The Day Oswald Mosley Was Knocked Out in Liverpool Before He Could Say a Word
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On the afternoon of Sunday 10 October 1937, Sir Oswald Mosley climbed onto the roof of a loudspeaker van on a patch of waste ground in Walton, Liverpool. He straightened up, raised his arm in the fascist salute and was promptly hit on the head by a stone. He hadn't said a word.
The leader of the British Union of Fascists went down on the van roof and was carried off to hospital, where he stayed for the best part of a week. It was the last time he ever tried to speak in public on Merseyside.
The story usually gets told as the day Mosley was hit by a brick. It was almost certainly a stone, he was in a different hospital from the one usually named, and it wasn't the turning point it's often made out to be. What actually happened is better than the legend.
Quick Answers
Oswald Mosley was knocked out in Liverpool on Sunday 10 October 1937.
It happened on waste ground off Queens Drive in Walton, in front of a hostile crowd of 8,000 or more.
He was hit on the left temple by a stone as he gave the fascist salute, before he'd begun to speak.
He was treated at Walton Hospital for concussion and a head wound, and kept in for five to seven days.
About 14 people were arrested and more than 20 were hurt when police charged the crowd.
It came exactly a week after his march through Bermondsey had been blocked, and a year after Cable Street.
He never held another public meeting on Merseyside.
Was It a Brick or a Stone?
Every report from the time says stone. The picture agency caption that went out with the photographs said a stone had been flung at him by a member of a crowd of 8,000. The Glasgow Herald said the same, and so did the news agencies.
Bricks were certainly in the air. One detailed history of Merseyside anti-fascism describes volleys of bricks and stones hitting the van before Mosley even arrived. So where did the brick come from? Partly from America. The Associated Press sent its photograph of Mosley being helped off the van around the world with a caption saying he'd been knocked unconscious by a brick. The British papers, who were closer to it, stuck with stone. The brick has won in the retelling, probably because it's a better word.
How Mosley Got Here
It's easy to forget how far he'd fallen. Mosley entered parliament in 1918 as a Conservative, aged 22, the youngest MP in the House. He crossed the floor, joined Labour and by 1929 was a minister with a brief to tackle unemployment. People on both sides talked about him as a future prime minister.
When the Labour cabinet turned down his plan for public works in 1930, he resigned. He set up his own New Party, which lost every seat it fought in 1931. He went to Italy, came back impressed and in October 1932 launched the British Union of Fascists.
Its early meetings were built around him: the uniformed stewards, the spotlights, the long wait before the leader appeared. For a couple of years it drew real crowds and a membership somewhere near 40,000 or 50,000. After the violence at Olympia in June 1934 the crowds that came were mostly there to shout him down. So he took to speaking in the open air from the roof of an armoured loudspeaker van, which could at least be driven away.
Liverpool Already Knew the Blackshirts
Mosley didn't walk into Liverpool blind. His movement had been trying its luck there for four years, and it had gone worse each time.
Fascism in Liverpool was older than Mosley's party. In 1925 members of an earlier outfit, the British Fascisti, kidnapped the communist leader Harry Pollitt from Lime Street Station and drove him off to Wales. Five of them were tried and acquitted after telling the court it had been a prank.
The city's establishment hadn't always been hostile to fascism. In 1928 the Conservative Lord Mayor, Margaret Beavan, visited Mussolini in Italy and was photographed giving the fascist salute. The BUF held its first rally at Liverpool Stadium in November 1933. The main speaker was William Joyce, who'd later broadcast for the Nazis as Lord Haw-Haw. The left mostly ignored it.
They didn't ignore the next one. By October 1934 an Anti-Fascist Committee had formed out of local communists, Independent Labour Party members, the unemployed workers' movement and some Labour people. Police banned its march and let the fascist rally go ahead.
In June 1935 it turned ugly. A Blackshirt speaker was using an armoured van as a platform in Bootle when, according to that same history, one of his men was seen to hit a mixed-race child. Stones flew and a fight broke out. A woman in the crowd, Frances Evans, collapsed and died. The crowd chased the van back to the fascists' headquarters on Strand Road and put in every window.
Then, on 11 October 1936, one week after the Battle of Cable Street, Mosley brought 300 uniformed Blackshirts to march from the Adelphi Hotel to the Stadium. He'd planned to take the salute at Lime Street and thought better of it, arriving 20 minutes late by car. More than a thousand anti-fascists were waiting, and the column was pelted with bricks the whole way. It is remembered as the Battle of Lime Street. When Mosley finally got to speak, the hall was only a third full.
Twelve men ended up in court. One of them, a 61-year-old labourer called Thomas Kennedy, got two months' hard labour for turning up with a sword.
So by 1937 the pattern was set. Whenever Mosley came to Liverpool, a great many people turned out to make sure he regretted it.
A Bad Week Gets Worse
October 1937 was already going badly for him. The Public Order Act had come into force on 1 January, banning political uniforms, so the black shirts had gone. Money was short and he'd laid off most of his paid staff.
On Sunday 3 October he'd tried to mark the BUF's fifth birthday with a march through south London. The East End was closed to him, so about 3,400 fascists set off from Millbank for Bermondsey. They found barricades made of market barrows, fencing and barbed wire across Long Lane, and a crowd numbered at anywhere from 12,000 to 50,000. Police diverted the march. When Mosley finally spoke, he was drowned out by people beyond the cordon chanting "They did not pass!" There were 111 arrests.
One week later he was due in Liverpool.
Queens Drive, 10 October 1937
The meeting was fixed for a piece of vacant land beside Queens Drive in Walton. The local Communist Party got there first. It held its own public meeting on the same ground an hour before Mosley was due, which meant that by the time the fascists turned up, the audience was already in place and it wasn't theirs.
Estimates of the crowd run from 8,000 to 10,000. Police had to clear a path to get the BUF's loudspeaker van through. An electrician climbed onto its roof to rig the microphone, and that was the signal. The booing turned into a barrage, and the van's windscreen went in.
This was a crowd with personal reasons. Liverpool men were fighting and dying in the International Brigades in Spain, against forces armed by Mosley's heroes. One woman was heard shouting: "You killed my man in Spain! Down with the bastards!"
The first casualty wasn't Mosley. G.C. Balfour, the BUF's district treasurer, was hit by a stone and taken to hospital before his leader had even arrived.
Mosley came by car, as he had the year before. He got out, climbed onto the van roof and gave the salute. A stone caught him on the left temple. He put a hand to his forehead, swayed and went down. One account says he was hit again on the back of the head as he lay there. A press photographer caught the moment he was struck, hand to his head, nearly toppling off the van.
Reports differ on whether he was knocked out cold or left semi-conscious. Either way, he didn't speak. A bodyguard stayed crouched over him on the roof while the missiles kept coming.
Then the police went in. About 250 officers, some of them mounted, charged the crowd to clear the ground. More than 20 people were injured in the rush. Press cuttings from the following day put the arrests at 14, two of them women, and several were later fined.
Whoever threw the stone that did it has never been named in any published account.
Walton Hospital
Mosley was driven the short distance to Walton Hospital. You'll often read that he went to the Royal Infirmary, but the reports of the day all say Walton.
The press was told he had concussion and a punctured wound to the skull, and that an operation had been carried out. A less excitable version says he needed three stitches and had been unconscious for up to half an hour. He was kept in for somewhere between five days and a week.
He was photographed as he left, and the picture that went round the world showed him with his head wrapped in bandages. For a man whose whole act was built on looking invincible, it wasn't a helpful picture.
It Wasn't Only Liverpool
Liverpool gets remembered because Mosley ended up in a hospital bed. But the same thing, minus the stone, had been happening all over the country for four years.
In Stockton-on-Tees in September 1933, a hundred or so Blackshirts bussed in for a recruitment meeting were driven back to their coaches by local trade unionists and the unemployed. The BUF never held a rally there again.
At Belle Vue in Manchester in September 1934, more than 3,000 protesters got into a Mosley rally and simply made a noise. They kept it up for the whole speech. A reporter said that even with the amplifiers on full, it was hard to catch "two consecutive sentences".
On Holbeck Moor in Leeds in September 1936, around 1,000 Blackshirts met a crowd put at 30,000. Mosley was hit by stones there too and turned up at Cable Street a week later with a cut under one eye.
Then came Cable Street itself, and Bermondsey a year after that. Liverpool was the end of a run.
Was It Really a Turning Point?
No, and it's worth being straight about that. The old version of this story says the Liverpool stone marked the beginning of the end for British fascism. The dates don't support it.
The damage had been done earlier. Mosley's respectable backers had deserted him after his stewards beat up hecklers at Olympia in 1934. The uniform ban took away his movement's whole look. By the time he got to Walton he was short of money, short of staff and banned from marching in the one part of London where he had real support.
Nor did Liverpool finish him. Police files show the BUF had actually gained about 2,000 London members in the weeks after Cable Street, and in March 1937 its candidates took close to a fifth of the vote in parts of the East End. Mosley then reinvented himself as a peace campaigner. In July 1939 he filled Earls Court with a crowd reported at 20,000 or more.
What Liverpool did do was close a city to him. In four years his people had gone from an ignored rally at the Stadium to a leader carried off a van roof. He never tried again on Merseyside.
What Finished Mosley
The war did. Once Britain was fighting the regimes he'd modelled himself on, and taken money from in the case of Mussolini, there was no audience left.
On 23 May 1940 he was arrested under Defence Regulation 18B and held without charge. The BUF was banned. His wife, Diana Mitford, was locked up a month later, and the two were eventually allowed to live together in a house in the grounds of Holloway Prison. They were released in November 1943 on health grounds, to public fury. The Commons backed the decision by 327 votes to 26.
He tried to come back. He founded the Union Movement in 1948 and stood for parliament in North Kensington in 1959, taking 8.1 per cent, and in Shoreditch in 1966, taking 4.6 per cent.
And the crowds hadn't forgotten how to deal with him. On 31 July 1962 he tried to hold a meeting at Ridley Road market in Dalston. He was punched to the ground as soon as he appeared, and the police closed the meeting after about three minutes. He was 65. He died in France in December 1980.
Why the Story Sticks
There's something about the timing. Mosley's whole method was the big entrance: the spotlight, the salute, the pause before the speech. In Liverpool he got as far as the salute.
It's also a story about a city deciding it had heard enough. Nobody organised the stone. But somebody had organised a meeting on the same ground an hour earlier so that the right crowd would be standing there, and that tells you most of what you need to know about how Liverpool felt.
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Sources
Libcom: Stoned by the Mersey, opposing the Blackshirts in Liverpool
Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 11 October 1937: Mosley wounded in Liverpool, stoned by hostile crowd
TopFoto: press photograph and original caption, October 1937
Scouse Not English: A short history of Liverpool and fascism
Past Tense: Mass opposition prevents the BUF marching into Bermondsey, 1937
Searchlight: review of A Short History of Fascism in Liverpool 1923-1940 by Chris Jones
Associated Press photograph and caption, October 1937 (via Alamy)
The National Archives blog: 'No pasarán', the Battle of Cable Street
