Case Studies

A 1940 story: sticky-backs

by Mark Rowe

The Government-backed Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST) recently posted a blog on ‘blind networks in the extreme right’. It described how anti-semitic, anti-immigrant right wingers arrange to have supporters of such ideology print off stickers to propagandise.

As the blogger, Ben Lee, a Senior Research Associate at Lancaster University, detailed, such networks have anonymity (no-one can easily get tailed and collared by the authorities); and are open to anyone over the internet; it doesn’t matter how fragmented the extremists are, and they can get propaganda material even while locked down during the Covid-19 pandemic; and the stickers offer ‘performance and publicity’: “Individual local acts are combined to give the impression of a larger network; exaggerated claims of scale and reach have been a key aspect of recent extreme-right propaganda.” See also a report from the Jewish charity the Communist Safety Trust (CST) on the terror incitement and anti-Jewish hate created and circulated by right wing extremists on social media; Hate Fuel: the hidden online world fuelling far right terror.

Stickers also serve to mark territory, which explains otherwise bizarre stickers stuck on street furniture by football fans of various nations, such as a ‘FC Zenit-Pride Of The North Capital’ pictured, in Arundel in Sussex, celebrating a St Petersburg football team.

Much the same was going on 80 years ago, as various MI5 security service files now kept at the National Archives at Kew show, downloadable for free during the lockdown. Months before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the fanatically anti-semitic Conservative MP Captain ‘Jock’ Ramsay set up The Right Club out of his London home at 24 Onslow Square. It didn’t have premises, and the only membership list was kept by Ramsay – who by the spring of 1940 handed the list for safe-keeping to a friend he made at the American Embassy, Tyler Kent.

MI5 had three agents inside the Club. Thus the security service was well-informed about what Ramsay said and did, such as the Right Club put sticky-back signs on windows with the conspiracy theory slogan ‘This is a Jews’ war’; and left around leaflets decrying war as ‘plotted and engineered by the Jews for world-power and vengeance’. Even when Special Branch went to Ramsay’s home on May 23, 1940, to arrest him in the first batch of detentions of fascist-subversive suspects, Ramsay made a similar ‘tirade’ to police, ‘alleging that it [the British Government] was Jew ridden and controlled, that the press was in the hands of the Jews and that the war had been engineered by Jews’, Special Branch noted.

Ramsay by spring 1940 was regularly meeting Anna Wolkoff. She was the daughter of a Russian admiral who had been washed up by the Russian Revolution who was understandably strongly anti-communist and now running a tea shop on the corner of Harrington Road and Queens Gate in South Kensington, not far from Ramsay’s London home (he also had a castle near Arbroath). Less understandably, although Britain had given Admiral Wolkoff a refuge – he had been a naval attache in Britain under the czars – he was also anti-British and had evidently passed that on to his daughter Anna.

Anna Wolkoff, ‘a Russian and rather temperamental’, as MI5 put it, reportedly described Hitler to a fellow Right Club member as a ‘god’. How Anna Wolkoff conspired with Tyler Kent and Ramsay to try to pass on highly secret material from the American Embassy to an Italian military attache is the proverbial another story. It got them all jailed.

To return to the humbler ‘sticky-backs’. Anna Wolkoff was also keen on going around the streets of west and central London during the black-out – the streets darkened to make German bombing more difficult – and placing stickers on lampposts, telephone boxes and the like; but not brick walls, because the stickers weren’t sticky enough. Some sticky-backs advertised the New British Broadcasting Station, fronted by William Joyce, popularly known as ‘Lord Haw-Haw’ who broadcast from Berlin and was hung in 1946 as a traitor. Others were against the war.

Another tactic of the Fascists was to chalk slogans; one Leeds member of the British Union of Fascists detained in December 1940 admitted to chalking on a gent’s lavatory door at the Leeds Odeon cinema. Chalking was the resort of anyone who did not have a more official platform for his views; in his diary in 1940, the writer George Orwell confessed to chalking in London.

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