By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

The Red Book

As we have seen in Part One, Hitler actively pursued an influential and largely overlooked backdoor foreign policy with the royal families of Britain, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, Italy, Romania, and Germany. They were all looking to seize a more visible political role in their respective countries. In Britain, this included the Anglo-German Fellowship and the Cliveden Set, whereby became seditious with Right Club’s plans for a coup d’état.

Yesterday we saw the sympathy between some British Royals and Hitler. However, this situation would get much worse with three major conspiracies whose goal was to overthrow the British government to replace it with a pro-Nazi government. Furthermore, as we will see this information was contained in the so-called 'Red Book' which would be kept under wraps for 50 years.

What made the documents in the 'Red Book' remarkable is because of their complete absence from the official histories of pro-Nazi fascists in Britain. Hence although some of the perpetrators would challenge their detentions in the courts, their detailed plans for a Nazi puppet regime were never revealed.

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. In this, the Home Secretary was mistaken.

When the entries in The Red Book 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.

In 2020 Graham Macklin in his book Failed Führers A History of Britain’s Extreme Right shows in detail how attention to the ideological twists and turns of even small groups of radical activists is important in understanding these movements. Their ideas are often carried through in lean years by small sects, but these groups can expand very rapidly and take the national stage.

That is what happened with The Right Club including the other groups we will discuss. That is, 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 Moseley, 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.”2ht 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.3

At the same time as the Security Service uncovered Ramsay’s Right Club conspiracy, British Government files show that MI5 agents also penetrated a second and well-advanced plot for an armed coup d’état by “a subversive organization [intending] to establish an authoritarian system of Government” once German troops landed in Britain. Its operations included “illegal printing, a transport section to convey the members in their various activities, an extensive arrangement of accommodation addresses, and various aliases for leading members of the organization,” as well as the acquisition of a substantial armory of 303 Lee Enfield rifles.4

This organization's self-styled ‘Leader’ was Dr. Leigh Francis Howell Wynne Sackville de Montmorency Vaughan-Henry, a celebrated musicologist and conductor. They had held concert performances for the British Royal Family. To the general public, Henry was known for his regular appearances on BBC wireless programs. He discussed his area of expertise: the Welsh Bardic tradition in poetry and song. To the police and MI5, however, Leigh Vaughan-Henry was better known as a pro-Nazi Fascist and violent anti-Semite. Throughout the 1930s, he had been in regular contact with Nazi officials in Germany, had been entertained by Party leaders in Berlin, and had made at least one radio broadcast for propaganda chief Josef Goebbels.

He had been a member of (variously) the British Union of Fascists (BUF), the Imperial Fascist League, and the Imperial Socialist League, and in April 1940, acquired a criminal record after making a speech to a meeting of the English Nationalist Association (a BUF offshoot). In it, he denounced Jews as “a lot of dirty lousy Yids” and “a menace to Britishers”; he then “challenged those of Jewish beliefs or the Jewish race to come up to the platform and resort to force.”  Magistrates at Old Street Police Court gave him a choice between a £250 fine 139 and three months in prison. Henry paid the fine and was additionally bound over to be of good behavior for six months; it was an injunction he chose to ignore.

MI5 infiltrated its undercover agents into Henry’s group of British fascists and discovered that it was planning for an armed revolution. According to Henry’s deputy, Samuel Darwin-Fox, formerly Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Switzerland, but better known to the Security Service as “one of the more extreme and unbalanced of Nordic League members,”  in early May 1940 the plot was primed and ready. Darwin-Fox told an MI5 agent code-named M/W that:

“Italy would declare war almost immediately, France would give in, and Britain would follow before the end of the week. There would be a short civil war, the Government would leave first for Bristol and then for the Colonies, General Ironside would become dictator, and after things had settled down, Germany could do as she liked with Britain.” 

The names of Henry and Darwin-Fox’s co-conspirators have never been released. Still, the reference to General William Edmund Ironside (subsequently ennobled as the 1st Baron Ironside) must have caused alarm. Despite being regularly associated with pro-German fascists - he was the patron of General John Fuller, who was confident enough of his mentor’s support to advise the Link’s Admiral Barry Domvile that “Ironside is with us” – Ironside was then Chief of the Imperial General Staff and about to be named as Commander-in-Chief of Home Forces.

In the same month, a second MI5 undercover operative – Agent M/M – reported that Henry had organized his followers along classic revolutionary lines. 

“There are 18 cells already organized. Each cell has 25 members who are responsible for the district in which they live or work. Henry says he has many phone numbers; instructions are to be given to each member who will destroy them when committed to memory. No call is genuine unless ‘Peter Leigh’ is mentioned in the conversation on both sides.

Henry was reported to be eagerly anticipating the arrival of Hitler’s troops. In late May, he summoned 16 cell leaders to a meeting in his elegant Notting Hill home; it was, he told them, to be the last such gathering before the imminent coup d’état, and he issued their orders. 

“Revolution is to take place after the total loss of the Channel ports and defeat on the Western Front, and an effort is to be made to link up with the enemy in Holland … The next plan is the [in]filtration of into the C.P. [Communist Party] and chiefly the I.L.P. [Independent Labour Party]. This to be done by Darwin-Fox. Intimidation of certain people by threat, and possible action against their wives and children; bumping off certain people (this to be organized with great care).” 

But Henry also knew that his plot might be discovered before the coup was launched. He told his cell leaders that in the event of trouble, plans had been put in place to hide his revolutionaries from the police and smuggle them to safety in the Irish Republic. 

Arrangements are being made for the allocation of hide-outs for the women of the party and their children if necessary. These will be reached in 10 minutes, and … the point to go will be imparted to each person, and from there, he will be escorted to an unknown destination. A getaway out of London is to be by the river and out of the country to Ireland via S. Wales, a route which has been tried successfully; there is a second route. Two people have already used the first route; one injured a policeman who is now dying.” 

The same agent also reported that Henry had obtained a printing press to churn out the revolutionary government’s instructions, which “has been moved and will continue to be moved by a baker in his bread van every few days.” MI5 also discovered that he was forging identity documents and that he had linked up with experienced Irish terrorists.

“According to information which we obtained from a reliable source, Vaughan-Henry had a large stock of inner pages of passports, and a Foreign Office embossing stamp. He said he could replace the photograph in a passport with that of someone he wanted to smuggle to Ireland, and stitch in blank pages for endorsements. He then sends such persons to a place in South Wales and thence to Ireland. In a period of ten days he has smuggled six persons to Ireland in that way, and members of the IRA have come to England by that route …:

“Eventually there will be a legion formed in Ireland (by those who go over by the secret route) who will return to fight when the revolution starts.” 

Meanwhile, the Right Club’s plans for a coup d’état were interrupted in May 1940 by the arrest of Ramsay’s ‘Chief of Staff, Anna Wolkoff, an ardent anti-Semite and passionate admirer of Germany’s Führer, who had declared (according to an MI5 undercover report reports) “Hitler is a God …He is of this century, and it would be wonderful if he could govern Britain.” 

While Ambassador Kennedy arguably harbored some sympathy for Germany, other forces were at work in the American embassy to undermine Churchill’s pleas for American intervention. Anna Wolkoff, a White Russian émigré in London and secretary of the Right Club who operated out of a tearoom in Kensington, recruited Tyler Kent, a low-level employee at the American embassy, to steal secret correspondence between Roosevelt and Churchill requesting American military aid. Both Wolkoff and Kent were eventually arrested and indicted.

 

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

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

3. 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.

4. Leigh Vaughn-Henry: Reasons for Internment, November 28, 1940. National Archives file TS/27533. Op. cit.

 

 

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