Rotha Lintorn-Orman: The War Hero Who Founded Britain's First Fascist Party
In the spring of 1923, a decorated war veteran in her late twenties put an advert in a right-wing paper calling on patriots to stand up to the Red menace. Within months she was running Britain's first openly fascist organisation, nearly a decade before Oswald Mosley ever pulled on a black shirt. Her name was Rotha Lintorn-Orman, and she's one of the oddest figures in 20th-century British politics.
She was a Girl Guide pioneer, an ambulance driver decorated for bravery in the Balkans and a woman who wore a collar and tie at a time when that alone could get you talked about. She founded a movement that patrolled Dublin with revolvers, broke strikes and gave the future Lord Haw-Haw his start. And by 40 she was dead, alone in a Canary Islands hotel, cut off by the mother who'd bankrolled the whole thing.
Quick Answers
Who was Rotha Lintorn-Orman? An Englishwoman who founded the British Fascisti in 1923, the first openly fascist group in Britain.
When was she born and when did she die? Born in London in February 1895, she died on Gran Canaria on 10 March 1935, aged 40.
What did she do in the First World War? She drove ambulances and served with the Scottish Women's Hospitals in the Balkans, earning the Serbian Croix de Charité.
Was Rotha Lintorn-Orman a lesbian? Nobody knows for sure. She dressed in a masculine style and was dogged by rumours about her sexuality, but no relationship has ever been firmly documented.
What happened to the British Fascists? Splits, money trouble and her heavy drinking hollowed the movement out, and most of its active members defected to Mosley's British Union of Fascists in 1932.
A Field Marshal's Granddaughter
Rotha Beryl Lintorn Orman was born in Kensington in February 1895, the only child of Major Charles Orman of the Essex Regiment and his wife Blanche. Both sides of the family were steeped in the army, but it was Blanche's father who really mattered. He was Field Marshal Sir John Lintorn Simmons, governor of Malta from 1884 to 1888 and, as her 2025 biography's publisher puts it, Queen Victoria's favourite field marshal.
Blanche was the old soldier's heir, and that money bought the family a serious country pile. Forest Mere, near Liphook in Hampshire, had 31 rooms and a staff of 12 servants when the Ormans moved in. The house had been built only a couple of years earlier for a Lord Justice of Appeal who died almost as soon as he'd moved in. It's a spa these days, which would probably have baffled its most famous former resident.
Charles eventually folded his father-in-law's name into his own, and the family became the Lintorn-Ormans. One reviewer of Anthony J. Randall's biography suggests the switch was probably about keeping the Field Marshal sweet.
Rotha grew up largely on the Hampshire estate with a companion of her own age, Nesta Ashworth, hired to keep her company. Nesta's later memoir is one of the few windows we've got into Rotha's childhood, which matters, because Rotha herself seems to have left no diaries or journals at all. Almost everything we know about her comes from other people, and plenty of those people had axes to grind.
The Girl Who Joined the Scouts Under an Initial
When Robert Baden-Powell's Scout movement took off in 1908, a lot of girls wanted in. Rotha was one of them. A copy of Scouting for Boys got her hooked on the outdoor life, and she signed up using only the initial of her first name, so nobody would twig she was a girl.
In 1909 she and Nesta went to the famous Scout rally at Crystal Palace, where a group of girls in homemade uniforms turned up and pushed Baden-Powell to let girls in. The pressure worked, and the Girl Guides were launched the following year. That same year, at just 14, Rotha set up a new troop in Bournemouth.
Blanche threw herself into it too, founding a Guide company at Forest Mere and becoming the first county commissioner for Hampshire East. Hold on to that picture of Rotha as a teenager. Uniforms, drill, badges, duty and a bit of rule bending to get her foot in the door. Pretty much everything she did later grew out of it.
Ambulances, Malaria and a City on Fire
When the First World War broke out, Rotha didn't sit at home knitting socks. She served with the Women's Reserve Ambulance and with the Scottish Women's Hospitals, the all-female medical units that worked in some of the grimmest corners of the war. She ended up on the Balkan front, driving ambulances and training nurses, collecting the wounded in conditions most of her class would never see.
She was in Thessaloniki (then usually called Salonika) when the great fire of August 1917 tore through the city and left tens of thousands of people homeless. She was decorated for her part in the response and came home with the Serbian Croix de Charité, alongside the British War Medal and the Victory Medal. Stories later went round that she'd won the Military Cross, but that wasn't possible, as it wasn't awarded to women.
The Balkans gave her malaria as well as medals, and she was invalided home in 1917. She didn't stay idle for long. She worked at Red Cross headquarters in Piccadilly and became commandant of the British Red Cross Motor School, in charge of training the drivers who'd be sent out to the battlefields.
Collars, Ties and the Rumours That Followed Her
Peace didn't suit her. Like plenty of people who'd had a busy, purposeful war, she drifted. She moved to a dairy farm in Somerset, cropped her hair short, wore shirts and ties and pinned her medals to the lapels of her jackets. Contemporaries found the look very odd indeed, and one phrase got used about her again and again: mannish woman. By most accounts she didn't much care what they thought.
In 1920s Britain, mannish woman wasn't a neutral description. It was a nudge and a wink. This was a country where MPs tried to make sex between women a crime in 1921 (the Commons passed it, the Lords threw it out on the grounds that talking about it'd only give women ideas) and where Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was banned as obscene in 1928. A woman in a collar and tie, living on a farm with no husband in sight, was always going to have people whispering.
And they did whisper. Rumours about Rotha's sexuality followed her around and did real damage to her reputation, with gossip about what went on at the Somerset farm. Her political enemies joined in, too. Communists and socialists sneered that the British Fascists were a haven for lesbians, a smear made easier by the fact that so many of its most active members were unmarried women.
So Was She Gay?
The honest answer is that we don't know. Randall's biography, the most thorough look at her life so far, doesn't identify any long-term relationship, and with no diaries or letters of her own surviving in public hands, there's no first-hand evidence either way. One Spanish history site claims she wrote to the former suffragette and police pioneer Mary Allen as a lover, inviting her to join the movement, but nothing in the English-language record backs that up. Allen certainly lived openly with a female partner and later drifted into Mosley's orbit, but that tells us about Allen, not Rotha.
What we can say is that the early British fascist scene was full of people who didn't fit the era's ideas about how men and women were supposed to live. The BF's own splinter group, the National Fascisti, counted among its members Valerie Arkell-Smith, who was born the same year as Rotha, served in the war and then lived as a man called Colonel Victor Barker, even marrying a woman under that name. The writer Edward White has argued that these movements offered a strange kind of refuge to people on the fringes of respectable society.
That's an uncomfortable thought, and modern queer historians haven't shied away from it. The Bad Gays podcast, which looks at the darker side of LGBTQ+ history, gave Rotha a whole episode in 2024, presenting her as a dashing tomboy who also happened to found Britain's first fascist party. Whatever her private life looked like, she's now firmly part of that conversation.
Digging the Garden and Dreaming of Mussolini
Her politics hardened in the years after the war. Travelling abroad, she met White Russians who'd fled the Bolsheviks, and their stories turned her into a fierce anticommunist and a devoted monarchist with a love of uniforms and firearms. She raised money for Russian refugees with raffles and dances, and also ran homes for war orphans.
Then in October 1922, Benito Mussolini marched on Rome and took power in Italy. To a lot of British conservatives, terrified that Bolshevism was about to sweep across Europe, he looked like a man with answers. If you've read about Mussolini's own rocky road to power, you'll know he was hardly a model of respectability, but that didn't put off his British admirers.
Rotha later claimed the idea for her own movement came to her while she was digging her garden. In May 1923, adverts appeared in The Patriot, a far-right paper, inviting readers to join a new movement modelled on Mussolini's. The British Fascisti was up and running by the summer, claiming 5,000 members and working out of a townhouse in Chelsea. Her mother reportedly put up £50,000 to get it going, a staggering sum at the time.
So what did they actually stand for? Rotha's principles were the King, class friendship, preferential treatment for ex-servicemen and “the purification of the British race”. She was against communism, socialism, trade unions, atheism and free love. She told officials the point wasn't to seize power but to defend the Constitution and the Empire against the Reds.
The structure was borrowed straight from Italy. Rotha took the title of Founder, and the movement was run by a Grand Council, just like Mussolini's. The first president was the Irish peer Lord Garvagh, who was soon replaced by Brigadier-General R.B.D. Blakeney, a retired soldier who'd once managed Egypt's railways. In 1924 the Italian-sounding Fascisti became the plainer British Fascists, because a foreign name was a bit of a liability for a movement obsessed with Britishness.
Blue Shirts, Jiu-Jitsu and a Fascist Father Christmas
At first there wasn't any official uniform, though plenty of members wore black shirts. Everyone wore a black handkerchief and a badge with a big F and the motto For King and Country. Later on came a blue shirt, black beret and black trousers, with black skirts for the women. That was almost ten years before Eoin O'Duffy's Blueshirts made the look famous in Ireland.
Women were front and centre in a way that set the BF apart from most far-right outfits anywhere in Europe. There were women-only paramilitary units, young female recruits paraded in uniform and took jiu-jitsu classes (the same fighting style Edith Garrud had taught the suffragettes), and several women sat on the executive committee. Aristocratic women such as the Countess of Eglinton and the Marchioness of Ailesbury lent their names. There was even a Fascist Children's Club, and at one of its Christmas parties Rotha dressed up as Father Christmas.
The historian Julie Gottlieb has argued that Rotha's version of feminism was about women's right to serve the state, not about votes or equal civil rights. Some have called her a fascist feminist, which sounds like a contradiction until you remember how many former suffragettes later ended up in Mosley's ranks.
The membership was a strange mix. There were retired officers, landed gentry and Tory die-hards. Colonel Sir Charles Burn, a former Conservative MP, sat on the Grand Council, and Sir Robert Burton Chadwick was a member while still sitting as a Tory MP. John Baker White, later MP for Canterbury, called Rotha “one of the bravest people I have ever met.” The conspiracy writer Nesta Webster, who blamed most of the world's ills on secret societies, was a big influence on many members.
There were nastier characters too. Arnold Leese, who'd go on to found the viciously antisemitic Imperial Fascist League, came through the BF. So did a young William Joyce, the man who'd become Lord Haw-Haw and be hanged for broadcasting Nazi propaganda. Joyce was slashed across the face in a fight at a 1924 meeting, leaving him with the scar he carried for the rest of his life.
Revolvers on Armistice Day: The Irish Branch
One of the least known parts of the story is what the BF got up to in Ireland. Soon after the Irish Civil War ended, a Free State Command opened a headquarters in Dublin. Police there reckoned it had about 30 active members and a few hundred supporters, many of them former Royal Irish Constabulary men and retired British officers. There was an Ulster Command too, with units in Belfast, Newry, Newcastle and Kilkeel.
Armistice Day was their big moment. In the early 1920s, uniformed members patrolled Dublin's commemorations carrying revolvers to enforce the two-minute silence. They helped the Royal British Legion sell poppies, harassed the small Jewish communities in Dublin and Belfast and even campaigned to rename Remembrance Sunday as Fascist Sunday.
The IRA didn't take kindly to any of it. In November 1926, the Protestant republican George Gilmore stabbed two BF members on Grafton Street, and the IRA later burned the Dublin headquarters. The Belfast operation had its own dark side. Its deputy leader, Dorothy Hartnett, had been dismissed from the RUC in March 1923 after numerous complaints about strip searches of suspected republicans. She'd later campaign for Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
Not Taken Very Seriously
You'd think a paramilitary movement modelled on Mussolini would have the authorities rattled. It didn't. The Home Office, Special Branch and MI5 were largely relaxed about the BF, seeing Rotha as a harmless eccentric. The Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, described them as “a very respectable lot.”
The authorities stayed relaxed even when BF members broke the law. In 1925 a group of them kidnapped the communist leader Harry Pollitt from Liverpool's Lime Street Station and drove him off to Wales. Five were tried and acquitted after telling the court it had all been a prank.
The armed forces were a bit warier. By 1925 the Admiralty had banned serving Royal Navy officers from joining, and the War Office followed suit for the army. For a movement stuffed with military men, that stung.
Interestingly, there's a Metropolitan Police Special Branch file, catalogued as MEPO 38/1, covering Rotha's correspondence with the Commissioner about arms between 1932 and 1935. Nearly a century on, it's still listed as closed or retained, so what she was writing to the head of the Met about remains anyone's guess.
Splits, Strikes and Infighting
The BF was never a happy family. Members described Rotha as chaotic, indecisive and divisive, with a real talent for getting under people's skin. Edward White points out that the same could be said of plenty of male political leaders, who rarely got judged so harshly for it.
The first big split came in October 1924, when hardliners who wanted something more extreme broke away to form the National Fascisti, with headquarters on Oxford Street. Arnold Leese took his Stamford branch over to them the following year, sneering that the BF was just “conservatism with knobs on”. Coming from Leese, who wanted something far nastier, that wasn't the compliment it might sound like.
Then came the 1926 General Strike. The government's volunteer strike-breaking body, the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, wouldn't take on a group calling itself fascist. Blakeney and the moderates split off as the Loyalists and signed up, while Rotha and the women leaders dug their heels in and refused to give up the BF's independence. Even so, fascist squads still broke strikes with the tacit approval of the military and civil authorities.
After that, the movement was more or less Rotha's alone, run with her loyalists on the Grand Council. That gave her control, but it also meant there was nobody to steady things when her own life began to go badly wrong.
Drink, Drugs and the Collapse
By 1927 the BF was faltering, worn down by splits and Rotha's serious drinking problem. Then in 1932 came the knockout blow. Oswald Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, a slicker, better-funded and far more aggressive operation.
Rotha wanted nothing to do with him. She saw Mosley, a former Labour MP, as a crypto-communist in a black shirt, and she knew his men wouldn't give women the prominence she'd always given them. A proposed merger was reportedly rejected by a single vote. Senior officials such as Neil Francis Hawkins defected anyway, taking membership lists with them. In a final irony, Leese's Imperial Fascist League attacked her for letting ex-socialists and Jews into the BF.
Mosley's supporters then stormed the BF headquarters, smashing the place up and injuring four people. Most of the BF's active members went over to the BUF that same year. If you want to see how one of Britain's sharpest minds dealt with Mosley, Bertrand Russell's reply to him is well worth a read.
Rotha, meanwhile, was falling apart. In 1932 she claimed the BF had nearly a million members, which was pure fantasy. That summer the movement's paper reported she'd been seriously ill after a heart attack. In 1933 Blanche went to the Metropolitan Police and claimed that people in the BF were feeding her daughter drugs, encouraging wild drinking parties and stealing her money. They're allegations from a worried mother rather than proven facts, but they've coloured Rotha's reputation ever since.
Blanche then did the one thing that could finish the movement off. She cut off Rotha's allowance, and the BF slid into bankruptcy. By 1934 the intelligence services believed Rotha was being treated for a serious alcohol-related illness. There are also claims the dying movement got some financial help from Nazi Germany.
Dying Alone in the Canaries
Rotha headed to the Canary Islands, presumably hoping the warmer climate would help. It didn't. She died on 10 March 1935 at the Hotel Santa Brigida on Gran Canaria, just a month past her 40th birthday, and she died alone.
The cause of death has never been entirely clear. One account says she apparently died of a barbiturate overdose, which would fit with the stories about drugs, though it's never been confirmed. She was buried in the English Cemetery in Las Palmas, a long way from Forest Mere. By then the British Fascists had all but ceased to exist.
Fascist, Feminist or Just a Die-Hard Tory?
So how should we remember her? It's not a simple question. Rotha never seems to have embraced antisemitism herself, and Randall's 2025 biography leaves one reviewer thinking ultra-conservative is a better label for her than fascist. Her loyalties were to the monarchy, the country and the Empire, and much of what the BF actually did was strike breaking and stewarding Tory meetings.
But that's a generous reading. She borrowed Mussolini's name, his uniforms and his paramilitary style. Her movement wanted to purify the British race, harassed Jewish communities in Ireland and gave men like William Joyce and Arnold Leese their first taste of organised far-right politics. Whatever she thought she was building, she opened a door that much worse people walked straight through.
Rotha Lintorn-Orman was brave, stubborn and unconventional. She wasted most of that on a cause that went nowhere good, and she paid for it with a lonely death far from home. Mosley gets the history books, but she got there first.
Suggested Reading
Want to dig deeper into Rotha and Britain's early fascists? These are worth a look.
The Rise and Fall of Rotha Lintorn-Orman by Anthony J. Randall. The first full biography of Rotha, out from Pen & Sword in 2025, covering everything from her Hampshire childhood to her lonely death.
Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain's Fascist Movement by Julie V. Gottlieb. The go-to book on why so many British women, Rotha included, were drawn to the far right.
Hurrah for the Blackshirts! by Martin Pugh. A lively history of fascism in interwar Britain, showing how close it sat to mainstream conservatism.
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Sources
Conservatism with Knobs On, The Paris Review
The First Fascists, James Crossland
The First Blueshirts: The British Fascisti in Ireland, 1923 to 1935, History Ireland
Research paper on the British Fascists and interwar fascism (accepted manuscript), Steven Woodbridge, Kingston University
British Fascists Ltd: Rotha Beryl Lintorn-Orman (founder), correspondence with the Commissioner concerning arms (MEPO 38/1), The National Archives
Rotha Lintorn Orman, la primera europea en fundar un partido político, El Debate
The Women of Forest Mere: From Guiding to Controversy, Alton Herald
Review: The Rise and Fall of Rotha Lintorn-Orman, Historical Novel Society
The Rise and Fall of Rotha Lintorn-Orman, Pen & Sword
Rotha Lintorn-Orman, Bad Gays podcast
Rotha Lintorn-Orman discussion thread, Great War Forum
