Blackshirts at the Beach: Remembering Fascism on the Kent Coast

_________
The Cultural Location of fascism

By Tommy Maddinson

OUR GRANDPARENTS DIDN’T VOTE FOR FASCISTS …

THEY SHOT THEM!

I couldn’t help but chuckle as I came across these words on a bizarre street artwork in Folkestone.1 Wandering around on the morning of the eightieth anniversary of VE Day, and in the wake of sweeping Reform Party wins across the county of Kent, I had been struggling to make sense of what The War means today. Judging by the scale of the anniversary celebrations that took place that May, the conflict clearly still matters enormously to many people throughout the country. As a Lancaster swooped over the skies of London, and a Spitfire crashed in a field in West Hythe, it felt as if the worlds of 1945 and 2025 were colliding into one another. In Parliament, nursing a set of bruising local election results, the Prime Minister proudly gave his backing for a statue to the ‘Forces’ Sweetheart’, Vera Lynn, in Dover. The singer, he remarked, ‘is sewn into our nation’s soul’.

In Folkestone, the contested memory of Nazism briefly flashed up as a moment of political controversy during the local council elections, held the week before VE Day. John Baker, the Reform candidate for Folkestone West, had his local shop plastered with stickers depicting a swastika being thrown in the bin, accompanied by the words ‘keep rubbish out of Folkestone’. In response to his critics, Baker stated: 

“I am angry … I am not a Nazi. That is all they can say – that you’re a Nazi, fascist and racist. I am certainly not a racist. I am married to a daughter of Windrush immigrants.”2

Baker’s comments were a striking reflection of the messy cultural politics of The War and its legacy in the present. To me, the affair captured something of the historical and political disorientation experienced by both the right and the left today. I don’t wish to enter a debate here over the accuracy of using such labels against Baker – although, there have indeed been several well-documented reports demonstrating the presence of neo-Nazi supporters within Reform UK’s ranks.3

What I do want to reflect on is whether the memory of the struggle against Nazism still serves as an effective rallying point for anti-racist organising today, or whether we might also look for other histories and narratives to ground ourselves in the present. Paul Gilroy touched on a similar set of debates in There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, where he examined the relationship between anti-racism and anti-fascism among political movements like Rock Against Racism and the Anti-Nazi League in the 1970s.4 One of the central tensions within these movements, Gilroy argued, was ‘the tendency to conceive of neo-fascism and racism as distinct and unrelated problems’, and ‘to make the popular memory of the Second World War the dominant source of images with which to mobilise against the dangers of contemporary racism’.5 The mobilisation of nationalist and patriotic sentiment by groups like the Anti-Nazi League proved, ultimately, to be an ‘unstable foundation’ for political anti-racism, particularly once the National Front found ways of presenting themselves not as Nazis but simply as “concerned” British patriots.6

On the Kent coast, this dilemma is particularly acute: a place where the Second World War – and the conflict against Nazism – provides an extremely powerful source of regional identity. The patriots and ultranationalists who call this coast home do not usually dress themselves in brown or black, but in red, white, and blue. Local far-right activity is predominately organised around the small boats “crisis” in the English Channel. Their tactics vary – mobilising in the streets of Dover, harassing local asylum claimants at hotels and accommodation centres, stalking the cliffs to film the latest boat arrivals – but at their heart they share an obsessive concern with vigilante policing of the nation’s borders. 

These forces explicitly ground their vigilantism in local historical and cultural senses of place. Grassroots organisations like the “Little Boats”, a failed anti-migrant patrol group named after the Little Ships of Dunkirk, directly appeal to the memory of the Second World War in combatting Channel migration. Some reach even further back in history: in the view of one far-right commentator, writing from the Kent and Sussex border, the small boats “crisis” marks the ‘first successful invasion of our country since 1066’. Many of the political elites in this country blithely repeat the “invasion” narrative to their supporters, amplifying it as a cultural sign of decline and doom. The sight of lonely, overcrowded boats crossing the Channel serves as a useful symbol of weakness and defeat, tantamount to a profound betrayal of the “greatest generation” and their present-day inheritors. Ultimately, the mythic battlefield of The War becomes overlaid with the contemporary battlefield over immigration.

Yet, despite the conflict’s overwhelming dominance in local popular memory, I want to insist that there are still alternative histories, memories, and narratives from the twentieth century that offer a different orientation towards the contemporary moment. In his reflections on culture as a system and process, Raymond Williams stressed the importance of recognising the ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ elements that exist alongside any given dominant culture. The residual, as he saw it, was that ‘which has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process’. Williams goes on to argue that the dominant cultures work to incorporate these residual elements ‘through reinterpretation, dilution, projection, discriminating inclusion and exclusion’.7

Taking up Williams’ argument, we might start by searching for those residual histories that have been marginalised, diluted, or even excluded from popular narratives of the Second World War altogether. These are not the kinds of popular narratives championed through large-scale commemorations or displays of military air power, as the ‘selective tradition’ would have it. Instead, these are the sorts of histories that unsettle the more comfortable and celebratory attitudes towards the historical past, and, in doing so, challenge how we make sense of our own standpoint from the present day. As a demonstration of what this kind of exercise looks like in practice, I want to return to the first line of the artwork I saw that day in Folkestone: 

Our grandparents didn’t vote for fascists. 

Except – what if they did?

Fascist organising on the Kent coast in the 1930s

It is no secret that the British Union of Fascists (BUF) was active across south-eastern England in the 1930s. In All The Devils Are Here, a dark and seedy psycho-excursion along the Kent coast, David Seabrook tried to resurface this little-known history of the Isle of Thanet.8 Among several blackshirts drawn to the beaches of Kent was the Anglo-German political activist and BUF member Arthur Albert Tester. In 1931, Tester purchased a seaside residence at Naldera, Broadstairs formerly owned by Oswald Mosley’s father-in-law Lord Curzon, and favoured retreat for his daughter Cynthia. Tester’s precise role in local fascist organising remains somewhat hazy, but, according to Seabrook, he appears to have been something of a socialite who entertained fascist guests like Mosley and William Joyce (the infamous Lord Haw-Haw).9

Active fascist organising on the Kent coast really took off in earnest in 1934. In May of that year, the BUF established active branches in Dover and Folkestone. Two blackshirt meetings were held on Dover sea front on May 10th and May 30th.10 Both meetings were attended by large crowds, including a number of Labour party followers who took several opportunities to interrupt the proceedings against the BUF. At the second meeting, a member of the audience demanded to know if the BUF were ‘anti-Jewish’ and in support of Mussolini’s new antisemitic laws. The BUF speaker replied:

We don’t intend to bother about race or religion. We don’t intend to persecute Jews, but if we find any individual of the State who is directly working for the interests of the section or race against the interests of the British nation as a whole, we shall come down on him very hard.11

During the summer of 1934, the BUF also targeted local town halls along the Kent coast. In Folkestone town hall in June, a BUF spokesperson delivered a public speech on ‘the case for fascism’.12 Two months later, the BUF attempted to hire Dover town hall for a public gathering but were refused by the Town Clerk. The local branch did, however, make a successful second attempt to book the hall in the following year, and the BUF held their first major gathering there in March 1935 with an address from the BUF’s policy director Mr. A Raven Thomson.13

The high point for the BUF’s activities on the Kent coast was the ‘Blackshirt Ball’ held in Folkestone in January 1935. Oswald Mosley’s mother, Lady Maud Mosley, served as hostess for the evening’s affairs. Almost six hundred guests, drawn from several BUF branches across Kent, came for a night of singing and dancing at the Leas Cliff Hall. Oswald, meanwhile, sent a letter of regret for his absence, being occupied elsewhere in Lancashire. After a series of waltz and fox-trot exhibition dances, the fascists partied late into the night: 

Members of the movement gathered on the floor and sang party songs and party cries, accompanied by the London Blackshirt Band which, with Standfield Deacon’s Band, provided the music for dancing … After the last dance the limes were turned on the stage and the Union Jack was brought on while the trumpeter of the Blackshirt Band sounded a long call; “God Save the King” was sung, and during the last line every Blackshirt gave a party salute.14

Regional fascist organising on the Kent coast continued right until September 1939. In July of that year, the orientalist-turned-fascist St John Philby contested the Hythe by-election on behalf of the British People’s Party (BPP), a splinter group from Mosley’s British Union of Fascists led by John Beckett. The BPP poured considerable resources into the Hythe campaign. Beckett and Lord Tavistock, both major figures in the BPP movement, canvassed for Philby during the by-election, as did other fascist activists and pro-Nazis including Lady Grace Pearson, Dr. Meyrick Booth, Captain Vincent Collier, General J.F.C. Fuller, and Admiral Sir Barry Domvile.15 In the final week before the vote, the party also released an antisemitic pamphlet titled Alien Money Power in Great Britain, which accused the Conservative candidate Rupert Brabner of being associated with a Jewish law firm in London.16

None of the BPP’s efforts in Hythe paid off. On the night of the election count, Philby’s campaign ended with a disastrous 576 votes, well behind the 12,000 votes for Brabner and the 9,500 votes for Liberal candidate Frank Darvall. Philby glumly concluded in his memoir that ‘I do not think my campaign was conducted as skilfully as it might have been … I was rather like a fish out of water’.17 Two months later, war broke out in Europe, bringing with it a firm clampdown on local fascist organising in Britain.

Mourning the present 

Looking back over the period of the Thirties, it is difficult to evaluate how much of a threat fascism really was on the south-eastern edge of England. Neither the BUF or the BPP were ever able to mobilise their activities into any significant electoral gains locally. Yet it cannot be disputed that there were real pockets of fascist organising and support along the Kent coast, which involved significant figures like Arthur Tester, Lady Maud Mosley, and St. John Philby.

Where does this history leave us in the present? We could, rather simply, point to the continuities between the far-right political mobilisations of the 1930s and those of the early twenty-first century. Philby may be a distant memory in Hythe, but the town has still not quite shed its fascist past. In November 2022, Andy Weatherhead, a Tory councillor for Hythe West, was forced to resign after he was found to have been a former member of the neofascist New British Union (NBU) party. Meanwhile, the far-right continues to mobilise on Dover sea-front; in July this year, a large group of anti-immigration supporters descended on the local beach to protest against small boat crossings. 

But placing an unbroken line between past and present, or classical and contemporary fascisms, remains historically and politically fraught. Anti-semitism was at the heart of local fascist organising in the Thirties; today, the contemporary far-right is far more likely to claim a strategic philosemitism and political solidarity with Israel under its wing. Local reporting of fascist gatherings in newspapers like The Dover Express seems distinctly quaint compared to the organised shitstorms that are mobilised through X, TikTok, and Telegram today. 

At the very least, the residual histories of local fascism in twentieth-century Britain not only challenge the more triumphalist narratives of The War, but they also throw into question contemporary forms of political grieving. I raised the point earlier on the ways in which mourning the Second World War, Britain’s purest lost love-object, provides one of the distinctive emotional and cultural registers for the far-right locally. Rather than dismissing this type of historical mourning as outdated nostalgia, perhaps we should instead seek to rework its affective energies in service of the contemporary moment. What kinds of collective mourning might be mobilised in response to the scenes of death and disaster in the English Channel? What would it mean to truly grieve the ongoing  loss of life on the beaches of northern France and at sea? 

For the moment, these questions remain unanswered. But something of this emergent and transgressive spirit is exemplified by the regular vigils for migrant deaths in the Channel that have been held in Folkestone, London, and elsewhere in the last five years. Gathering on the beaches of Kent and outside 2 Marsham Street, ordinary people come together in the spirit of remembrance, solidarity, and protest. They are united by anger, by grief, and the belief that to look away, to succumb to apathy and indifference, would be an act of moral and political abdication. They are not there to grieve a distant war receding further by the day. They are mourning lives lost here and now.

Previous
Next
  1. The original artwork by Gilbert & George was produced in 2014 and later installed as part of the Folkestone Triennial in 2021. ↩︎
  2. Brad Harper, Brad, ‘Reform UK candidates in Kent targeted by vandals amid predictions of big wins for party at county council election’, KentOnline, April 23, 2025, https://www.kentonline.co.uk/ashford/news/standing-for-reform-does-not-mean-im-a-nazi-vandals-are-323320/. ↩︎
  3. Gregory Davis and Harry Shukman, ‘Meet the SEVEN Reform candidates in Doncaster who posted Hitler memes, white nationalist articles, and antisemitic conspiracy theories’, Hope Not Hate, Aprill 17, 2025, https://hopenothate.org.uk/2025/04/17/reform-party-candidates-doncaster/. ↩︎
  4. Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Routledge Classics, 2002), 146-199. ↩︎
  5. Ibid, 154. ↩︎
  6. Ibid, 175. ↩︎
  7. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1977), 121-127. ↩︎
  8. David Seabrook, All The Devils Are Here (Granta, 2002). ↩︎
  9. Ibid, 83. ↩︎
  10. ‘Blackshirt Meeting on the Sea Front’, The Dover Express and East Kent News, May 11, 1934, 13; ‘Fascist Meeting on the Sea Front’, The Dover Express and East Kent News, June 1, 1934, 23. ↩︎
  11. ‘Fascist Meeting on the Sea Front’, The Dover Express and East Kent News, June 1, 1934, 23. ↩︎
  12. ‘Blackshirts Policy Explained’, Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald, June 23, 1934, 13. William Joyce gave a later address on behalf of the BUF at the town hall in October 1934. ‘Fascists and the Financiers’, Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald, October 13, 1934, 13. ↩︎
  13. ‘Dover Town Council’, The Dover Express and East Kent News, August 3, 1934, 2; ‘Blackshirts at the Town Hall’, The Dover Express and East Kent News, March 8, 1935, 13. ↩︎
  14. ‘Blackshirts’ Dance’, Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald, February 2, 1935, 17. ↩︎
  15. Steven Woodbridge, ‘The Other Philby: The Far Right Sympathies of St. John Philby’, History@Kingston, August 29, 2023, https://historyatkingston.wordpress.com/2023/08/29/the-other-philby-the-far-right-sympathies-of-st-john-philby/. The BPP’s contestation of the Hythe by-election has also been analysed by Richard Griffiths and Martin Pugh. See Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9 (Constable, 1980); Martin Pugh, Hurrah For The Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (Random House, 2013). ↩︎
  16. ‘Talk of the Town’, Folkestone, Hythe, Sandgate & Cheriton Herald, July 22, 1939, 3. ↩︎
  17. St. John Philby, Arabian Days: An Autobiography (R. Hale, 1948), 310-311. ↩︎

Proudly Powered by WordPress