Modern Italy

ISSN: 1353-2944 (Print) 1469-9877 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cmit20

Italian anti-Fascism in London, 1922–1934

Stefania Rampello

To cite this article: Stefania Rampello (2015) Italian anti-Fascism in London, 1922–1934, Modern
Italy, 20:4, 351-363, DOI: 10.1080/13532944.2015.1086734

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13532944.2015.1086734

Published online: 29 Sep 2015.

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 Modern Italy, 2015
Vol. 20, No. 4, 351–363, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13532944.2015.1086734

Italian anti-Fascism in London, 1922–1934

Stefania Rampello*

Department of History, Cultures and Religions, ‘La Sapienza’ University, Rome, Italy
(Received 16 June 2014; final version received 12 December 2014)
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Between the end of the Great War and the start of the Second World War, various
Italians living in London, who for the most part had migrated there around the start
of the twentieth century, started their own particular determined opposition to Fas-
cism. Their initial aim was to counter Fascist monopolisation of London’s Italian
community, contesting control of the community’s main associations, institutes and
cultural bodies by the Fascio, which had been established in London in 1921.
Subsequently, these anti-Fascists also sought contacts outside London’s Little Italy,
on the one hand with British political bodies and the British press, and on the other
with anti-Fascists in other countries. While strong links were formed with the latter,
British society showed only a muted interest. This is in part explained by the
positive response to the Fascist experience by the Conservative press and various
eminent British politicians, at least until the mid-1930s.
Keywords: anti-Fascism; Labour Party and Italian anti-Fascists; Italian community;
1922–1934

Italian emigration to the United Kingdom was not, typically, political (Audenino and
Bechelloni 2009, 347). The majority of those who decided to leave Italy and cross the
English Channel did so to improve their own social and financial situation. The Italian
community in London that experienced the conflict between Fascism and anti-Fascism
in the early 1920s consisted of about 22,000 people, most of whom had arrived in the
British capital in the decades just before and after the turn of the century (Sponza
2005, 11). The protagonists of this economic migration were for the most part mer-
chants, skilled craftsmen and street traders (Di Paola 2004, 33). For these reasons the
historiography of anti-Fascism and the political engagement of Italians abroad has long
neglected the British context and its small anti-Fascist groups. While these were politi-
cally and socially diverse, they were committed to a common purpose, and left their
mark as a resolute and enduring force of protest.
Italian anti-Fascism in London emerged as a reaction to the establishment of the
British Fascio, the first branch to be set up outside Italy, which in the 1930s was to be
described by Mussolini as ‘the advance patrol of the regime’ (Bastianini 1939, 36–38,
quoted in Baldoli 1999, 261). When the Fascio was founded, in June 1921, those pre-
sent included ardent early Fascists such as Antonio Cippico, in whose house in Holland
Park the first meetings were held, and Camillo Pellizzi, both of whom were linked to
the Italian Studies department at University College London (ibid.). The Fascio wanted
to exert control over the Italian community in London and monopolise its every aspect;

*Email: stefaniarampello@hotmail.it

© 2015 Association for the Study of Modern Italy

 352 S. Rampello

however, it especially wanted to convey, as much to British society as internationally,

the idea of a community that was consistently and unitedly Fascist. Various newspapers
and bulletins proved useful for this purpose, including in particular L’Italia Nostra, a
newspaper initially called L’Eco D’Italia that Pellizzi had been instrumental in launch-
ing in November 1919. This was originally aligned with nationalist thinking, and
subsequently became the property of London’s Fascio, promoting its position:
We do not believe that in other countries around the world, despite Italians magnificently
demonstrating every civil and patriotic virtue, there is any [Italian] community as strong,
enthusiastic, united and Fascist as that in London. (L’Italia Nostra, 18 March 1938)
It was in direct opposition to this, and in the wake of the early disturbances instigated
by the Fascists, that Il Comento first appeared in the summer of 1922.1 This weekly
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satirical magazine, published every Saturday from 1922 to 1924, was one of the few
explicitly anti-Fascist periodicals in London, and circulated within the Italian commu-
nity. Its title expressed its intention to comment on ‘everything and everybody, to what
extent and whenever it wants to’ (Bernabei 1997, 61). The anti-Fascists’ first issue of Il
Comento came out on 8 July 1922, and in their initial editorial, addressed directly ‘[a]l
lettore’ (‘to the reader’), they declared the intention to make it their main means of
resistance to the Fascio:
There is not a single Italian who has not deplored, or heard lamented, the absence within
our colony of a periodical that can call a spade a spade without having to defer to any
individuals or groups, when the interests or actions of these individuals or groups become
harmful to the community.
Those involved in Il Comento were primarily men with anarchist and socialist alle-
giances, as can quickly be discerned from the list of those who managed the weekly.
These included Amos Salvadori, a trade union activist, the socialist Vittorio Taborelli,
and the freemason Francesco Galasso, who also took on the role of editor. Alongside
them were the anarchists Pietro Gualducci and Emidio Recchioni and many others,
although not all those who contributed to the paper chose to put their names to articles:
to avoid public exposure, many preferred to retain anonymity or to use a pseudonym
(Bernabei 1997, 61). Thus there were columns with ironic and imaginative titles such
as ‘Lettere a Cacasenno’ (‘Letters to Clever Dick’), written by ‘Bertoldo’, and ‘Tra una
salsa e l’altra’ (‘From one sauce to another’), by ‘Ciccio er Coco’, whose pseudonym
came from the aria in the first act of Puccini’s La Bohème. However, it should be
stressed that the London context was, and remained, entirely different from that of Italy.
In London the Fascists could not carry out punitive raids, or at least not by daylight,
because ‘unfortunately, alas, the British police are not under Benito’s command’ (Il
Comento, 5 August 1922). This was spelt out by Gualducci in a letter to the editor:
The Fascists … are saying that they have given me a beating, while I walk about by day
and night and have still not met a Blackshirt who has said a word to me…. This is Lon-
don, not Italy, and both the Italian workers of our community, who are the vast majority,
and the British people would be quick to suppress [the Fascists’] bloodthirsty institutions.
(Il Comento, 11 November 1922)
The pages of Il Comento bore witness to some real verbal battles between Fascists and
anti-Fascists, who were frequently vying for control of the main associations and soci-
eties that had been established by Italians in London. In most cases the Fascists gained
the upper hand, due to the involvement of the government in Rome. From early on this
supported every action taken by the London Fascio (Baldoli 1999, 261), which quickly
 Modern Italy 353

gained control of the Club Cooperativo Italiano (Il Comento, 5 May 1923), the
Mazzini–Garibaldi Society, the Dante Alighieri Society, and the Italian Hospital, where
Francesco Galasso in fact worked as a doctor. He personally exposed the abuses and
illicit manoeuvres that led to the Fascist takeover of the community’s associations, in a
column entitled ‘Camorra patriottica’, first printed in Il Comento in the issue of 26
May 1923. In the periodical’s pages the anti-Fascists also sought to report on the
political situation in Italy, with the aim of revealing Fascism’s true nature:
So that, however far away we are from our homeland, people should hear our cry of pro-
test against all the types of evil bird that nest in our bloodstained peninsula, which avail
themselves of every opportunity to demonstrate their stupidity. (Il Comento, 29 July 1922).
The Lettere dall’Italia column, for example, signed by Nello Rava as a correspondent
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from Milan, attempted to publicise the violence being practised in Italy by the Fascists,
whose hands ‘are dripping with the blood of their dead victims, outnumbered by a hun-
dred to one’ (Il Comento, 17 February 1923). A harsh light had to be thrown on these
acts of aggression, because people could not be allowed to think that ‘as the trains run
on time since Fascism has been in power, it does not really matter if the law has lost
its bearings or justice has been forfeited’ (Il Comento, 21 July 1922). Meanwhile, the
anti-Fascists organised meetings and conventions, often held in the rooms of the St
James and Soho Working Men’s Club at 16 Greek Street. In December 1922 this group
founded a society, Libera Italia, and Il Comento published its constitution in full. It
was presented as ‘a forum for propaganda and the dissemination of all moral principles
for civilised progress’ (23 December 1922). The symbol chosen for Libera Italia con-
sisted of three superimposed elements, a winged wheel, a compass and a book, which
alluded to the strong influence of freemasonry on anti-Fascist activity in the 1920s.
This is clear from the role played by Galasso, a mason and a key figure in their collec-
tive venture. In this initial phase, the anti-Fascism of these Italians was almost exclu-
sively addressed to other members of the Italian community: their anti-Fascist leaflets
and other literature circulated among the employees of hotels and restaurants, who
accounted for the bulk of Italian workers living in London.
Practical assistance for the publication of Il Comento in fact came from the various
commercial activities conducted by these Italians, such as ‘the shops selling silk goods,
ceramics and antiques’.2 Important bases for anti-Fascism included the café bar owned
by Luigi Sabini, the Caffè Taborelli, and Emidio Recchioni’s King Bomba, a deli-
catessen on Old Compton Street, also in Soho.3 Recchioni, who had come to England
in 1899, was one of the wealthier members of the anti-Fascist group. He acquired King
Bomba – ‘which for the British means “the Bourbon king” but for Recchioni refers to
the anarchist bomb’4 – in about 1910, and it was patronised by well-known writers and
intellectuals, including George Orwell and Emma Goldman. It soon became a meeting
place for many Italian exiles, who tended to believe that complex Italian political
affairs should not ‘as a basic principle, be discussed in other people’s houses’ (Il
Comento, 25 November 1922). British circles did not, in any case, pay much attention
to the ideas of anarchists or freemasons, which were too radical for the domestic
political environment.
The British brand of anti-Fascism, support for which grew later in its opposition to
Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, made no close contacts with its Italian
counterpart before the early 1930s. An early anti-Fascist body was the People’s
Defence Force, established in January 1924 as a non-violent reaction to the foundation
of the British Fascists (initially the ‘British Fascisti’) in 1923, which while formally
 354 S. Rampello

independent was closely aligned with the labour movement. It was committed to ‘keep
a watchful eye on the activities of the Fascisti’, and to ‘resist any attempt to break up
meetings’.5 Another anti-Fascist association, also founded in 1924, was the National
Union for Combating Fascismo [sic], organised by E. Burton Dancy; its aim was to
create a united front in order to check the influence and growth of Fascism (Copsey
2000, 7). However, Italian and British anti-Fascism seem not to have encountered each
other in this period: while the Italian exiles were mainly battling with the impositions
and demands of the Fascio, and always attempting to disparage the authority of
Mussolini, the British were occupied by a conflict that never really threatened the status
quo (Parker 1969, 131–133). Their most bloody engagement was to be the Battle of
Cable Street, on 4 October 1936, which saw between 100,000 and 300,000 people
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mobilised against a planned Fascist March (Copsey 2000, 12–13). Even the London
Fascio had very little contact with Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, which, founded
in October 1932, was inspired by Mussolini and his men but otherwise not formally
linked (Branson and Heinemann 1971, 283). The issue of whether there was Italian
funding for British Fascism remained contested, despite statements to this effect made
by some of Mosley’s followers (Cross 1961, 65).
While the interest of the British public was not aroused by what was perceived as
in-fighting within London’s Little Italy, there was growing curiosity in relation to Italy
and the politics of Mussolini. The British press, especially its Conservative component,
became the purveyor of a careful distinction between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Fascists
(Bosworth 1970, 171): the first, in essence, were perceived as having saved Italy from
the dangers of Bolshevism and the red revolution.
It appears fairly clear that the early anti-Fascist activity within London’s Italian
community did not represent a real politically organised movement, but was simply the
initiative of various individuals in response to the high-handedness of the Fascio’s men.
There was no direct contact with British political bodies, simply the expression of
affinities and hopes, such as those felt especially by Italian anti-Fascists of a socialist
persuasion when a Labour government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, was formed in
January 1924:
So goodbye, at least for the moment, to spectacular parades, in which, with the minor
expense of a black shirt and the interruption of a stroll, toothless volunteers, deserters and
draft-dodgers would allow themselves the luxury of striding in warlike fashion through the
streets of London, displaying themselves for the admiration of their neighbour under the
artificial light of home-made heroism. Britain is moving to the left. (Il Comento, 2
February 1924)
MacDonald’s government did not last long, however, and the subsequent elections saw
victory go to the Conservatives with Stanley Baldwin as prime minister (Worley 2005,
76). Worried by a potentially skewed interpretation of Fascist politics, the Italian anti-
Fascists continued their endeavours, although with great difficulties. At the end of
1924, after pressure and various threats by the Fascio and in view of a precarious finan-
cial position,6 Taborelli was forced to suspend publication of Il Comento (Bernabei
1997, 67).
Prior to this closure, the anti-Fascists commented on the news of Giacomo
Matteotti’s disappearance. Shortly before his death the Socialist leader had visited
London to add his voice to the chorus of protest against Mussolini, joining other
important figures in this struggle such as Carlo Rosselli, who was married to an
Englishwoman, Marion Cave (Matteotti 1985, 216). After arriving in the British capital
 Modern Italy 355

on 22 April 1924, Matteotti had published his book The Fascisti Exposed: A Year of
Fascist Domination, and had told the Daily Herald that ‘what you need to understand
is that my life is constantly in danger’ (Bernabei 1997, 80). In an article in Il Comento,
one of the anonymous authors stated that he had not met Matteotti, which confirms on
the one hand the absence of links between the paper and the higher echelons of the
Labour Party, and on the other the difficulty that the paper and its Italian contributors
had in promoting the anti-Fascist struggle by themselves. The disappearance of Mat-
teotti and subsequent discovery of his body in the summer of 1924 led to a notable
mobilisation of energies, not only in London but across the whole country.
Once Il Comento had closed, the task of providing an outlet for dissident voices
was taken on by Pietro Gualducci. On 20 March 1925 Il Processo al Regime (‘The
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regime on trial’), a news-sheet brimming with protest and indignation, made its appear-
ance. As its editor wrote on the front page, ‘I accuse Benito Mussolini of having
ordered the elimination of Giacomo Matteotti’. The tone was more solemn than that of
its predecessor, because ‘everything has collapsed and everything must be done afresh.
This is the hour for men of good will’. This news-sheet presented itself as a one-off
production, but Gualducci then decided to print a second issue in order to publish an
important document, the ‘Filippelli memorandum’, in which Filippo Filippelli, former
editor of the Fascist daily Il Corriere Italiano, revealed background information on the
Matteotti case, and in particular Mussolini’s responsibilities for events.7 This memoran-
dum, which was presented for Italian public consumption by Florence’s anti-Fascist
newspaper Non Mollare, made a rapid tour of many of the most important European
and American newspapers.
The interest aroused by the two short issues of Gualducci’s news-sheet gave rise to
the publication of a supplement with an English title, Truth and Common Sense, on 1
October 1925. This edition contained articles in both English and Italian whose inten-
tion was to reveal the true nature of Fascism’s leader, very different, as it said, ‘from
Courage, Idealism and Sacrifice!’, the qualities that the Italian press attributed to him
and that he himself claimed. The anti-Fascist group knew:
… that the one point of attack that Fascism fears is public opinion abroad…. A weekly or
fortnightly newspaper printed in English, or even better in two or three languages, that
publishes genuine news stories about what is happening in Italy which are also concise,
open and honest, would undoubtedly be the most effective way of striking Fascist wrath in
the heart. (Il Processo al Regime, 7 June 1925)

Truth and Common Sense was not, however, able to make progress with its aims by
itself, and closed after its first issue. Greater involvement of the British circles that were
opposed to Fascism became necessary, and with this in mind the association ‘Friends
of Italian Freedom’ was established in 1925.8 Meanwhile, in 1924 and 1925, the anti-
Fascist movement was strengthened by the arrival of new exiles, including men of con-
siderable moral and intellectual stature who were more politically involved, and who
changed the nature of the struggle against Fascism on British soil. Although the previ-
ous migration of Italian labour had already created bodies linked to ‘Italian political
organisation on the republican, socialist and anarchist left’ in their countries of arrival
(Rapone 2008, 54), it was this new wave of migration, generated by Fascism, that
made a much greater impression on the British public. The end of the summer of 1925
saw the arrival in Britain of Gaetano Salvemini, the well-known historian of the tradi-
tion of liberal democracy and the doyen of a generation of anti-Fascists that included
the Rosselli brothers. Salvemini declared that in London he felt as if he were at home,
 356 S. Rampello

‘free amongst the free, and a man amongst men’ (Killinger 2002, 206). In his memoirs
he expressed his pleasant surprise at the interest that the British showed for ‘all things
Italian’, as for example when a conference on ‘Italy and the Fascist regime’ was held
on 19 January 1926 at London’s National Liberal Club:
The British were unable to comprehend how a civilised people (as the Italian people were
still regarded) could have sunk so low on the scale of intelligence and political morality as
to take on and tolerate a posturing dictator such as Mussolini. As a result people wanted
to hear both the Fascist and the anti-Fascist sides of the story. (Salvemini 1973, 42)
Salvemini wished to gain the support of the major foreign powers by exposing the
dangers of the Blackshirts, and with this in mind he arranged a series of seminars and
conferences, wrote articles for important newspapers and periodicals such as the
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Manchester Guardian, published books, and travelled between Britain, France and
the United States. In London, he came into contact with important figures in the
anti-Fascist movement such as Emidio Recchioni and Abele Giandolini, owner of one
of the city’s best restaurants. Salvemini also collaborated with Sylvia Pankhurst, the
campaigner who dedicated much of her life to the pursuit of equal rights, first as a
suffragette and subsequently in the struggle against racism and Fascism.9 In particular,
Salvemini met Luigi Sturzo, who had founded the Partito Popolare Italiano in
September 1919 and had then been its leader (De Rosa 1977, 328). Having arrived in
Britain in the autumn of 1924, Sturzo remained in London until his departure for the
United States in September 1940.
During his time in Britain this Catholic priest and leader made his own intellectual
and financial contribution,10 but kept a certain distance from the various opposition
movements. It has to be remembered that when making any public appearance he was
constrained by instructions from the Vatican. Pius XI’s Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro
Gasparri, and in London Cardinal Francis Bourne, expressly requested that Sturzo refrain
from political engagement (Petrocchi 1945, 125). This gives special value to the few
things that he wrote, and particularly his book Italy and Fascismo (sic) (Sturzo 1926).
Sturzo collaborated with Henry Wickham Steed, a former editor of The Times and well-
known opponent of Fascism. In the 1930s, together with Barbara Barclay Carter, ‘an
American woman who had settled in London, an Italianist, and a lover of Italy and Chris-
tian democracy’ (De Rosa 1977, 283), and the Italian Michele Sicca, he applied himself
to the periodical People and Freedom, whose aim was ‘to show London the existence of
an Italian anti-Fascism’ (Istituto Luigi Sturzo 2001, 7). Sicca, a surgeon at the Italian
Hospital in London, became Sturzo’s personal doctor as well as his friend, fostering and
openly demonstrating ‘sentiments hostile to the regime’.11
These men endowed the British anti-Fascist movement with greater intellectual
prestige, and even though their British hosts still showed limited interest in the cause –
Mussolini’s Italy, after all, did not yet represent a real threat – Fascist spies started to
note some worrying new developments. In a message dated 16 July 1927 to Cornelio
di Marzio, General Secretary of the Fasci all’estero, an anonymous informant described
the movement’s configuration:
The organisation is apparently divided into two independent groups, in order to avoid con-
tact between individuals who are too different in their views and social status, and perhaps
also to evade our checks with greater ease.12
The informant described these two main clusters of subversives as ‘socialist-commu-
nist’ and ‘liberal-Catholic’. The influential head of the first group was the freemason
 Modern Italy 357

Francesco Galasso, who, after his experience as editor of Il Comento, had been
involved in establishing a lodge of the ‘Grande Oriente d’Italia’ Masonic organisation.
Freemasonry was outlawed by the Fascist regime, and the lodges were dissolved in
Italy by the Grand Master Domizio Torrigiani in September 1925.13 In 1929 Galasso
and others founded the ‘Ettore Ferrari’ lodge in London, named after the former Grand
Master of the ‘Grande Oriente d’Italia’ who had sculpted the statue of Giordano Bruno
erected in 1889 in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori. This lodge consisted almost entirely of
Italian emigrants, for the most part artisans and traders. Galasso took the roles of, first,
‘Secondo Gran Sorvegliante’ (‘Grand Junior Warden’), then ‘Gran Segretario’ (‘Grand
Secretary’), and finally ‘Venerabile’ (‘Worshipful Master’), holding this post without a
break until the Second World War.
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The anti-Fascist group of freemasons likes to gather at Recchioni’s delicatessen in Old

Compton Street, and they are almost all members of the Druids Lodge. The most active
include, as always, Dr Galasso, Barberi and Cora. They have fellow members scattered
around different English and Scottish cities with whom they correspond, and through
whom they can put out anti-Fascist propaganda in those cities where they work.14
The second group of anti-Fascists, described in the same report of 1927, was organised
by Angelo Crespi and his wife.15 Crespi, who played host to Salvemini at his house in
Chelsea,16 was a professor at Birkbeck College. In January 1926 he had a letter
published in the Italian daily La Tribuna, writing as follows:
To be Italian today – that is to acknowledge Fascism – means to recognise the authority of
a false and spineless king, of a syphilitic and murdering head of government, and of the
most sinister band of evildoers under the sun. My intention is to remain free to fight them,
within Italy and without, with whomsoever within and without, Italians and non-Italians,
on every front; I regard them as Satan’s poisoned vomit. Long live Salvemini! Long live
Matteotti! Long live the republic! Long live a welcoming and free Britain! If you find
yourselves in need of an executioner, I will return, ready to take on this temporary
responsibility. (La Tribuna, 27 January 1926)
Crespi’s anti-Fascist activity was well known in Italy, so much so that in June 1928 he
received an arrest warrant issued by the Chief of Police in Cremona, in view of his
responsibility for ‘the dissemination by an Italian citizen, outside State territory, of false
and tendentious information, such as will damage the reputation of the State abroad’.
In October 1939 his name was registered with the border control guards, ordering his
arrest.17
None of this made Crespi hesitate in his continued challenge of falsely flattering
images about Fascist Italy. His established position within London circles allowed him
to collaborate with the Catholic Herald, which sympathised with the anti-Fascist
movement, and with other newspapers:
In a letter printed in the Sunday Times he protested about the statement that Italy is happy
and united, made by Sir John Fraser in his article ‘New Italy’, published in the first edition
of the Sunday Times on the 6th of this month; he added that the Fascist experiment, which
Great Britain has no need to try, has made Italy neither happy nor united, as evidenced by
the victims of Fascism, both within Italy and outside.18
As a convinced champion of a Christianity that engaged in the social sphere, Crespi
sought to make British public opinion aware of issues in Italian politics, both as a jour-
nalist and as a university lecturer. In the summer of 1927, at a conference on Italy’s
economic position at the National Liberal Club, to which he belonged, he presented a
pessimistic vision of the Italian situation, which he claimed had been worsened by the
 358 S. Rampello

advent of Fascism. Crespi insisted that Fascism could not be credited with reorganising
the country’s finances, which had been on the way towards a balanced budget before
the March on Rome, and claimed that Italy’s cultural situation was in a serious decline,
‘as one can see, among other things, from the reduced numbers attending university’.19
In an article of March 1930, blaming Fascist Italy for a failed naval conference, he
stated:
Blessed be every act of disrespect that might reawaken the sense of human dignity in a
people for whom Fascist barbarism has arrived to re-affirm the never-completely cancelled
worthlessness of centuries of foreign and papal domination, that might reawaken this espe-
cially against Fascism, which is only in government because, widespread or concentrated,
it is a little in everybody’s soul, and in everybody’s habits and emotions. Blessed be every
slap in the face by free foreigners that might help the shame of being slaves to emerge!
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Italy will be free again when it starts to have the courage to be ashamed of its current
well-deserved state of abjection in the face of every insult by foreigners.20

The year 1930 also saw the secret establishment of the London committee of the
Italian Union for the League of Nations, with Crespi as its president.
Matters relating to another anti-Fascist, the anarchist Emidio Recchioni, are also of
interest. The British police started to make checks on him following his request for
naturalisation in 1927, and a particular focus for their attention was his close friendship
with the anarchist Camillo Berneri, resident in France. Both were engaged in intense
anti-Fascist activity, and the Fascist spies who were keeping them under close observa-
tion described them as prepared to ‘use any means – including assassination – to over-
throw the Fascist regime’.21 It was Recchioni, in a letter defending himself addressed
to the Home Office, who reported the designs of the Fascist agent Menapace, following
the arrest of Berneri, to attract the attention of the foreign press regarding a possible
anti-Fascist plot:
Menapace took the professor [Berneri] through France and Switzerland in his car, which
indicates that he was not without means (the Fascist regime spends about 4 million lire per
year on espionage abroad).22

Recchioni’s defence of himself seems to have been successful, as he was granted

British naturalisation on 17 October 1930. However, he was then involved in another
matter: a conspiracy to kill Benito Mussolini, uncovered in 1931, which was jointly
organised with Michele Schirru and Giuseppe Polidori, a Soho restaurateur. The Daily
Telegraph even printed an article, on 5 July 1933, in which Recchioni, described as a
violent man, was named as responsible for the attempted assassination of the Duce. He
immediately started legal proceedings against the paper, which were successful, and he
was awarded compensation in the region of £1200.23 This anti-Fascist’s activity came
to a definitive end on 31 March 1934 with Recchioni’s death from syphilis in a Paris
clinic; his body was moved to the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and subsequently his ashes
were returned from France to London.24
Applications for British citizenship, like that of Recchioni, were made by many of
the Italians resident in Britain. Only a few wished to return home, and this partly
explains why their activism against Fascism was weaker than elsewhere. A limited
number, including Salvemini, Sturzo, Crespi and Alessandro Magri, were actively
engaged in the anti-Fascist struggle, which in London took place more in the cultural
sphere than in the strictly political arena. Despite their awareness of the limited
resources at their disposal, and of the unlikelihood that the British authorities, which
 Modern Italy 359

remained unconvinced, would be of any assistance, the anti-Fascists believed it was

essential to continue to disseminate their ideas.
The situation in the British capital also appeared clear to the Fascist police: ‘[h]ere,
the rest of the world seems not to exist: for these British, the only thing that exists is
their empire’.25 This phrase provides a somewhat simplified picture of the context in
which Italian anti-Fascists in London took their first steps. Until the mid-1930s, their
protests seemed to be matters of personal conviction; no sign of real danger was seen
in Mussolini’s politics, and the anti-Fascist movement was not sufficiently strong or
united to ask for support or collaboration from the main British political forces. These
were primarily interested in preserving international stability, which was increasingly at
risk despite various countries signing the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, intended to
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stop international disagreements escalating into war.26

For British politicians, at that point, open support for the small group of Italian
anti-Fascists would have meant exposure to an unjustifiable risk: it would have meant
aligning themselves against Italy, breaking longstanding alliances, sacrificing goodwill,
and complicating a situation that was already unstable enough. Moreover, the traditions
of the Risorgimento and the politics of Italy’s Liberal era, themes that were ever-pre-
sent in the vocabulary of men like Salvemini and Crispi who were thereby attempting
to preserve the linkages between British and Italian history, now seemed to some Bri-
tons to be concerns of the past that had been superseded by more important issues
(Berselli 1971, 13).
At the forefront was the communist threat. During the 1920s and 1930s many
expressed support for the new model of the State embodied by Mussolini’s Italy; there
was particular interest in how the country, under Fascism, had come to the fore on the
international stage. Among the most respected voices was that of Winston Churchill,
who from 1924 was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Baldwin’s Conservative govern-
ment. Visiting Rome in January 1927, he confessed to being charmed by Mussolini,
and to feeling admiration for the new head of the Italian government. In particular, he
took up the theme of the dangers of communism:
[It is] quite absurd to suggest that the Italian Government does not stand upon a popular
basis or that it is not upheld by the active and practical assent of the great masses…. If I
had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start
to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Lenin-
ism…. Externally, your movement has rendered service to the whole world. (Gilbert 1976,
226)
In this context Antonio Bordonaro, the Italian ambassador in London until 1932,
thought that any agreement between anti-Fascism and the British Labour Party was
unlikely, especially because:
The departure from the Independent Labour Party of Snowden and MacDonald, without
doubt that group within the party in the most direct contact with Italian exiles, suggests a
weakening of the relationship between the government and anti-Fascist groups present in
Britain.27
It was in fact British Labour politicians who made the absence of explicit references to
anti-Fascism a condition of any assistance, material or otherwise: the Italian emigrants
could have their support ‘only if and inasmuch as they present themselves as socialists
and not anti-Fascists’.28 The Labour leadership was particularly concerned to avoid any
links with Communists, and they therefore forbade any help for ‘anti-Fascist organiza-
tions under Communist influence or control’ (Miliband 1961, 218). Divisions within
 360 S. Rampello

the British Left were also evident in the prompt rejection by the Labour Party of the
proposal from the Independent Labour Party and the Communist Party, made for a
second time in 1934, to form a ‘United Front’ to oppose the advances of Fascism in
Britain (ibid.).
The approach taken at this time by the Labour Party corresponded, moreover, with
the strong belief that ‘opposition’ should mean ‘opposition in Parliament’, and that until
they returned to power with a parliamentary majority very little could be done. This
was the context for the formation, in about 1929, of the ‘Italian Labour Delegation’,
‘also for potential use in election matters’.29 Its secretary was Alessandro Magri, who
had a republican upbringing and lived in North London, where he gave his full atten-
tion to anti-Fascist activity and propaganda. He was very well educated and self-pos-
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sessed, an excellent orator, and spoke perfect Italian, English, French, German and
Irish; he therefore soon took on an important role.30 As a result of this he came into
contact with Walter Citrine, the president of the Trades Union Congress (TUC), and
sought to convince him to put pressure on the Labour Party leaders ‘in order that this
party should resolve to formally undertake the task of anti-Fascist propaganda in
Britain’.31 It was on Magri’s initiative that an Information and News Bulletin was pub-
lished on 22 February 1929. In this, the anti-Fascists emphasised the veracity and relia-
bility of their material: ‘What we say, we shall have documents to substantiate’. In
1930 the London branch of the Lega Italiana dei Diritti dell’Uomo (LIDU) (Italian
Human Rights League) was founded, with its affairs managed by Magri (once again),
as secretary, and by Dino Rondani, a former Socialist parliamentary deputy, as the
branch president.32
The Italian anti-Fascists in Britain sought the support of other Italians committed to
their cause, especially in Switzerland and France, where the Concentrazione antifascista
was founded in 1927. Magri was in touch with Carlo Rosselli and the Giustizia e Lib-
ertà movement, and in the mid-1930s became its representative in London, with the
aim of disseminating in the British context guidelines for the conduct of anti-Fascism
abroad. The key figure in these relationships, however, was Rondani, who relocated to
London in December 1927 in his capacity as representative of the Concentrazione
antifascista’s General Council:33
In London, after the expulsion of Sinnico, Rondani had been given the responsibility of
rebuilding the socialist group among the Italians living there. All of Rondani’s efforts man-
aged to bring together just six people across the whole of London. These were: Cappella,
Sinnico’s brother-in-law, who resided with him at 47 Adelaide Road; a certain Cima, a
cook from Alessandria in Piedmont; someone called Silla; and three other individuals.34
Rondani too made frequent attempts to improve contact with the British authorities: he
first approached MacDonald, and then his minister Baldwin, to whom he wrote supply-
ing various pieces of news on ‘the economic conditions of our country in relation to
the work of the national government’,35 but in both cases little came from this. With
the help of the republican politician Francesco Ciccotti, who was living in France, Ron-
dani was also in touch with the Duke of Connaught, an uncle of the British king, and a
meeting between the two men in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat in March 1929 caught the atten-
tion of Fascist spies. The political police reported that the central topic of this meeting
was the alliance between Fascism and the Vatican, with a view to ‘being able to exploit
this matter in order to win non-Catholic forces over to the anti-Fascist cause’.36
These various efforts demonstrate the extent of the determination and passion of the
anti-Fascists, who never gave up in the face of failures and problems. In his role as
 Modern Italy 361

president of LIDU, Rondani was often on the move to Nice and Monaco, and also to
Tunis and Algiers,37 and was thus on the British side of the channel only for short peri-
ods. This led him, in 1932, to hand his LIDU responsibilities over to the anarchist
Decio Anzani. This transfer seems symbolic of the tacit collaboration between the vari-
ous anti-Fascist forces, and also of the political ascent of Anzani (Bernabei 1997, 98).
From Forlì originally, Anzani had arrived in Britain in June 1910 having encountered
various misfortunes in France and Switzerland, in fact having been expelled from both
these countries for subversive activities. In London he helped with the circulation of
pamphlets and other writing, such as The Menace of Fascism, produced with Magri
and with the collaboration of the Labour Party, which aimed to help the British public
to properly understand this phenomenon:
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Where is the wise man who would put trust in the words of a patent liar?
Because it aims to a general state of tyranny, and tyranny can only breed despots on one
side, and slavery on the other but never men.38

The essential mission of LIDU was to safeguard the principles, rights and freedoms of
men from Fascist violation:
Our league stands for those fundamental rights of thought, speech, press, association, meet-
ing, ect.. [sic] without which no free and civilized state is possible. It is strictly non-politi-
cal.39

Among the Italian anti-Fascists resident in London it was very clear, in the final
analysis, that the only real possibility of taking action against Mussolini lay in involv-
ing British circles in activities of propaganda and information provision. The British,
however, still regarded the anti-Fascists with suspicion, and were unsure whether they
or the Fascists constituted the real hazard. It would only be with changes to the
international picture, and especially with the war in Ethiopia launched by Mussolini in
October 1935, that Fascist politics were to start being perceived as a threat. When even
the League of Nations, in which Britain had hitherto always placed its trust, proved
ineffectual, Fascism started to be seen as a genuine danger. Until then OVRA, the
Fascist political police, was to keep the anti-Fascist group in the British capital under
constant surveillance. As the ambassador, Bordonaro, reported, they were ‘not
numerous, but of significant importance’.40
Translated by Stuart Oglethorpe (stuart.oglethorpe@gmail.com)

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes
1. Copies of Il Comento and other periodicals referred to are held by the British Library
(Newspaper Collections).
2. Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome (ACS), Polizia politica, Materia, busta (b.) 12, cat. C
15/2.
3. ACS, Polizia politica, Materia, b. 49, cat. 13/8, Rome, 1 August 1933.
4. ACS, Polizia politica, Materia, b.12, cat. C 15/2, briefing note of 16 July 1927.
5. These extracts from British Special Branch police reports in 1924 are quoted by Copsey
(2000, 7).
6. ACS, Casellario Politico Centrale (Central Political Files) (CPC), b. 2231, copy of a note
from the Italian Ambassador in London to the Polizia politica, 27 October 1927.
 362 S. Rampello

7. The Filippelli memorandum is in an appendix in the book edited by Rossini (1966,

926–930).
8. ACS, CPC, b. 250, telegram from the Italian Ambassador in London to the Ministero
dell’Interno, 31 August 1925.
9. ACS, CPC, b. 2231, telegram from the Ministero degli Affari Esteri to the CPC, 14 January
1927.
10. See Luigi Sturzo’s letter to his brother Mario dated 5 February 1927 (Sturzo 1985, 174–175).
11. ACS, Polizia politica, Materia, b. 4794.
12. ACS, Polizia politica, Materia, b.12, cat C 15/2, briefing note of 16 July 1927.
13. ACS, CPC, b. 2231, telegram from the Italian consulate in London to the Ministero
dell’Interno, Direzione Generale della Pubblica Sicurezza (DGPS), 22 May 1929.
14. ACS, Polizia politica, Materia, b.12, cat. C 15/2, report of 20 August 1927.
15. Ibid.
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16. ACS, CPC, b. 1530, fasc. 3293, questura di Milano, 19 March 1926.
17. ACS, CPC, b. 1530, fasc. 3293, letter of 14 April 1936.
18. ACS, CPC, b. 1530, fasc. 3293, telegram to the Ministero degli Affari Esteri from the
DGPS, 23 October 1929.
19. ACS, CPC, b. 1530, fasc. 3293, telegram to the Ministero degli Affari Esteri from the
DGPS, 2 July 1927.
20. “Alla conferenza navale fallita. La responsabilità dell’Italia fascista.” Libera Stampa, March
1930, in ACS, CPC, b. 1530, fasc. 3293.
21. ACS, Polizia politica, Materia, b.12, cat. C 15/2 , telegram of 25 July 1931.
22. National Archives, London, Home Office, HO 144/1849. Letter from Recchioni to Sir John
Pedder of the Home Office, 25 July 1930.
23. On the dispute between the paper and Recchioni, Bernabei says that ‘[i]t is not clear why
the British authorities declined to assist the Telegraph when there was clearly evidence
demonstrating Recchioni’s involvement. The details of this affair remained secret for more
than sixty years, only being released by the Home Office in the early 2000s’ (1997, 105).
24. ACS, CPC, b. 4260, fasc. 087295, note from the divisional chief, Polizia Politica, for the
Divisione Affari generali e riservati, Rome, 18 April 1934.
25. ACS, CPC, b. 47, cat. 13, Milan, 4 September 1934.
26. This agreement, put forward by the French Foreign Minister Briand and the American
Secretary of State Kellogg, had been signed in Paris by 15 countries, including the United
Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Japan, as well as France and the United States. Some 57
countries were to sign, although ‘the treaty was to prove a great illusion’, in the light of the
crisis of the 1930s and the subsequent world war (Duroselle 1998, 99–100).
27. ACS, Direzione della P. P., b. 393, note from Bordonaro to the Ministero degli Esteri, 20
May 1930.
28. ACS, Direzione della P. P., b. 393, telegram from the Ministero degli Esteri, 9 November
1929.
29. ACS, CPC, b. 1530, fasc. 3293, telegram to the Ministero degli Affari Esteri from the
DGPS, 23 October 1929.
30. Ibid.
31. ACS, CPC, b. 1530, fasc. 3293, note for the Divisione Affari generali e riservati, London,
13 March 1931.
32. ACS, CPC, b. 2231, telegram from the Ministero dell’Interno to the CPC, 5 February 1929.
33. ACS, CPC, b. 4405, fasc. 2090, copy of a telegram from the DGPS to the Ministero degli
Affari Esteri, 1 August 1929.
34. ACS, Polizia politica, Materia, b.49, cat. C 13/8, Paris, 25 October 1934.
35. Ibid.
36. ACS, CPC, b. 4405, fasc. 2090, from the prefecture of Milan, 9 March 1929.
37. ACS, CPC, b. 4405, fasc. 2090, copy of a note from the sezione prima to the Ministero
degli Affari Esteri, Rome, 16 February 1932.
38. The Menace of Fascism, The Italian League for Rights of Man, London branch, n.d.
[1934?]. A copy of this pamphlet is held by the British Library.
39. Ibid.
40. ACS, DGPS, b. 418, telegram from Bordonaro, Italian ambassador in London, to the
Ministero dell’Interno, 26 September 1931.
 Modern Italy 363

Notes on contributor
Stefania Rampello has worked as a Research Assistant with Dr Joachim Häberlen at the Univer-
sity of Warwick, joining the project ‘Politics of Emotions: Challenging Emotional Regimes
Across the Iron Curtain from the Late 1960s to the Early 1980s’ from June to October 2014 to
work on Italian archives. She obtained a Master’s degree in Contemporary History at the Univer-
sity of Rome ‘La Sapienza’; her thesis on ‘Emigrazione antifascista italiana in Inghilterra, 1920–
1943’ was assisted by a ‘thesis abroad’ scholarship, which allowed her to undertake archival
research in London.

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