I don’t mean I became crooked. This was something else. He’d been in the force in 1926 and got stuck in against strikers in Brighton during the General Strike. He’d been befriended by a bunch of toffs who’d provided a mounted auxiliary volunteer support for the police just so they could break a few working-class heads. They regarded strikers as communists who should be treated like dogs.
Quite a few were members of the British Fascists and Charlie joined them. He persuaded me and my friend, Philip Simpson, to join Sir Oswald Mosley’s new party, the British Union of Fascists.
Simpson wasn’t slow to put the boots in dealing with what he called ‘oiks’. He was a bit of a bastard, actually. He had a vicious streak although he didn’t have the muscles for it — he was a long streak of piss. So he was always ready with his baton. He would disable with blows to elbow and neck, and once they were down he started kicking.
I heard about one occasion he almost went too far. He’d started to get into it with this bloke. The bloke had been around. He could see the way this could go.
‘Don’t knock me about,’ he said. ‘If I’m doing any wrong, take me down to the station and charge me.’
But Simpson kept pushing and shoving him, trying to make the man retaliate so he could book him for assault. The man wouldn’t, though, so Simpson used his baton to knock him down, then gave him a good kicking.
Charlie Ridge came along. The future chief constable was a sergeant then. He didn’t stop the fight. He ordered the bloke to get up and fight like a man. The bloke wouldn’t (he had more sense) so Simpson kept kicking him between his legs. Eventually, Ridge told Simpson the bloke had had enough and the two bobbies left him passed out in the street.
The man later complained officially. The kicking had ruptured his urethra. He was in hospital for three months being operated on, then a month convalescing. Simpson and Ridge denied anything had happened and, of course, they were policemen so they were believed.
You could always count on the magistrate to side with the bobby when it came to giving evidence. They were pretty uncritical, however unlikely your story was.
Simpson hated costermongers, I don’t know why. He was always moving them on — at least until he worked out a system of getting them to pay him to look the other way. God help them if they didn’t pay up.
I didn’t go for any of his kind of behaviour. Bobbies had to be tough, of course. Generally, they were pretty rough — their batons weren’t just for show. I didn’t use mine much. You had to be careful. A mate of mine walloped somebody over the head and killed him.
My way was fists and boots. But they’d know what I was doing. I wasn’t like Simpson. I’d take my tunic off, fold it and put in on the floor, put my helmet and belt on top of it. Nobody would ever touch my uniform during the ensuing fight.
It was a fair fight, except I always aimed to get my retaliation in first. We were taught only to use sufficient force but we’d also been blooded — well blooded — in the boxing ring. We boxed all the time. And, of course, they taught us a few things about self-defence when we signed up.
But speed and the first good blow would usually do the trick. You had to be fit then — not like coppers today who couldn’t chase a thief down a street if they wanted to, which most of them don’t.
I did try to play fair. I didn’t always come out on top, but if I did come unstuck, I’d never complain of assault, unless they started it. If I started it, then the most they had to fear was a charge of obstructing an officer in the execution of his duty.
I would explain away the injuries by saying I’d fallen or walked into a wall because other bobbies saw it as weakness to be beaten, whatever the odds. Having said that, most policemen in Brighton got hurt sooner or later. It was just part of the job.
Some districts of Brighton were particularly hostile to policemen. Policemen who were a bit uppity were given these roughest areas as punishment beats. One street was known as Kill Copper Row. Generally, it made more sense to give someone a leathering for something small instead of nicking him. Problem was, in these no-go areas, kindness was taken as weakness.
And come closing time every pub in Brighton was a potential trouble spot. Gangs fighting when the pubs had closed on a Friday and Saturday night would turn on any bobby daft enough to try to break it up.
I liked night duty, even in the bad weather, because you could give it to them hotter then. The real hooligans, I mean, not some poor bloke who’d just had a couple of drinks too many.
For me it was the razor gangs. Nobody carrying a cut-throat razor, a switchblade knife or a knuckleduster is a man in my eyes. If I came up against anyone like that, then my truncheon did come out — and I didn’t much care how I used it.
THIRTY-ONE
So there we were, Ridge, Simpson and me: fascists together.
Oswald Mosley intrigued me. He’d started out Tory, then gone to Labour, then struck out on his own with his New Party when Ramsay Macdonald headed the new National Government in 1931. And the secretary of the New Party was a crime writer I liked called Peter Cheyney.
The New Party had been trounced in the 1931 general elections. On 1st October 1932 Mosley had launched the British Union of Fascists with a flag-waving ceremony in the old New Party offices at 1 Great George Street up in Westminster.
These days, fascism has terrible connotations and we associate it with the far right. But at the time it had a perfectly proper place on the political spectrum. It was just a radical movement. My leanings were actually to the left, except that I didn’t like unions.
Mussolini — who created the name fascism in Italy — was much admired, even after his ruthless attack on Abyssinia. He was admired by the upper classes for bringing firm government that held back the perceived threat of the Red Menace that the Russian Revolution had conjured up. He was admired by the young and the progressive for looking to the future, not to the past. In Italy, the trains ran on time.
Mosley took on his mantle in Britain. Although from a wealthy background, he presented the British Union of Fascists as a classless organization in which merit was the only qualification for advancement.
He presented the BUF as a youth movement against the ‘old gangs’ of British politics. He wanted to cure unemployment and prevent Britain’s economic and political decline.
I was an energetic young man, eager to get on. The police force was incredibly hierarchical — it took Charlie Ridge thirty years to rise from constable to chief constable. The BUF was for me, especially as Stanley Baldwin from the old establishment called Mosley ‘a cad and a wrong ’un’. That was almost all the recommendation I needed.
The big newspaper proprietor Lord Rothermere was a fan of Mussolini and he backed the BUF in the
Neither of us fancied the uniform — we had enough of uniforms in the day — or the processions or the flag- waving but we could tolerate them.
When we joined, Mosley wasn’t interested in all that Protocols of Zion nonsense. The BUF stood for religious toleration, not anti-Semitism. Mussolini was the same, actually — it was the National Socialists in Germany who added that to the mix. In fact, other British fascist groups — and there were many factions — called the BUF kosher fascists.
It probably sounds now like I’m protesting too much. I probably am. Anyway, anybody could join and the first thing I realized was that anyone did. Philip, Charlie Ridge and me usually went up to London for our meetings, but there was a Brighton branch that we went to a couple of times that was full of eccentrics.
The Brighton meetings were something and nothing — someone would give a talk, then we’d go to the pub for a drink. There was a bloke called Tony Frederick who was a music hall performer. A dancer. He and his wife — well, he said she was his wife — performed as Kaye and Kaye. He just seemed to be down on everything, a man full of envy. His wife would join us for a drink afterwards. Her dress was a bit gaudy and she was past her best, but she
