The public display of the notorious Red Book has caught the
attention of people throughout England, according to a report
filed by P. Lashmar of the Independent on Sunday.
On the face of it, Lahsmar wrote, the tome is just an aging
leather-bound ledger with a few pages of hand-written names.
But its contents have a totemic significance and its blood-
red leather is a symbol of the fascism and antisemitism that
once held sway at the heart of the British establishment.
The Red Book is the membership list of the Right Club, a
secret organization founded in May 1939 by Captain Archibald
Ramsay MP. Unlike the populist British Union of Fascists lead
by the charismatic Sir Oswald Mosley, the Right Club was
exclusive.
Its members were aristocrats and Members of Parliament,
academics, civil servants, clerics and rich dilettantes. Some
of the men had distinguished themselves in World War I and
saw themselves as patriots. But they were also virulent
racists who supported Hitler's treatment of Germany's Jewish
population. Many were Nazi sympathizers.
From King Edward VIII downwards, Lashmar explained, there was
a widespread view that only a powerful Germany could hold
back the threat of Bolshevism, and that Britain should be
supporting Hitler, not preparing to attack him. The existence
of the Red Book first emerged in 1943 during a heated debate
in Parliament. By then, it had already been seized by MI5.
For 40 years, the ledger was believed to have been lost and
its whereabouts was much speculated upon. Some believed it
was held by a secret clique of the extreme right awaiting a
fascist revival. And the racist right did treat it with a
respect akin to ancestor worship. Among anti-fascist
conspiracy theorists, it was believed to have been suppressed
by the government to prevent the embarrassing exposure of
establishment figures.
The reality is somewhat different.
According to the Independent on Sunday report, the
book is divided into male and female membership lists with
notes as to whether they have paid their dues, made donations
or received their club badge, which featured an eagle killing
a snake.
But if the badge seems mildly comic now, the vehemence with
which these establishment figures hated Jews was chilling.
The list, written with a fountain pen in Ramsay's hand,
includes names that still resonate in British society: Arthur
Wellesley the 5th Duke of Wellington, the Second Baron
Redesdale, The Earl of Galloway, Lord Ronald Graham, Princess
Blucher, Sir Ernest Bennett, Prince Turka Galitzine and
Britain's most notorious Second World War traitor, William
Joyce, later known as Lord Haw-Haw as he broadcast propaganda
from Germany.
The book also lists donations. Sir Alexander Walker, then the
head of the Johnnie Walker whisky dynasty, is shown to have
donated the princely sum of 100 pounds.
Another well known, antisemite member was A.K. Chesterton, a
First World War military hero. Commander E.H. Cole was the
Chancellor of the White Knights, a British version of the Ku
Klux Klan. MPs included Sir James Edmondson, Colonel Charles
I. Kerr and John M'Kie.
Many of those who appear in the Right Club list were also
members of other extreme right-wing groups. Fifty-four were
in the Nordic League, which, like the Nazis, believed in an
"Aryan master race."
Who was this man who founded the Right Club? Until the mid-
1930s, Ramsay was a run-of-the-mill constituency MP. Born in
India, educated at Eton and Sandhurst, he was an officer with
the Coldstream Guards in France during the First World War
and was invalided out in 1919.
He was elected as the Conservative MP for Peebles and South
Midlothian in 1931. Known to his friends as "Jock" he was,
apparently, a charming man, closely connected to the
aristocracy in Scotland. His questions and statements in the
House of Commons were mainly about parochial issues.
Then, during the Spanish Civil War, he was swept up by the
tide of fascism and emerged as a virulent antisemite and
enemy of international Communism.
A powerful orator, he toured the nation fulminating on the
"Judaeo-Bolshevik Plot." He became closely associated with
pro-Nazi circles in Britain and, by 1938, was a leading
figure in the Nordic League.
Unlike some of his fellows, he was undeterred by the 1938
Kristallnacht pogrom, when the Germans first showed the
violence they could unleash on their fellow citizens if they
were Jewish.
As the clouds of war closed over Europe, Ramsay became
further convinced that Jews were orchestrating a
confrontation, which he much opposed, between Britain and
Germany.
So he set up the Right Club. "Our first objective," he later
wrote, "was to clear the Conservative Party of Jewish
influence." The list of some 235 members seems to have been
drawn up that summer.
According to Lashmar, the club held meetings, several of them
chaired by Lord Wellesley. It forged connections with other
pro-Nazi, antisemitic groups, such as the 4,000-member Link,
founded by Admiral Sir Barry Domville, a former Director of
Naval Intelligence.
When war broke out, Ramsay was undeterred. If anything, his
zeal grew. While there is evidence that many Right Club
members dropped from view, others shared his enthusiasm.
Lord Sempill, a famous aviator of the inter-war years, was
suspected of spying from his post at the Admiralty and was
secretly retired by Churchill to prevent a scandal.
Ramsay nominally dissolved the Right Club when war began but
continued work with a 10-strong inner circle including his
assistant, Anna Wolkoff.
In April 1940, he took the Red Book to Tyler Kent for
safekeeping because, as a cypher clerk at the U.S. Embassy,
he had diplomatic immunity. A month later, the police raided
Kent's flat. He and Wolkoff were accused of supplying the
Germans with secret cables between Churchill and the U.S.
President.
The other members of the inner circle, including Ramsay, were
rounded up and detained under Defense Regulation 18B, an anti-
fifth-column clause. Ramsay, the only serving MP detained
under this law, was released in 1944. He lost his seat in
1945 and died a decade later.
What happened to the Red Book?
According to Professor Richard Griffiths, the police had it
until October 1944. But it seems likely that it was returned
to Ramsay after his release. Nothing was seen of it until the
late 1980s, when it was discovered at the bottom of an old
safe in a solicitor's office.
Luckily, the finder was familiar with Professor Griffiths's
work and passed it to him. Professor Griffiths used it as a
primary source for his book, Patriotism Perverted: Captain
Ramsay, The Right Club and British Antisemitism 1939-40,
then deposited the book at the Wiener Library.
Last week it was, for the first time, opened to the
public.
