Lot 1523 , Oswald Mosley, Harold Nicolson, Cyril Joad and The New Party, 1931; six letters to Peter Winckworth, July – September 1931
Oswald Mosley, Harold Nicolson, Cyril Joad and The New Party, 1931; six letters to Peter Winckworth, July – September 1931 i. Cyril Joad, 4 East Heath Road, Hampstead, 1 July 1931; typescript; encloses a letter [not present] ‘from a man who would, I think, be a useful member of your young persons
[A Karl Love, otherwise Philip Emmett of 10 High Road, Woodford in Essex, was detained under the Defence Regulations: TNA KV 3/277].
ii. Oswald Mosley, The New Party, 1 Great George Street, Westminster, 17 July 1931; manuscript; ‘My dear Winckworth’; ‘Hold on a day or two – I think we can get things settled’.
iii. Oswald Mosley, The New Party, 1 Great George Street, Westminster, 25 July 1931; typescript; ‘My dear Winckworth’; ‘… at last through our troubles and can really go ahead. I have asked Mr Box to draft a Constitution for the Youth Movement on the basis of our last discussions, and to call a meeting next week to consider it and to settle it. [Peter] Howard is not likely to be back until late September, so I am afraid that will be rather late for you to go round with him.’
iv. Harold Nicolson, Sissinghurst Castle, 15 August 1931; manuscript; ‘You must have a column in the papers for our youth movement. … I want to get at your real views. Hitherto I have only seen you either in the ardours of combat or in the enclosed atmosphere of the National Council.’ Proposes meeting.
v. Harold Nicolson, Action, the New Weekly of the New Movement, 5 Gordon Square, WC1; 10 September 1931; typescript; ‘Many thanks for your essays which I like and should wish to print unaltered. There are some tricky points on which I shall have to consult the Board. I am not sure even whether “The Pioneer Idea” or the word “Pioneer” is to be kept. You know more about this than I do. Let me hear the moment you return.’
vi. Harold Nicolson, Action, the New Weekly of the New Movement, 5 Gordon Square, WC1; 12 September 1931; typescript; ‘now you are staying on in Engelberg’ repeats what was in his letter of 10 September. ‘We have our meeting in Trafalgar Square today and are expecting a little trouble. Mosley’s two speeches in the House of Commons have made an enormous effect.’
Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley, sixth baronet (1896–1980), politician and fascist leader, resigned from the Labour Party on 28 February 1931, launching the New Party the following day, convinced of the inadequacy of the existing parliamentary machinery to solve the economic crisis and wider social problems. The party received £50,000 funding from Lord Nuffield. By September the party had launched its magazine Action, edited by Sir Harold George Nicolson (1886–1968); Mosley was the son-in-law of his old mentor, Lord Curzon, and Nicolson had formed a friendship with him at Berlin in 1929.
On 21 July Mosley, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill met at a specially organised private dinner party, at which the prospect of together forming a National Opposition in the event of a coalition between Stanley Baldwin and Ramsey MacDonald was mooted.
Mosley encouraged the formation of a Youth Movement composed of younger men fit enough to defend the New Party speakers against the threat of communist violence whilst Strachey and others feared this could develop into a ‘proto-fascist defence force’.
The captain of the England Rugby Football team, Peter Dunsmore Howard, was assigned to train a team of young men for the purpose of protecting speakers and, later, he and the Jewish boxing champion, Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis, were to act as Mosley’s bodyguard when he addressed 20,000 in Glasgow on 20 September 1931. Lewis had served in the same capacity at the Trafalgar Square meeting to which Nicolson’s letter of 12 September refers.
Cyril Edwin Mitchinson Joad (1891–1953), philosopher, later to become famous as a member of The Brains Trust, acted as director of propaganda of the New Party. On 23rd July 1931 John Strachey and Allan Young resigned from the party because they felt that Mosley was ‘drifting very rapidly back to Toryism’. Joad also left that month ‘because it (the New Party) was about to subordinate intelligence to muscular bands of young men’. The British Union of Fascists was launched a year later, on 1 October 1932.
It is clear from these letters that Peter Winckworth was an early recruit to Oswald Mosley’s New Party, and that both Mosley and Harold Nicholson saw him as a potential leader of its youth movement. Nicolson’s letter of 15 August 1931 implies that he had been involved in street violence. It is safe to assume that Winckworth left the party at or before the formation of the British Union of Fascists in 1932.
John Peter Winckworth was born on 2 November 1908, youngest of the three children of Lewis Herbert Winckworth (1864-1940), solicitor, and Ruthella Theodora, elder daughter of the Revd Herbert Clementi-Smith of Holland Park Avenue, Kensington, chaplain to the Mercers’ Company. In September 1922 he entered Grants House at Westminster School (also attended by his father and three uncles) and left in July 1927.
Admitted as a solicitor in October 1932, he practised in London, in 1947 with Messrs Trollope and Winckworth of 21 Old Queen Street, Westminster. Winckworth was one of the originators of the Seven Years’ Association, established at the 1933 Anglo-Catholic Congress to form ‘a youth auxiliary to the Church Union’. In 1948 he became Registrar of the Diocese of Oxford, and subsequently served as a Church Commissioner, Master of the Worshipful Company of Mercers 1961-2, a governor of St Paul’s School and Secretary of the Church Union.
He joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in August 1940, and was transferred to the Training Progress Section of the Air Ministry in 1941.
Winckworth was author of Does Religion Cause War? (1934); Sensible Christians (1935); The Way of War: Verses (1939); A Simple Approach to Canon Law (1951); The Seal of the Confessional and the Law of Evidence (1952); A Verification of the Faculty Jurisdiction (1953); and A History of the Gresham Lectures (1966).
He died at Eastbourne on 28 April 1986, and a requiem mass was held at St Matthew’s Church Westminster on 23 June.
His portrait, by Richard Aylmer Frost (1905-1995), a Westminster contemporary, 1924, is among the collections of the school (GB 2014 WS-03-PIC-002/29): https://collections.westminster.org.uk/index.php/gb-2014-ws-03-pic-002-29
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