The Red Book: Stories

The Red Book - The Membership List of The Right Club, 1939 by Robin Saikia, published June 2010 by Foxley Books ISBN 9781905742028. £UK 12.95

In May 1939, the British MP and army officer Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay formed an anti-Semitic secret society he called The Right Club. He recorded the members in a stout, red, leather-bound ledger that came to be known as The Red Book. Its damning contents are published here in full for the first time and throw fresh light on the controversial British right wing of the Thirties. Robin Saikia offers an expert analysis of the motives and thinking of Ramsay and his circle. The Red Book remains a disturbing document for our times, offering stark warnings about the dangers of right wing extremism.

Right Club members were mainly upper and middle class, with a sprinkling of mavericks and hangers-on. True blues included peers and MPs like Lord Redesdale (father of the Mitford girls), Lord Galloway, the Duke of Wellington, Sir Peter Agnew and Sir James Edmondson. Mavericks included the traitor William Joyce (Lord Haw-Haw) and the spy Anna Wolkoff. Among the extreme anti-Semites were A. K. Chesterton and Arnold Spencer Leese, forefathers of extremist groups still active today. These and other active Right Club members were united by a hatred or mistrust of Jews and a desire to avoid war with Hitler. After a brief flurry of activity, they found humiliation at the hands of Winston Churchill, who pounced at the outbreak of war, unceremoniously imprisoning all suspected Nazi sympathisers under Defence Regulation 18b.

Not all members proved beyond redemption. The book contains notable revelations, including the story of Prince Yurka Galitzine, who joined the Right Club before the war but renounced his right wing sympathies after witnessing first hand the atrocities enacted at the Natzweiler death camp in Alsace.

The Red Book

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