Sir Oswald Mosley provided close on 10,000 people in Olympia to-night with an entertainment which Mr. Bertram Mills might at once have envied and deplored. For while Mr. Mills must certainly have envied Sir Oswald the number of his audience and the excitement he and his hecklers provided, he must have deplored the violence with which that excitement was obtained.
For what is described in the talk of the gangsters as ╥rough-house work╙ no meeting in these islands within memory can have shown anything like it.
It is not easy to apportion the blame for the disturbance. For when the anti-Mosleyites ╤ Communists, pacifists, and Left-wing members of the Labour party and the I.L.P. ╤ arrived at Olympia with their placards and pamphlets a couple of hours before the meeting was due to begin it was to encounter massed groups of Blackshirts and a strong force of police, not only on foot but mounted, and it is an odd fact that of all the emblems of authority which drew booing and catcalls from a crowd of British Communists and Left-wingers the mounted policeman seems to be regarded as the most provocative.
For over an hour before the meeting the crowds jostling one another outside Olympia numbered several thousand. There were young men and women in evening dress, there were middle-class family parties with small children, and there was a large gathering of workers in their working clothes.
On the main road forty or fifty policemen frantically tried to move on traffic that would not move. There were catcalls and booing and cheering, and in a scuffle one could catch sight of a yelling demonstrator being dragged off by the police. It was what has so often before, and with much less justice, been described as an ╥ugly scene.╙
Inside the great hall it was seen that Sir Oswald Mosley had nothing of theatricalism to learn from either Hitler or Mussolini. There was a massed band of Blackshirts, there were flags, the Union jack, and the black and yellow flag of the British Union of Fascists. There were arc-lamps with a theatrical greyish-blue tinge, and there was an aisle lined with Blackshirts extending from the entrance usually employed by the performing animals at the Royal Military Tournament to a specially contrived platform draped with drugget of a tinned-salmon pink.
And Sir Oswald, in keeping with a nowadays out-of-date theatrical tradition, kept his audience waiting while the band played patriotic marches and other tunes devised for the British Fascists.
Exactly thirty-five minutes after the meeting was due to begin Sir Oswald made his appearance. The lights of the hall flickered, the band dropped into a Low German march of the seventies or thereabouts, the arc-lamps swung round from the platform down the Blackshirted aisle, and there in the foggy distance Sir Oswald appeared ╤ announced by a fanfare and preceded by six men carrying Union jacks and the British Blackshirt flag. And so the march proceeded to the platform while some people ╤ they did not seem to be many ╤ raised their arms in a Fascist salute and others with less commitment, cheered. Yet above the cheers could be heard the unmistakable sound of booing.
With the arc-lamps swung round on him, Sir Oswald began his speech.
Almost at once a chorus of interrupters began chanting in one of the galleries. Blackshirts began stumbling and leaping over chairs to get at the source of the noise. There was a wild scrummage, women screamed, black-shirted arms rose and fell, blows were dealt, and then above the noise came the chorus chanted by rough voices, ╥We want Mosley.╙
The arc-lamps swung round from the platform on to the fighters. Sir Oswald stood to attention in the half-darkness, making unintelligible appeals through the amplifiers. In a few minutes there was something like silence again.
For close on two hours the meeting dragged on like that, interruption following interruption and ejection. Now and again a woman would shrill at the top of her voice, a crowd of Blackshirts would hustle round her and, knotting her arms behind her back, bundle her out. The arena was soon full of hooting and whistling and chairs and boots and shoes were flying in the air.
Then came the big scene. Suddenly, as Sir Oswald was speaking during a lull in the interruptions ╤ so placed were the amplifiers that those in the seats reserved for the press could not distinguish his words ╤ a pamphlet fluttered down from the blue gauze-covered roof. Suddenly a voice sounded high up in the girders, ╥Down with Fascism!╙
Eyes swung upwards and there, balanced one hundred and fifty feet above the crowd, a man was seen clambering across the girders. Then from each side Blackshirts appeared treading the same precarious perch.
Sir Oswald went on speaking, but all eyes were on the climbers. Chaos broke out in the back of the hall. Chairs were cleared away in case the men should fall. The arc-lamps swung round from the platform to show up five or six men threading their way along the girders ╤ a scene that would have thrilled most people in a cinema. Suddenly, as the men seemed to meet in the centre of the girders, the interrupter clambered up above his pursuers and swung along the girders on to a platform high above them. His pursuers followed, straggling on either side, and in a moment all were out of sight.
Sir Oswald still went on speaking until a sudden crash of glass tore the air. Someone had fallen sixty feet at a guess, on to a floor at the side of the hall. At the moment it is not disclosed whether the man was the interrupter or one of his pursuers.
The meeting ended in a mild chaos ╤ not from interrupters but from a general stampede of the audience, who had plainly grown tired of Sir Oswald╒s two-hour monologue. After ten o╒clock it was plainly a struggle between Sir Oswald and the decision of the licensing justices of the borough of Hammersmith. The licensing justices won and Sir Oswald was robbed of his triumphant exit.
