Organisation For The Maintenance of Supplies - The OMS and Fascism

The OMS and Fascism

The British Fascisti (BF), which maintained transport and communications units to be used in the event of a strike, provided an organisational structure for the OMS although there was uncertainty at government level about allowing BF members to join the OMS given fears about their potentially revolutionary nature. Members of BF were allowed to join only if it agreed to renounce fascism and the BF name, a proposal rejected by the majority of the group's controlling committee under Rotha Lintorn-Orman. The minority faction, led by Brigadier-General R.B.D. Blakeney and Rear-Admiral A.E. Armstrong, split to form a new group known as the Loyalists (as well as the Scottish Loyalists under the Earl of Glasgow) and this group was subsumed into the OMS as soon as the strike began.

Despite this individual fascists obtained high rank within the OMS. BF member and later co-founder of the National Fascisti Colonel Ralph Bingham worked along with Peter Howard, who had published a magazine for fascists in the Ukraine and who was later a member of the New Party, running an OMS depot during the strike. The BF's Neil Francis Hawkins, later a leading figure within both the British Union of Fascists and the Union Movement, was also important in the OMS during the strike.