Lieutenant-Colonel

Graham Seton Hutchison

DSO MC
Born20 January 1890
Hampstead, London, England
Died3 April 1946 (aged 56)
Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England
NationalityBritish
CitizenshipBritish
Alma materRoyal Military Academy Sandhurst
Occupation(s)Army officer
Writer
Years active1909–1946
Known forFar-right activist
Notable workThe W Plan
History of the Machine Gun Corps
The Red Colonel
Political partyLiberal Party
British Fascists
British Empire Fascist Party
MovementNational Workers Movement

Lieutenant-Colonel Graham Seton Hutchison (20 January 1890 – 3 April 1946)[1] was a British First World War army officer, military theorist, author of both adventure novels and non-fiction works and fascist activist. Seton Hutchison became a celebrated figure in military circles for his tactical innovations during the First World War but would later become associated with a series of fringe fascist movements which failed to capture much support even by the standards of the far right in Britain in the interbellum period. He made a contribution to First World War fiction with his espionage novel, The W Plan.

Military career

Hutchinson was born in Hampstead in January 1890. His father came from Inverness,[2]: 101  although the family settled in London.[3] He was educated at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst.[3] Seton Hutchison first saw military service when he enlisted in the King's Own Scottish Borderers in 1909, remaining with the regiment until 1913.[4] He spent time in colonial Africa, serving with the British South Africa Police and the Rhodesian Army before the outbreak of the First World War.[4]

In 1914, he returned to the British Army initially with the 2nd Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the Machine Gun Corps.[4] In 1917 Seton Hutchison, at the time a Major and Machine Gun Officer in the 33rd Division, convinced his commanding officer to group all the machine gunners, who were spread between four brigades, into a single company under his command, a scheme that was soon rolled out across the British Army resulting in the Machine Gun Corps becoming an independent branch of the army.[5] He also became noted for his strong opposition to retreat and recounted a story of how in March 1918 he shot all but two of a group of forty British soldiers fleeing from the German Imperial Army.[6]

Seton Hutchison's exploits made him a well-known figure and he was awarded both the Distinguished Service Order and the Military Cross.[7] A somewhat more unusual tribute followed in 1921 when the composer Kenneth J. Alford penned a marching tune, The Mad Major, in his honour.[8]

Post-war activity

Following his war service Seton Hutchison took an interest in the welfare of ex-soldiers, forming the Old Contemptibles Association and then taking a leading role in setting up the British Legion.[7] Between 1920 and 1921 he was part of the Upper Silesian Commission and he would write that his time there gave him significant sympathy with the defeated Germans and convinced him that the Treaty of Versailles was an unjust settlement.[9]

His first involvement in party politics came with the Liberal Party and he was its candidate in Uxbridge in the 1923 general election, without success.[7] He would soon after move towards a more right-wing position and became a member of the arch-conservative English Mistery soon after its foundation in 1930.[10] He had previously led his own similar group, the Paladin League, although it did not enjoy such a high profile as English Mistery.[2]: 102  His other political sympathies included a strong strain of anti-Semitism, which he claimed was engendered by contempt for his Jewish classmates whilst at school in Hampstead, and support for the Social Credit economic ideas of C. H. Douglas.[11] During the 1930s he corresponded with Ezra Pound, largely over their shared interest in Social Credit.[12]

Fascism

Like a small number of British Army officers after the First World War Seton Hutchison was attracted to the militarism of fascism and he became involved in a number of movements. He initially claimed to have a large band of supporters, including the ludicrous claim that he had 20,000 followers in Mansfield alone, and attempted in 1931 to merge this unnamed group with the British Fascists (BF). However Rotha Lintorn-Orman broke off negotiations when it became clear that Seton Hutchison had no movement at all to speak of.[13]

In November 1933, Seton Hutchison formed his own group, the British Empire Fascist Party, and presented a 24-point programme for "National Reconstruction". This document, which was avowedly fascist unlike the BF (a group which, despite its name, had an underdeveloped ideology that was denounced by sometime member Arnold Leese as "conservatism with knobs on"[14]), called for the destruction of the party system, the establishment of a corporate state with highly statist overtones, a stronger policy of imperialism and the removal of most rights from Britain's Jews.[15]

The same year he also formed a group called the National Workers Movement, a group that changed its name to the National Socialist Workers Party before finally settling on the title of the National Workers Party. By this point Seton Hutchinson had become obsessed by Nazism and wrote widely in praise of the ideology and Adolf Hitler.[16] Despite its pretensions to appealing to the working class the group only appeared to have one other regular member, Commander E.H. Cole, who was better known for his time in the Imperial Fascist League.[7] Seton Hutchison, who was paid by Nazi Germany as a publicist, led the group largely because of his antipathy towards Oswald Mosley and his much larger British Union of Fascists, whom he believed to be under Jewish influence.[17] Like the Nazis, Seton Hutchison on was strongly critical of Freemasonry and mainline Christianity, calling for a move to Positive Christianity.[2]: 102–103  However it was to Mosley that Seton Hutchison lost his support as members of the Nordic League initially sympathetic towards the National Workers Party were won over to the BUF by the efforts of the likes of J.F.C. Fuller and Robert Gordon-Canning.[18]

Seton Hutchison nonetheless remained a vocal activist and in 1936 ran afoul of Clement Attlee when he publicly claimed that the Labour Party politician was a Jew who was engineering a world war, supporting white slavery and punishing the poor. Attlee filed a libel action against Seton Hutchison, although this was ultimately withdrawn when Seton Hutchison publicly apologised and disowned the claims.[19] Remaining a vocal Hitlerite, including declaring public support for the Anschluss, he became disillusioned by the German occupation of Czechoslovakia and by the time of the Invasion of Poland in 1939 Seton Hutchinson was praising Poland for standing up to what he had come to see as Hitler's bullying tactics.[20]

Scottish nationalism

Although he had spent much of his early years in London Seton Hutchison saw himself as first and foremost Scottish and wrote "I have always flatly declined to describe myself as 'British'".[21] In his 1945 essay "The Highland Division can Save Scotland", he declared his support for Scottish independence and declared his support for the Scottish National Party. He called for the return to the Clan system as a basis of a classless, corporatist Scotland, arguing the Scots represented a unique race.[21] His ideas were largely undeveloped however as Seton Hutchison died the following year before expanding upon them.

Author

Seton Hutchison was also known as a prolific author of both espionage novels and military history. One of his spy novels, The W Plan, had its proofs read by D.H. Lawrence before publishing. Lawrence dismissed the book as poor for what he felt were its unconvincing attempts to portray Germany and its unrealistic portrayals of female characters.[22] Despite Lawrence's criticisms a film version produced and directed by Victor Saville and starring Brian Aherne, Madeleine Carroll and Gordon Harker was made in 1930.[23] His novels did find favour with Ezra Pound who praised them, along with those of John Hargrave, for what Pound felt was their "specific treatment of live economies".[24] His final novel, The Red Colonel (1946), broke from some of his earlier stories in that it was highly critical of the Nazis, mirroring his own disillusionment with that movement.[25]

Seton Hutchison also published a History of the Machine Gun Corps although this non-fiction work was characterised by its vivid accounts of battle that almost read like a novel.[26] Another of his factual works was a biography of Peter McLintock, who had served as his batman during the war.[1] His 1932 work Warrior, a consideration of the philosophy behind combat and war, was in a similar vein to Ernst Jünger's work on these topics.[4] As a freelance journalist Seton Hutchison attended a few of the Nuremberg Rallies and was paid by Joseph Goebbels to write glowing tributes to the spectacles.[2]: 112 

References

  1. ^ a b Harold Bloom, J. R. R. Tolkien's The lord of the rings, Infobase Publishing, 2008, p. 38
  2. ^ a b c d Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers on the Right, Oxford University Press, 1983
  3. ^ a b Gavin Bowd, Fascist Scotland – Caledonia and the Far Right, Birlinn, 2013, p. 49
  4. ^ a b c d J.M. Bourne, Who's who in World War One, Routledge, 2001, p. 138
  5. ^ Arnold D. Harvey, Collision of empires: Britain in three world wars, 1793–1945, Continuum International Publishing Group, 1992, pp. 374–375
  6. ^ Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory: The Illustrated Edition, Sterling Publishing Company, Inc., 2009, p. 223
  7. ^ a b c d Thomas P. Linehan, British fascism, 1918–39: parties, ideology and culture, Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 136
  8. ^ Jeffrey Richards, Imperialism and music: Britain, 1876–1953, Manchester University Press, 2001, p. 431
  9. ^ Bowd, Fascist Scotland, p. 50
  10. ^ Martin Pugh, "Hurrah for the Blackshirts!" – Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars, Pimlico, 2006, p. 71
  11. ^ Bowd, Fascist Scotland, pp. 50–51
  12. ^ Bowd, Fascist Scotland, p. 135
  13. ^ Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History, 1918–1985, Basil Blackwell, 1987, p. 56
  14. ^ Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts!, p. 55
  15. ^ Thomas P. Linehan, British fascism, 1918–39, pp. 132–133
  16. ^ Bowd, Fascist Scotland, p. 53
  17. ^ Peter Barberis, John McHugh, Mike Tyldesley, Encyclopedia of British and Irish political organizations: parties, groups and movements of the 20th century, Continuum International Publishing Group, 2000, p. 190
  18. ^ Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley & British Fascism, Penguin Books, 2007, pp. 425–426
  19. ^ Robert Benewick, Political Violence and Public Order, Allan Lane, 1969, p. 266
  20. ^ Bowd, Fascist Scotland, p. 60
  21. ^ a b Bowd, Fascist Scotland, p. 180
  22. ^ D. H. Lawrence, James T. Boulton, Keith Sagar, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 450
  23. ^ Rachael Low, The History of British Film Volume VII, Routledge, 2005, p. 412
  24. ^ K. K. Ruthven, Ezra Pound as literary critic, Routledge, 1990, p. 125
  25. ^ Bowd, Fascist Scotland, pp. 177–179
  26. ^ Leo van Bergen, Before my helpless sight: suffering, dying and military medicine on the Western Front, 1914–1918, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009, p. 218
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