Saturday, July 25, 2026
How Oswald Mosley met his match in Swansea
Wales-on-line reports that he started his Welsh odyssey in Cardiff where his rally was peaceful, but the reaction was vry different in Swansea’s Plaza Cinema that summer when Mosley took written questions from the audience:
The crucial one was, “I work for a Jew. Should I change my employer?” Mosley replied: “I am disgusted that anyone should work for a Jew. You should be certain to find a more reliable gentile.”
Up stood the questioner – to reveal his dog collar. The Rev Leon Atkins’ “employer” was Jesus Christ. At that the huge audience erupted, attacking the Blackshirts as Mosley was rushed away shouting “Blasphemy.” The 19-year-old Dylan Thomas wrote to Pamela Hansford Johnson telling her “I was there and was thrown down the stairs,” adding, “No harm done, however.”
The website explains that Mosley and his blackshirts were well-prepared for fights to break out at their meetings:
Mosley had warned when forming his New Party that “the only methods we shall use will be English ones. We shall rely on the good old English fist.” So at his HQ in the Kings Road, Chelsea he trained a team of enforcers known as the Biff Boys. They would bring the beginning of his downfall.
In June 1934, they acted like Hitler’s brutal Brownshirts during a massive, Nuremberg-style rally at London’s Olympia. MPs from all parties watching the ferocity of their attacks on hecklers were appalled. Not so Lloyd George. He wrote: “I feel that men who enter meetings with the deliberate intention of suppressing free speech have no right to complain if an exasperated audience handles them rudely.”
The following month Lord Rothermere withdrew his support for the Blackshirts, claiming that Jewish businesses had threatened to take their advertising to rival papers. He told Hitler later that year that the Jews compelled him to “toe the line.” It had an effect. In 1934 the BUF had up to 40,000 members. In 1935 it was down to 5,000.
The Blackshirts’ last act in Wales came in 1936 when Tommy Moran [an ex-light heavyweight champion of the Royal Navy and a former miner] took speakers to Tonypandy for a final rally. Annie Powell, Britain’s first Communist mayor, recalled years later “we swore not even one Welsh sheep would hear the Mosley message.”
They didn’t. Hundreds of miners attacked the speakers and even Annie was impressed by Moran. “He kept knocking ‘em out one by one,” she remembered, “but we won.” Tommy Moran was moved from Wales after what went down in our history as the Battle of De Winton Fields and during the war was interned with his leader.
