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Morris Beckman |
Remembering the men that stood up to Mosley
HE was tall, silver-haired, a little stooped, and yet looked every inch the sort of man you’d never want to mess with.
Before I asked him I had guessed the answer. Yes, he had been a member of the underground 43 Group of Jews that had literally driven a Nazi-style movement off the London streets in the late 1940s.
But Phil Evans, now in his 80s, didn’t want his pictures taken. He was still cautious and secretive, a throwback to his days of subterfuge with the 43 Group.
Phil, who lives in St John’s Wood, explained that he had infiltrated the fascist organisation run by Sir Oswald Mosley using his Anglicised name – though his real Jewish name had been Evansky.
“One night, they questioned me and said they’d found my home address and my real name, Evansky,” he told me. “I knew I was in trouble so I told them they were talking rubbish and I’d go out and get my papers from my car. But when I got out I ran as fast as I could.”
Phil, who later became a butcher, was one of several old members of the now famous 43 Group who had decided to hold a final farewell party on Sunday at the Hampstead Garden Synagogue (see The Review).
The Group was founded in Hampstead in 1946 when Morris Beckman and his Jewish friends came across a fascist public meeting near Whitestone Pond.
The very thought that the fascists were making a comeback maddened Beckman and his ex-service friends who just had come out of the Forces fighting them.
It was then that they decided to form a secret military-style body to break up the Mosleyite movement.
In a way, the Group became a kind of League of Gentlemen, burrowing away through moles in the Mosley organisation.
Phil, like me, was surprised at the turnout for the farewell party – he had expected 20 or 30 people. But more than 300 had turned up – old stagers from the 1940s but also quite a lot of youngsters, supporters of today’s anti-fascist organisation led by the magazine Searchlight.
In a short speech, Beckman made it clear that Oswald Mosley was defeated through military-style tactics and the use of “intelligence”.
This meant all types went undercover – one woman member of the Group became a “lover” of one of the Mosley leaders.
Another speaker said she had “co-inhabited” with him.
The 43 Group, so called because 43 people turned up for the inaugural meeting in West Hampstead, took an oath swearing their total allegiance to the aim of defeating the Mosleyites. They took it in front of the holiest part of a synagogue, the Ark, with the blessing of the Rev Leslie Hardman who, as a British army chaplain, had been among the first to enter the notorious Belsen concentration camp.
“There are times when violence can be met with violence”, Hardman told the 43 Group.
It was wound up as a fighting force four years later, in 1950 – by that time Oswald Mosley had had enough and fled to France.
The opinions and wisdom that come with age should not be disregarded
WHY do we treat our elderly so shabbily?
In the so-called more backward societies in the world, they are treated reverently, their wisdom used to guide the next generation.
Here we either dump them in an old people’s home or allow them to spend their last years miserably in one-bedroom flats serviced by council carers or neighbours. What a way to treat them!
If you want to see what we are missing in wisdom and guidance, do your best to see an extraordinarily good documentary, The Times of Their Lives, which had a special screening at the Phoenix Cinema in East Finchley on Saturday.
It will be shown next at the ICA in the Mall on March 8 and in the summer on BBC 4.
It stars three women – aged 87, 101 and 103 – and the Mary Feilding Guild home in Highgate.
I have visited this home several times so I didn’t need to see the film to know why it is among the best in the country. During the past three years I also got to know two of the starring women: Rose Hacker who died last year at 101 and Hetty Bower, aged 103 – so I knew what powerful intellect and good common sense these women can spread before us.
In the film Mary Feilding is described as a “home for aged intellectuals” – and judging by the interviews conducted so unobtrusively by the director Jocelyn Cammack, that about sums up both Rose, Hetty and the third woman, Alison.
They talk so wisely about sex, the attitudes of men and women, the disaster of the Iraq war, that you want to hear more from them in the film. But as Elizabeth Wright, representing Mary Feilding, pointed out at the screening, the film-makers had to boil 170 hours of interviews into one hour.
You may have read of Rose’s view of life in this newspaper, as we were the first paper to give her a regular column, making her the world’s oldest columnist.
You may have also read articles we have written about Hetty Bower – or you may have seen her on TV news channels either in the front of demonstrators marching against the Iraq war or handing in petitions at No 10 Downing Street.
Sound sense and thought-provoking ideas flow from Rose and Hetty in particular, enough to make you revise whatever prejudices may encrust your mind – in one sequence she blew my mind when she recalled talking to women inmates at Holloway prison about the best sex they could remember.
The film is a candidate for a shoal of prizes – it is being shown at a world festival of documentaries in Paris in March and later at another festival in Texas.
You may have to book early to see it at the ICA next month. If you do see it, you’ll see how we punish the elderly as they reach the end of their lives, instead of using their knowledge to make the world a better place.
Displaying a soft side
I REMEMBER the former Labour councillor IvoWr alker) as a witty man who would laugh uproariously at a joke.
One of my colleagues remembers his famous fireworks parties in the 1970s in the back garden of his Dartmouth Park home to which all the children in the area would be invited. There would be a lavish spread with the children sitting on the patio eating baked potatoes and watching Ivor let of loads of fireworks. Letting off fireworks brought out the child in him.
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