The Anglo-Rhodesian Society

👤 Robin Ramsay  

Introduction

While researching the Rhodesia chapters of our book, I came across the Anglo-Rhodesian Society, and discovered that, as usual with the British right, there was no substantial account of it. Here is the result of an initial trawl.

Future historians of the Conservative Party may discover that upon its heart in the 1960s “Rhodesia” was indelibly graven.(1)

With the arrival of Mrs Thatcher in 1975 came “the New Right”, with about as much claim to be called “new” as had the “New Left’ a decade earlier. Although the Tory right has a history with the same kinds of continuities and discontinuities as the Labour left, it lacks a detailed historical record like there is of the Labour left, for the Tory right has mostly organised semi-clandestinely.(2) The best example of this is the 92 Group, founded by Patrick Wall around 1964 (precise information is lacking), which remained undetected until the 1980s, when it was said to have 93 MP members and to be having weekly meetings with the Prime Minister.(3)

Before the Anglo-Rhodesian Society the post-war Imperial Tory right had most visibly organised a series of defensive campaigns round the decline of the Empire, and is identifiable first as “the Suez group”. This “group”, a series of temporary alliances over the 1952-54 period, included at various times and occasions, up to 40 MPs. The names that are striking now are Julian Amery and John Biggs-Davison, whose careers and causes are an unbroken thread through to the late 1970s.(4)

As Britain’s “colonial problem” deepened through the 1950s — one “insurgency” and “emergency” after another — alongside the Imperial Tory right appeared the professional lobbyist, a private sector adaptation of the psychological warfare techniques developed during the war. The pioneer was Toby O’Brien, who became an independent PR man in 1949 after reorganising the Conservative Party machine. His clients included Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, the commercial TV lobby, Tanganyika Concessions and the Imam of Yemen.(5) The O’Brien Organisation was hired by the Tanganyika Concessions chairman, Captain Charles Waterhouse — one of the leading members of the Suez Group — to put Katanga’s case in Britain. The perceptible British “Katanga lobby” in this period was matched by a similar “Tshombe lobby” in the United States.(6) The role of the O’Brien organisation in Britain is similar to that of Marvin Leibman in the U.S.. The first Secretary General of the World Anti-Communist League when it was entirely a lobby group for Taiwan, Leibman began in the China Lobby, went on to the Tshombe lobby (American Committee to Aid Katanga Freedom Fighters), Cuba lobby (Committee for the Monroe Doctrine), Chile Lobby (American-Chilean Council) etc.(7)

When the Central African Federation, of which (Southern) Rhodesia was a component, began to unravel in the late 1950s, there formed a Rhodesia lobby, “high Tories, Imperialists of the old school’.(8) In the House of Lords the leaders were Salisbury, Robins, Hinchenbrooke, Balniel and Clitheroe: in the Commons, Waterhouse, Patrick Wall, Anthony Fell, John Biggs-Davison, Harold Soref and Robin Turton. This “lobby”s’ high point was probably a Parliamentary motion by Robin Turton in 1960 against Colonial Secretary Ian Macloud’s plans to allow greater African representation in the Northern Rhodesian legislature, which attracted support from 102 Tory MPs.(9) This campaign also had a PR firm in tandem with it, Voice and Vision, hired in 1960 to save the Federation from the break-up which by then looked imminent. The campaign took 40 British MPs to see the Federation.(10)

The effectiveness of the PR campaigns like that run for the Federation is impossible to evaluate. In this period they were generally brought late into what turned out to be losing causes, but the Voice and Vision campaign does seem to have had an impact. In the Labour Party at the time of the Rhodesian Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in 1965, “there were even a few sympathisers with the Rhodesian cause (such as [the late] Reginald Paget and the late Frederick Bellenger), some of whom had been converted by the free public relations tours organised by Voice and Vision on behalf of the Federation government’.(11) With a Labour Parliamentary majority of 4 at the time, it might be argued that this minority within the Parliamentary Labour Party contributed to the Labour Cabinet’s reluctance to seriously consider the military option against the Smith regime — arguably a victory of a kind for the Voice and Vision campaign.

The Central African Federation’s disintegration was completed with the UDI of Southern Rhodesia in 1965. Up to this point the campaigns of the British right on the fringe of the Tory Party had been discreet for the most part. The notable exception was the League of Empire Loyalists, whose tactics of disrupting Tory meetings and abusing Tory Ministers got them much press attention but had put them beyond the pale for even the Imperial right.(12) But the Rhodesian issue was sufficiently powerful for some of the Imperial right to overcome their dislike of the further right and work together in the Anglo-Rhodesian Society (ARS). The ARS was the rebel Rhodesian government’s second attempt to create a propaganda body in Britain. The first attempt had been the Friends of Rhodesia, created by the Rhodesian High Commissioner in London in 1964, before the Declaration of Independence, but which never got off the ground. This was replaced by the Anglo-Rhodesian Society, initially funded by the Rhodesian government, and provided with information by them.(13) In its first six months it acquired over 1000 members and began a monthly bulletin, edited by a former Director of Information for the (Southern) Rhodesian Government.(14)

Among its public supporters were Reginald Paget MP (Labour — Eton, Trinity College, European Movement); Conservative Cabinet member Duncan Sandys; Patrick Wall MP (founder of the secret 92 Group of Tory MPs);(15) ex MI6 officer Stephen Hastings MP; Lord Salisbury, the Society’s President, and his son Lord Cranborne; Lord Coleraine, Judge Gerald Sparrow, Lord Hinchenbrooke (Victor Montagu), Lord Forester, the Duke of Atholl, Lord Wedgewood, General Sir Richard Gale, Lord De La Warr, Lord Colyton, Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur Longmore and Sir Archibald James.(16)

Although formally dominated by Tory Party grandees, the Anglo-Rhodesian Society was a meeting ground for the Tory right and the further, racist right. This was illustrated in 1966 when the Rev. Stephen Pulford, a leading — and highly visible — member of the Racial Preservation Society, was invited to lead an Anglo-Rhodesian Society service at the Cenotaph in London.(17) Some ARS branches joined the National Front on the latter’s formation in 1966.(18) The influx of the further right into the ARS resulted in a 1967 faction fight at which the Society “narrowly survived a take-over by extremist members demanding immediate recognition of Mr Ian Smith’s regime as the legal government…. The society has been seriously divided for months and earlier, a meeting of branch chairmen…. passed a vote of no confidence in the council’.(19)

In retrospect this was an ominous omen for the the Monday Club which, like the ARS, acted as “a bridge” between the right-wing of the Tory Party and the racist right. As with the ARS, the influx of the racist right into Monday Club led to a faction fight. In 1973, fronted by George Kennedy Young, the enthusiasts of “the bridge” attempted — but narrowly failed — to take-over the Club. I presume that essentially the same people were involved in both events but have no evidence to support that assumption.

The rise of the right in the Tory Party after 1965 can be attributed, in part, to the rallying effect of the Rhodesian crisis. Although Tory leader Edward Heath tried to maintain a bi-partisan policy with the Labour Government, the campaigning of the right gradually stiffened the spines of the Parliamentary Tory Party and it abandoned the bi-partisan policy in December 1966. In the ARS and the Monday Club began to assemble part of the coalition on the Tory right which was to capture the party in 1975.

Notes

  1. Kenneth Young, Rhodesia and Independence, (Dent, London, 1969), pp. 510-511.
  2. There is not one volume on the post World War 2 Tory Right. On the inter-war years there is one, The Ideology of the British Right-wing 1918-39, G. C. Webber, (Croom Helm, London, 1986).
  3. The Times, 1 December 1988 and 23 February 1986. Norman Tebbit attributes his rise within the Tory Party to support from this group which he describes as being “slightly right-of-centre”. Like himself? Norman Tebbit, Upwardly Mobile, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1988), p. 96.
  4. Other well known names were Lord Hinchenbrooke (Victor Montagu), and MPs Captain Waterhouse, Harry Legge-Bourke, Anthony Fell and Angus Maude. See Andrew Gamble, The Conservative Nation, (RKP, London, 1974), pp. 274-5 and 173-4.
  5. He acquired the Yemen contract after the “private” intervention there of “Julian Amery and clutch of his old Albanian cronies’. Anthony Verrier, Through the Looking Glass, (Jonathan Cape, London, 1983), p. 255.
  6. On the Rhodesia Lobby and Katanga lobby personnel, see Elaine Windrich, Britain and the Politics of Rhodesian Independence, (Croom Helm, London, 1978), pp. 66-7.
  7. Peter Dale Scott in Lobster 12, p. 20. The best profile of Leibman I know of is in John Gregory Dunne’s collection of essays, Quintana and Friends, (E. P. Dutton, New York, 1978). On the day of the first ballot for the Labour leadership in 1963, appealing to the left-wing of the party, Harold Wilson called for an enquiry into the Congo story, including Tshombe’s relationship with Sir Roy Walensky and the role of the O’Brien organisation: “We know perfectly well who is behind all this propaganda: a former official in the Conservative Central Office who is making big money representing in this country not only the Union Miniere and Katanga Concession but the Spanish and Portugese governments and the whole record of Portugese aggression in Angola and Mozambqiue.’ Such an enquiry, he said, “would be a revealing commentary …. on the seamier side of our political life in this country.’ Cited in Andrew Roth, The Yorkshire Walter Mitty, (Macdonald and James, London, 1977 — withdrawn) p. 269.
  8. Peter Joyce, Anatomy of a Rebel: Smith of Rhodesia, (Graham Publishing, Salisbury [Rhodesia], 1974), p. 101.
  9. Ibid.
  10. John Pearson and Graham Turner, The Persuasion Industry, (Eyre and Spottiswoode, London, 1965), p. 281.
  11. Windrich, p. 59 (see note 6).
  12. Chapter 3 of George Thayer’s The British Political Fringe, (Anthony Blond, London, 1965), is apparently the only decent account of the League.
  13. Andrew Skeen, Prelude to Independence, (Nasionale Boekhandel, Cape Town, 1966), p. 39. The ARS denied this — see the Sunday Telegraph, 4 December 1966 — but then, in those famous words, they would, wouldn’t they?
  14. The Daily Telegraph, 13 November 1965.
  15. Rhodesian High Commissioner Andrew Skeen said, “Rhodesia owes much to the unselfish efforts of Patrick Wall.” Skeen, (see note 13) p. 24.
  16. This list is compiled from press cuttings in the Guardian 19 July 1966, and the Daily Telegraph 15 March 1966 and 8 November 1966.
  17. The Sunday Telegraph, 13 November 1966, described him as “the keep Britain white rector”.
  18. Derrick Knight, Beyond the Pale, (CARAF, Leigh, 1982), p. 48.
  19. The Observer, 29 October 1967.

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