Strange journey : the life of Dorothy Eckersley

Three days before the outbreak of the Second World War, William Joyce, the leader of the British Nazi group, the National Socialist League, was in Berlin. He and his wife, Margaret, had fled there fearing internment by the British government if war broke out. Yet as war drew nearer, Joyce was unsure whether to return to Britain or not. But a meeting that day sealed his fate, leading to years of broadcasting for German radio, notoriety as ‘Lord Haw Haw', and his execution for treason in January 1946. The meeting was accidental, with the Joyces bumping into one of his English supporters - Mrs Frances ‘Dorothy' Eckersley - in a Berlin restaurant. Dorothy Eckersley was surprised to see Joyce, to whom she had recently sent £50 to help the NSL find a new headquarters in London. Now, having a far better network of friends and acquaintances in Berlin than the almost friendless Joyces, she was able to put him in touch with officials who recruited Joyce to the radio propaganda microphone. And by the end of 1939, Dorothy, and her son, James, would join the English language team broadcasting German propaganda to the UK. At 46, Dorothy had already led an extraordinary life that had taken her from the stage in America to the microphone in Berlin, marriage with one of the most gifted radio engineers of the time, and years of political activism with the radical socialist Independent Labour Party. Yet now she was a committed follower of Hitler and a national socialist..

The Fasces and the Saltire: the failure of the British Union of Fascists in Scotland, 1932-1940

The history of Britain's main manifestation of inter-war fascism, Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists [BUF], continues to be a hotly contested field of study. A new biography of Mosley, work on gender and the BUF, and the incorporation of new models of generic fascism have made important contributions to the historiography of the BUF. However, until recently, almost no historical consideration of the BUF's career in Scotland had been attempted. But work by Tony Milligan and Henry Maitles has opened up the topic of fascism in Scotland between the wars. This article seeks to build on these contributions, and examines two groups of factors that led to the failure of fascism in Scotland. The inability of the BUF to find political space in Scotland, allied to internal organisational weaknesses, compounded by the indifference of the English fascist movement to the BUF in Scotland created flaws that characterised the Scottish BUF from the outset. These weaknesses were exacerbated by the failure of the BUF to understand the Scottish dimensions of politics, such as the cross-cutting appeal of Scottish nationalism, and religious tensions. Finally, anti-fascist opposition proved to be especially problematic for the Scottish BUF

"The land of my dreams": the gendered utopian dreams and disenchantment of British literary ex-combatants of the Great War

The last two decades have seen a slow shift in the academic understanding of the impact of the Great War on concepts of gender in interwar Britain. The work of a small group of cultural historians, following in the footsteps of Rosa Maria Bracco, has challenged existing interpretations of the cultural impact of the Great War on concepts of gender. The argument that the wartime advances made by women in Great War in Britain, allied to combatant trauma, resulted in a crisis of masculinity and a related heightening of misogyny, has been questioned by one that challenges the notion of a crisis of masculinity, stresses continuity in gender constructs, and develops a more complex picture of cultural responses to the war

Review of Jews and the left: the rise and fall of a political alliance by Mendes, P.

Jews and the Left is an ambitious book, in that it attempts to provide an historical and global overview of a complex, changing relationship over a period of more than two centuries. The book is not only about the relationship of Jews to Left-wing politics, but also about the Left’s relationship with Jews. At present, that relationship is, perhaps, at its most fraught, but Mendes’ account suggests the possibility that it may, as in the past, improve once more. It is the ebb and flow of the relationship that sits at the heart of the book, and the historical account provides a story in four parts

Supporting fathers to engage with their children's learning and education : an under-developed aspect of the Parent Support Adviser pilot

The Parent Support Adviser (PSA) role, piloted in 2006-2008 in 20 Local Authorities (LAs) in England, offered preventative and early intervention support to families where there were concerns about children‟s school attendance or behaviour. Overall, this was a highly successful initiative in terms of supporting parental engagement with their children‟s schools. However, this article presents evidence drawn from 162 interviews (with PSAs, their line managers and coordinators in 12 case study LAs) showing that there was one key area in the PSA pilot that was less successful – the engagement of fathers. The article examines views about how to engage fathers and of the barriers explaining the overall absence of fathers from the PSA project. It highlights the dissonance between policy and practitioner guidance on the one hand and practice on the other with regard to the relative failure to engage fathers with this important initiative