We of the Imperial Fascist League did all we could to prevent the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany. We foresaw that whoever won such a war, Britain would be ruined. We knew that the Jews, assisted by the Freemasons, were resolved to destroy Hitler before he destroyed them; all the chief vehicles of propaganda were in their hands, and all the money, too. We made enough progress to be able to employ two whole-time men on a pittance, both of whom could have earned a good living at their own trades, but preferred to do our work for a bare subsistence. The solid nucleus of good men and women I now had around me could not be penetrated by the spies of the enemy with any hope of success. I was greatly overworked, attempting the impossible by having to administer an organisation and do a lot of research and writing for our paper, all at the same time. One evening, when addressing a meeting, I collapsed; it was sheer exhaustion of nervous energy and there was nothing, then, organically wrong.

Then came Munich, and a year afterwards, the War itself. It was unfortunate that I was actually on the sick list recovering from a gastric ulcer when the war broke out. Knowing that to carry on in the London office in war-time would not be possible, I closed down our G.H.Q. at once; the branches that could not pay their own way closed down, too. Two months of milk dieting, followed by a further period of restriction cured my complaint; which never gave me any more trouble; it was brought on undoubtedly by worry and by rushing into activity, habitually, too soon after meals.

In May, 1940, the Government put into practice its infamous regulation known as 18B, which allowed the Home Secretary to cause the arrest of anyone for indefinite periods of detention if he had “reasonable cause to believe” they had been recently concerned in acts prejudicial to the public safety or the defence of the realm or in the preparation or instigation of such acts and that by reason thereof it is necessary to exercise control over them. As the Government and the War were both Jewish, this regulation was construed as being applicable to anyone anti-Jewish. There was no trial; you were just arrested and taken away. There was a humbugging affair called an “advisory committee”, to which the detained people could appeal, but it was composed of people appointed by the Home Secretary himself; no evidence on oath was taken and the decisions could be reversed by the Home Secretary if he liked. It was a disappointment to me that so very few of the detained people refrained from using this Committee; if everyone had refused to recognise it, something more akin to justice might have been forced upon the Government.

About the 24th May, 1940, a large number of arrests were made under this regulation, including those of Capt. A. M. Ramsay, M.P. and Sir Oswald Mosley and his staff. I was not interfered with at this time, but I did not trust the look of things, and I began to picnic out in the country during the day-time, it being summer, only returning home at night. Getting tired of this, I went to the seaside to stay with friends for a fortnight and then, as nothing had happened at home, I returned to live there openly and normally. But I took certain precautions and arranged hide-outs for use if necessary at the homes of friends and provided for a certain signal to be made visible from the road, to prevent my returning from a walk to find detectives waiting for me inside my own home. I also wrote a letter to be delivered to any detective calling to arrest me when I was out, in which I explained that I would resist arrest, knowing 18B to be unconstitutional and illegal.

I was returning from a visit to the library in Guildford when I became aware that the signal was against me. I turned in my tracks, left the town with what I stood up in, and retired to a rural hideout. Next day, I asked my wife to join me, as I was afraid that she might be taken herself as a method of getting me. She told me what had happened.

My house had been surrounded by Police before the detective knocked; my wife went to the door and was told that the house was to be searched; this did not prevent the signal being made! My letter was given to the detective and seemed to annoy him, as I am not polite to those who take pay to do dirty work for the Jews. The Police spent 1½ hours in my house and took away a bundle of papers; on being challenged by my wife on their right (?) to remove my property, they promised to return everything in a fortnight; this promise they carried out, and asked for me again, without response. I expect that after this the house was watched, and one month later, two stupid-seeming policemen called late one evening and asked my wife, who by this time had returned home, where I was; they left unenlightened.

Meanwhile I had, at first, lived quietly at Hide-out No. 1, but detectives came one day to visit my host, who was a Fascist; they had no idea that I was there and I listened to their examination of him although, so far as distance is concerned, I was within arm’s length of them, but I remained undiscovered and unscathed! After they had left, I left, too, fearing to involve my kind host in trouble if it was found out later that they had been sheltering me. I travelled up to London and established myself in Hide-out No. 2. Here, I was again with friends, and I used to absent myself from about 10 a.m. until 7 p.m. visiting various parts of London, where I could find instruction or amusement. I was able, now and then, to meet my wife and spend the day with her.

In the autumn of 1940 came the invasion scare; I felt I had better take a few extra risks to be at home to offer what protection I could to my wife. I reached home safely and lived there three weeks, during which one of the rare bombings of Guildford occurred; I slept and worked during the day and exercised in the garden at night. The invasion-scare was now over, so I again made myself scarce, returning to my London Hide-out. Four weeks later, I made another stay at home, but I fear I must have been careless enough to allow someone to see me at a window or in the garden, because, on 9th November, I was doing some indexing in my bedroom about noon, when my wife came running in to tell me that detectives had burst into the house and were halfway up the stairs! I seized a thick stick, which I always had close to me throughout the time I had been “on the run”, and crept out on to the landing. There I saw a plain-clothes detective looking into the linen cupboard; I crept up behind him and could have brained him, but I simply said: “What the hell are you doing in my house?” He turned round quickly with his hand in his pocket and just then a uniformed man came along the passage behind me, so I backed into a corner and then there followed a sort of parley. I told them the facts and pointed out the dirty work they were doing for pay. They replied that they were ignorant men who had been ordered to make this arrest and if anything happened to them, others would follow to do it. Reasonable enough, that, for morons! Eventually they rushed me and a long struggle ensued; I did what I could, but there were two of them, each as strong as I was, and twenty years’ younger. My wife tried to help me and was, afterwards, fined £20 for it! At last they got me to the head of the stairs and then uniformed men came rushing up the staircase, the first one waving a revolver. This made the force against me overwhelming, which I took to be the only excuse for calling off resistance. Then I was taken down to Guildford Police Station, where, after searching, I was placed in a filthy cell, below ground, with stinking W.C. complete; I smashed everything breakable and tore the noisome blankets into strips and stuffed them down the W.C. This I did because I did not intend to be spirited away into detention without the people of Guildford, at least, getting to know. The Superintendent charged me at the Police Court with the damage, for which I was fined, but, of course, would not pay; and I was given one month’s imprisonment instead. Handcuffed to a policeman, I was taken in a police-van to Wandsworth prison where I served the month without incident worth mentioning; after that, I was handcuffed to a conscientious objector and then removed to Brixton prison as an 18B detainee.

Here, of course, I met many friends and some Mosleyite enemies. For the first fortnight, the imprisonment amounted to solitary confinement excepting for about four hours a day, when we mixed together. The men who had taken no precautions to get “on the run” had mostly been already in detention for six months, and at first they had had a scandalously bad treatment, but gradually, as the prison staff began to realise that their prisoners were not quite what the Home Secretary had intimated they were, i.e., traitors to their country and potential saboteurs, the detainees got improved conditions. Within a fortnight of my arrival, we had our cell-doors opened all day until 8 p.m. and we had about five hours in the winter and more in the summer in which we could be out-of-doors in the prison yard. Needless to say, we wore our own clothes, and absolutely refused when it was suggested to do work. Our friends could bring us food-parcels once a week. Otherwise we got prison-diet, although those who could afford it could have meals sent in from a restaurant outside.

I was disappointed to find how little fight there was in the average detainee; there was no chance of “starting anything”; there was no lack of wretched lick-spittles ready to betray anyone who organised combined action for escape or revolt; worse, I found that nearly all had already been before the Advisory Committee, and although I never would, my example came too late to have any effect.

After about a month of this, I went to the Governor, a wretched nervous wreck of a man, frightened of his own shadow, and complained of certain penal conditions I found myself under, contrary to law. His reply was: “My good man, don’t you know that there are a lot of people outside who would like to have you all shot and that you may consider yourself lucky to be alive?” That gives an idea of what the Mug-in-the-Street had been told about us detainees!

My wife came every week, loaded with food-parcels, and although the official length of the visits was supposed to be only 15 minutes, this was such an obvious scandal that they become in practice about 40 minutes. I endeavoured to get this increased to an hour, but was always told that there was neither staff nor accommodation sufficient to lengthen the period; this was utter nonsense, but we could do nothing about it. By the way, in the detention camps run by the military, two-hour visits were allowed.

On 30th December, 1940, I became aware that I had been grossly libelled in an article in the Empire News for 27th October, 1940. Under the caption “Ribbentrop’s Spy-Net”, ex-Detective-Sergeant East had written that I had often attended German Nazi meetings in Westbourne Terrace and at Cleveland Terrace, Bayswater and at Porchester Hall, and that I had been to Nuremberg where I contacted the Fichter-Bund of Hamburg. As I had never attended any German meeting anywhere, and had never set foot in Germany, I wrote to the Editor requesting him to withdraw this libel, but the only result was that he published my denial of its truth, without withdrawing it. This man East was a detective who used to visit our G.H.Q. before the war, and whom we had always treated with courtesy as a policeman concerning whom there was nothing to hide. There was no remedy against this kind of libellous outrage; the Mug-in-the-Street was far beyond any ability to make an unbiassed judgment, and Juries are generally composed of such Mugs. By the way, I have often been grossly libelled, but have so little faith in the law under the Jewish-Masonic regime that I have always let it go rather than take action in the Courts. Anything seemed better than resorting to the law courts for redress. I was rather inclined to regard being libelled by the Jewish Press as an honour which did me no harm and often did me good. Perhaps the limit was reached when the American Daily Worker said that I had been convicted of rape and sodomy! Surely that is a record in “smear”!

At my request, my wife sent my war-medals to H.M. the King, saying that it did not seem proper to retain medals commemorative of services which had evidently been forgotten.

On 24th January [1941], thirty of us were transferred to a camp at Ascot, where we were confined with many others within barbed wire and guarded by military; six weeks later, we were entrained and taken to a similar camp at Huyton, Liverpool. I then began a hunger-strike, partly to prevent being taken on to the Isle of Man, partly to try and break the whole abominable system...