By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Anglo-German Fellowship and the Cliveden Set

The idea of a coup d’état, led by a coalition of British fascist groups, had been under consideration within the broader British fascist movement in the weeks immediately after war was declared. To understand the larger context of what went side by side with this idea, we also need to look at the Anglo-German Fellowship and the Cliveden Set which also leads us to the Rudolf Hess affair. The idea of a group of superbly well-connected, pro-German appeasers meeting regularly at Waldorf and Nancy Astor’s Thames-side mansion is pictured below:

Some of those alleged to be Clivedenites were also associated with the Fellowship. The leaders, dubbed by Cockburn the ‘Cagoulords’ (a mischievous play on les Cagoulards, the 1930s French fascist-inclined terrorist group), were named lords Halifax, the 7th Marquess of Londonderry , Philip Kerr, the 11th Marquess of Lothian, and Lady Astor. Other names in the mix include Thomas Jones, the former deputy cabinet secretary, and several past members, alongside Lothian, Lord Milner’s famous ‘Kindergarten’ of young imperial administrators in South Africa. Some academic arguments have stated that Cockburn's account may not have been entirely accurate, but his main allegations cannot be easily dismissed.

The Anglo-German Fellowship and the Cliveden set shared some constituencies. Both groups were ‘concerned almost exclusively with imperial and foreign affairs and ‘carried on a disparate, irregular “ginger group” soliciting “a revolution by dinner party”’ operating ‘within, not against, or outside, the parameters of conventional political behaviour’.1

 

The Rudolf Hess flight

The overlap of the Fellowship and the Cliveden set confused internationally then and subsequently, especially in the US. The connection with the Douglas-Hamilton family laid the grounds for Rudolf Hess’s decision to choose their Scottish estate above which to bail out of his plane. The infiltration of the Fellowship by Kim Philby and his subsequent role in reporting the Hess affair to Stalin fuelled the Russian leader’s concerns about an Anglo-German axis turning towards Soviet Russia. 

The diary of the Russian ambassador, Ivan Maisky, corroborates this tension between the British ambulant amateurs and their National Socialist friends. Having noted as early as December 1936 that Lothian’s ‘Germanophilia had faded’, he later reported that ‘even Lothian treats Germany with suspicion.’2

By December 1937, Maisky sensed that Lothian’s support for the Cliveden set appeared to have been ‘wavering.’ By August 1938, he reported that Lothian had explicitly refused Halifax’s request to intercede with Hitler following Ribbentrop and Henderson’s furious row and that he disapproved of the British ‘capitulary policy.’3

Jan Masaryk, the Czech ambassador, confirmed Lothian’s disaffection, reporting to his government in July 1938 that had previously been ‘the most dangerous, because the most intelligent friend of Germany’, the ‘recent events in Austria and the whole cynical cruelty of the regime’ had convinced him he was ‘on the wrong road.’4

Lord Beaverbrook, the press baron, further fuelled Stalin’s paranoia at a dinner in October 1941, supplying a transcript of his interview with Hess, which developed into an article in Pravda that was broadcast on Moscow radio. Both contemporaries and historians typically associated this pro-German element with Cliveden, which can, in this context, be taken as a proxy for the Fellowship.

Maisky, the Russian ambassador, had been tasked with watching ‘the so-called “Cliveden” elements in the government while encouraging the anti-appeasers, notably, Eden and Churchill’ while Oleg Tsarev, the former KGB officer, turned historian similarly associated Hamilton with the ‘so-called Cliveden set.’

As Jo Fox has revealed, British communists ‘sought to keep the Hess mystique alive since it served their interests or those of their political masters and allowed them to connect home-front rumor with propaganda abroad’. They accused the aristocracy of ‘close association with the Nazis, contending that they were united by the forces of imperialism, plutocratic governments, and capitalism.5

Although confused with the chimeric Cliveden Set, the Fellowship’s legacy lingered longer among the Germans, the Russians, and the Americans. For Rudolf Hess, encouraged by Albrecht Haushofer, with whom he shared a dream of an Anglo-German alliance, it was the Fellowship that he hoped to find in Scotland.

Hess parachuted out of the plane, letting it crash into a field. A farmer picked up the German visitor who fell from the sky. When the police received him, he asked to meet Lord Hamilton, who was one of the most prominent figures in Great Britain. He also occupied a high military position at the time.

Hess revealed his identity to Lord Hamilton and reminded him of their meeting at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, which Hitler attended. Meanwhile, for Joseph Stalin, his paranoia about such an alliance fuelled by Kim Philby was what he most feared Hess might find in Scotland.

Philby joining the Fellowship was undoubtedly more than a smoke screen. The concept of an Anglo-German alliance alarmed the Russians, and Philby called it ‘the beginning of my actual work for the Soviet Union. He explained that ‘no one has so far suggested that I had switched from Communism to Nazism. The more straightforward and true explanation is that overt and covert links between Britain and Germany at that time were of grave concern to the Soviet Government.6

Philby had visited Germany in 1933 with his friend Tim Milne, where they had seen Hitler speak. He spoke German, was a good writer, clever, well-connected, and socially adept, and, therefore, an ideal candidate to work for the Fellowship.

The files detailing Philby’s interrogation provide further clues as to the chronology of his involvement with the Fellowship. In November 1951, when suspicion was building that Philby had tipped off McLean, SIS provided the Foreign Office with a curriculum vitae for Philby.7

By the summer of 1936, his biographers had agreed that Philby was spending an estimated one week per month in Germany on behalf of the Fellowship.8

The closure of the Fellowship on 11 October 1939, six weeks following the declaration of war, marked its demise as an organization. In Britain, any previous association with appeasing Hitler’s regime, including membership in the Fellowship, was an embarrassment.

The far from fully-explained Hess affair suggests how the legacy of the Anglo-German Fellowship, despite it being defunct for two years, still resonated in both Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR. Some commentators have acknowledged echoes of the Fellowship, but again it has not been adequately explored. While attention has focused on its connections with Ribbentrop and Göring, the Fellowship also had a powerful friend in Rudolf Hess. Scribe for Mein Kampf and Hitler’s most constant companion, Hess was appointed deputy Führer in 1933 and was third in the NSDAP hierarchy after Göring and Hitler.

By choosing Hamilton rather than ambassadors like Hoare and Lothian, Hess sought ‘to bypass the diplomatic circles serving Churchill’s government which had proved impervious to all previous peace feelers.’9

 

The conspiracies to overthrow the British Government

On 22 May 1940, Home Secretary Sir John Anderson reported to the War Cabinet that MI5 believed more than a quarter of the British Union of Fascist(BUF) members would be “willing if ordered to go to any lengths on behalf of Germany” Anderson could not, however, resist adding a caveat in his statement to the Cabinet that there was “no concrete evidence” to back up MI5’s claims.10 In this, the Home Secretary was mistaken.

MI5 (the British Security Service) uncovered three separate, if overlapping, treasonous conspiracies by well-connected British fascist groups. If none was the BUF (founded by Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, 6th Baronet), the leaders of each plot had been closely involved with Moseley. Meanwhile, in May 1939, Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay, Conservative Member of Parliament, anti-Semite, and fervent fascist, formed a new and secretive organization: The Right Club, where each member was sworn to secrecy once accepted. 

The Right Club. According to his son’s letter sent on Ramsay’s behalf: “The aim of the Club is to co-ordinate the activities of all the patriotic bodies which are striving to free this country from the Jewish domination in the financial, political, philosophical and cultural sphere. The organizations in question are the following: British Union, Nordic League, National Socialist League, Imperial Fascists, The Link, Liberty Restoration League and a few others.”12

Archibald Ramsay’s aim in establishing the Right Club was to unify the movement in time for the coup. On September 23, MI5 undercover agent Marjorie Amor (assigned the codename M/Y) had a “personal interview” with Ramsay in which she broached the subject of the coming uprising.13

“It is not that Ramsay anticipates successful revolution independent of German action. Ramsay has said to M/Y words to the effect that he expected Hitler would take the continent of Europe and leave Britain as a protectorate.”14

Ramsay also clearly expected – and indeed looked forward to – the prospect of violence, telling a meeting of trusted Right Club members: “Personally, I should welcome a civil war with shots fired in the streets.”15

Another member of The Right Club’s Inner Circle echoed this call to arms. In January 1940, MI5 received a report from one of its informants about an incendiary speech given by General John ‘Boney’ Fuller, one of Britain’s most decorated army officers who had previously denounced Jews as “the cancer of Europe”16, lionized Hitler as "that realistic idealist who has awakened the common sense of the British people by setting out to create a new Germany”17, and had been employed as an unofficial military advisor to the Wehrmacht.18

Ramsay had inscribed members' names in a large leather ledger called ‘The Red Book’. MI5 discovered this in Tyler Kent’s apartment on the morning of his arrest – Ramsay had given it to the American for safekeeping - and provided copies of its entries to the Home Office. In the wake of the Kent and Wolkoff convictions, Liberal MP Geoffrey Mander asked the Home Secretary to “publish the list of members of the Right Club in possession of the Home Office.” Home Secretary Herbert Morrison refused because to do so was “not in the public interest [and] I do not propose to give any indication of what names there are, or are not, on this list.”19

The Red Book would remain under wraps for more than 50 years 20. When its entries were finally opened for public examination, they showed that of the 242 Right Club members listed, 13 were titled aristocrats (of both sexes), and 12 were sitting MPs; there were also three members of European Royal Families and at least five senior officers, serving in the British army. Since MI5’s publicly released files disclose no evidence of any subsequent investigations into The Right Club, much less its involvement in the coup plot, the aim of keeping its membership secret appears to have been to protect the reputations of those who belonged to it.

 

1. Rose, Norman, The Cliveden Set: Portrait of an Exclusive Fraternity, (London, 2000) p. 6.

2. The Maisky Diaries: Red Ambassador to the Court of St James's, 1932-1943, 2015; December 1936; 18 April 1937.

3. Ibid. 1 December 1937; 6 August 1938.

4. Butler, Lothian, p. 237 fn.

5. Fox, ‘Propaganda’, pp. 104 – 105.

6. Kim Philby, My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy, 2002.

7. Martin to Carey-Foster, 2 November 1951, FCO 158/27 266, The National Archives (TNA).

8. Duff, Time, p. 58; see also Knightly, Phillip, Philby KGB Masterspy, (London, 1998), p. 52; Boyle, Andrew, The Climate of Treason, (London, 1979), p. 146; Macintyre, Ben, Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies, (London, 2012). p. 43.

9. Peter Padfield, Hess, Hitler & Churchill, (2013), p. 100.

10. War Cabinet Minutes, 22 May 1940. National Archives file CAB 65/7.

 

11. Letter from George Ramsay to Col. Thompson, 20 July 1939. Archibald Maule Ramsay MP. National Archives file KV 2/677.

 

12. Letter from George Ramsay to Col. Thompson, 20 July 1939. Archibald Maule Ramsay MP. National Archives file KV 2/677.

13. This fascist uprising would not, according to MI5’s reports of what Ramsay told Amor, happen spontaneously: instead, it would immediately follow the arrival of Hitler’s troops in Britain. Weekly Summary of Report by Agent “M/Y.” Archibald Maule Ramsay. National Archives file Records of the Security Service KV2/677.

14. MI5 Memorandum (undated). Anna Wolkoff. National Archives file KV 2/841.

15. Report of Agent “M/Y”, 3 May 1940. Archibald Maule Ramsay. National Archives file KV 2/677. 

16. Maj. Gen. J.F.C. Fuller: The Cancer of Europe. Fascist Quarterly Vol.2, Iss.1, pp.65-81, London, 1935.

17. Ibid. 

18. Fuller was also a personally-invited guest at the military parade through Berlin to celebrate Hitler’s 50th birthday in April 1939.

19. Hansard, 31 July 1941 Vol. 373 cc1509-10.

20. The leather-bound ledger was finally released to the Wiener Library in London.

 

 

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