in Jeparit, Victoria!

Why, on 1 July 1963 he allowed Queen Elizabeth II to make him a Knight of Scotland’s Ancient Order the Thistle. The ceremony took place in St. Giles’ Cathedral, Edinburgh. The Royal Company of Archers provided a guard-of-honour outside the Cathedral, while the heralds lead the procession which included the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, Sir Robert, his wife Dame Pattie and their son. The installation took place in the small, oak-panelled Thistle Chapel, in the presence of several Knights, among them Lord Home, future British Foreign Secretary. Sir Robert, in full regalia, posed for photographers. Later he, wife and son walked to the City Chambers nearby to meet the Lord Provost of Edinburgh. (‘Uk: Scotland: Edinburgh: Sir Robert Menzies Made Knight Of the Thistle’, britishpathe.com, 2 July 1963).

He acted as if he were some great Scottish gentleman. It was pure theatre, even if of the provincial kind.

And one could really say, today, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!

Churchill would write as late as 10 October 1937 – after the invasion and conquest of Abyssinia, and the Nazi-Fascist aggression on the Spanish Republic – that: “It would be a dangerous folly for the British people to underrate  the enduring position in world-history which Mussolini will hold; or the amazing qualities of courage, compassion, self-control and perseverance which he exemplified.” (R. R. James, Churchill – study in failure, 1900-1939, London, 1970 at 258, see also at 317).

Australian Prime Minister Joseph Aloysius Lyons made an official call on Mussolini on his way to the Imperial Conference in 1937. According to Dame Enid Lyons, her husband reached a more cordial relationship with the Italian dictator than any yet achieved at a diplomatic level in that trying period for Anglo-Italian relations. (E. Lyons, So we take comfort, Heinemann, London, 1965, at 259-60).

In 1939 Sir Henry Gullett, Minister for External Affairs, spoke of the genius, patriotism and superhuman capacity of Mussolini. (E. M. Andrews, A History of Australian Foreign Policy: From Dependence to Independence, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, at 171-72). In fact Mussolini was a third rate actor playing to a sycophantic audience: he played a versatile and multifaceted role, that of Mussolini, a heroic mixture of  the Renaissance condottiere, old Machiavellian thinker, Lenin-like  leader of a revolutionary  minority, steel-minded dictator, humanitarian despot, Casanova lover, and Nietzschean superman. He added later to his repertoire the Napoleonic genius, with well-know results, and, just before he died, the socialist renovator of society. Of course, he was none of these things. (L. Barzini, The Italians, Atheneum, London, at 146).

There is a thin line connecting Mussolini, Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet of Ancoats, the Australian Sir Wilfrid Selwyn Kent Hughes and Menzies: it is the rhetorical appeal to “the forgotten people.”

Menzies, as is well known, was an admirer of Mussolini. It is well accepted that he was endowed with a brilliant, albeit lazy, mind “and a dominating personality … He was a superb orator and parliamentary debater, … His colleagues were forced to realise that his leadership was indispensable to the success of the party, yet few of them felt for him much personal warmth. … For conservative voters he came in the end to possess almost the mana of a tribal god; he was powerful, wise, well bred, witty and above all, sound. Few Labor supporters denied his tremendous ability, but to them he appeared also as unscrupulous, opportunistic, condescending and insufferably arrogant.” (R. Ward, Concise history of Australia, University Press, St. Lucia, Qld., 1965, at 265-66).

He certainly wanted to appear as a ‘decisional man’ – like Il Duce.

But much more serious was Menzies’ admiration for Hitler, the real “bulwark against Communism” as he was fond of saying. It was the same rationale used for the establishment of secret organisations in Australia. Menzies was a determined appeaser. Eight days after the outbreak of the second world war Menzies wrote to former Prime Minister Bruce, then Australia’s High Commissioner in London, confidently expressing his opinion that Hitler “had no desire for a first class war” and would offer peace talk after defeating Poland. In the words of Menzies, “nobody cares a damn about Poland.” (The letter is dated 11 September 1939 and became public in April 2001 as part of the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library Lecture by Dr. John Edwards. R. Cahill, ‘Il Duce Roberto?’, Workers online (No. 94), 04.05.2001).

In 1935 and 1938 Menzies had visited Nazi Germany for high-level meetings, and was guest of honour at a luncheon sponsored by Hitler’s financial wizard, and Reichbank head, Hjalmar Schacht. By all historical accounts, Schacht was the architect in 1930 of the Bank of International Settlements, which was based in Basel, Switzerland, along with the Governor of the Bank of England’s Montagu Norman. The Menzies-Schacht meeting would clearly have been set up by Menzies financier controllers, likely by Lord Beaverbrook himself, a frequent visitor of Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s. Montagu Norman and Hjalmar Schacht personified the banking underworld, which bankrolled and installed Hitler and the Nazis in power, in pursuit of a larger, universal Fascist scheme. (J and S. Pool, Who financed Hitler – the Secret funding of Hitler’s rise to power, 1919-1933, Pocket Books, London 1979: J. Pool, Hitler and his secret partners – Contributions, loot and rewards, 1933-1945, Pocket Books, New York, 1997).

Nothing might have occurred in Australia similar to the languid, decadent atmosphere of Darlington Hall, and the frequent visits by Nazi leaders, English ‘aristocrats’, including  Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and other Nazi sympathisers, so admirably described in the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, and brilliantly rendered in the film The remains of the day, with James Fox, Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins.

The Lord Darlington figure was typical of a formidable group of British peers who were attracted by Hitler and supported efforts to keep the dictator placated. The peers were all Right-wing and rabid anti-Semitic; their attitudes brought considerable satisfaction to Hitler.

What lay behind their support of appeasement was a fear of Communism.

They all saw an immensely powerful union between Communism and the Jewish people as a world conspiracy that could be thwarted only by Fascism and Nazism.

Both Hitler and his strutting Italian teacher Mussolini offered these bewildered aristocrats a safe world, which would be secure from any Communist takeover. It also confirmed their long-held private prejudice.

What makes such hatred additionally odious is the fact these peers continued to air their views long after Hitler’s persecution of Germany’s Jewish population had become widely known.

Prominent among such peers was Lord Brocket, Arthur Ronald Nall-Cain, 2nd Baron Brocket. He fawned over visiting Nazi officials whom he invited to his home and even attended the celebrations for Hitler’s 50th birthday.

Brocket was said to be “a fundamentally nice but stupid man”; he even deluded himself that he was a valuable link between Hitler and Britain’s leaders. Another pro-Nazi peer was Lord Redesdale, David Bertram Ogilvy Freeman-Mitford, the son of the 1st Baron Redesdale. His daughters, who became famous as the literary Mitford sisters, included Unity who went to Germany and stalked Hitler, having fallen in love with him. Although she did become close to Hitler – he considered her to be a “perfect example of Aryan womanhood” – he told her to return to England as war approached. She shot herself in the head in Munich’s English Garden but survived and was dispatched home.

Another admirer of Hitler was the then Duke of Westminster, a man who believed countless conspiracies among British Jews to subvert the country. He even spent the first year of the war demanding, to whoever would listen, that peace be made with Germany.

One of the most colourful ermine-clad extremists was the 22nd Earl of Erroll, the Casanova of Kenya’s debauched ‘Happy Valley’ set.

Among the most famous names associated with anti-Semitism was the fifth Duke of Wellington. He became a member of the secret ‘Right Club’, which attempted to unify all pre-war Right-wing groups in Britain.

The founder, Archibald Maule Ramsay, said of the organisation: “The main objective was to oppose and expose the activities of organised Jewry. Our first objective was to clear the Conservative Party of Jewish influence, and the character of our membership and meetings were strictly in keeping with this objective.”

Members of the ‘Right Club’ included Ernest Bennett, Margaret Bothamley, Samuel Chapman,  A. K. Chesterton, E. H. Cole,  James Edmondson, Richard Findlay, the Earl of Galloway, Thomas Hunter,  William Joyce, Charles Kerr,  Aubrey Lees, John MacKie, Joan Miller, H. T. Mills, Serrocold Skeels, John Stourton, Mavis Tate,  Francis Yeats-Brown, and Anna Wolkoff.

Yet another extremist was James Angus, the Marquess of Graham and the future Duke of Montrose.

One Hitler-admiring peer, the Duke of Buccleuch, was even close to King George VI as the Lord ­Steward of the Royal Household. He also accompanied Lord Brocket to celebrate the Führer’s 50th birthday. It was a matter of personal delight to Hitler that the duke, a man who served in the very court of Britain’s Royal Family, was there.

One of the most alarming figures among this cabal was Lord Londonderry – Winston Churchill’s cousin and a member of one of the country’s wealthiest aristocratic families. The king called him “Charlie” and other members of the Royal Family were frequent guests at his London home, as were major political figures.

But towering over all these figures were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. He had abdicated as King Edward VIII in 1936 in order to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson. They were later given the ducal titles.

Their admiration for Hitler concerned the government, particularly after they were entertained by him on a visit in 1937.

It is thought that Goering had concluded a deal with the Duke to install him on the throne after Germany had won the war. His court would, no doubt, have comprised many of those peers who had lauded Hitler so lavishly. (L. James, Aristocrats: Power, grace and decadence: Britain’s Great Ruling Classes from 1066 to the Present, Little Brown, New York, 2009).

On 10 November 2018 the Australian Special Broadcasting Service documented the story behind the connections and support Hitler and the Nazi regime enjoyed from the British monarchy and among the British élite. (‘The Royals, British aristocracy and the Nazis’, Special Broadcasting Service, Ch. 3, 10 November 2018).

* * * * *

Three cases of anti-Semitism in Australia just before the opening of the hostilities of the second world war should be mentioned at this point:

1) the Évian Conference of July 1938,

2) the attempt by Dr. Isaac Steinberg to establish a ‘promised land’ in the Kimberley region of Western Australia in June 1939, and

3) the HMT Dunera scandal in July 1940.

Continued Saturday – The Évian Conference

Previous instalment – Adjunct imperialist clowns (part 1)