I was a bit wary of the Blackshirt organization by now. Mosley had made a big thing about not being anti-Semitic. That suited me as I’d no time for such stupidity. But I’d heard him give a speech about a month after I joined at which he’d responded to hecklers by calling them ‘three warriors of class war, all from Jerusalem’. I mentioned that to Charlie Ridge but he shrugged it off. ‘Do you know who Mosley has hired to teach self-defence to the stewards? Former welterweight champion of the world, Ted Kid Lewis.’ ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’ ‘Ted’s real name is Gershom Mendeloff. He’s a Jew from Whitechapel.’ But I was hearing other things that were both disturbing and funny. The Brixton branch was organized as a brothel. The secretary of one of the Newcastle branches had been convicted of housebreaking. The first national leader of the women’s section had been caught with her hand in the till and kicked out. Then there was the violence. The minute Mosley organized his defence force on military lines and put his men in jackboots, he was making it clear he was out for trouble.
