Love, Hate and the Leader is a memoir of growing up in a Fascist family in post-war Britain.
For Trevor Grundy and his family, Fascist leader Oswald Mosley was a God and antisemitism was a creed. His father was a Fascist brawler, his mother obsessed with Mosley and Grundy himself dreamed Mosley was his father and grew up to be the youngest member of the Fascist Union Movement to speak at Trafalgar Square. But, after her death, Grundy learnt that his mother was Jewish. The book features additional material from its original 1998 edition with more detail on Fascist figures in Grundy's childhood as well as his life after leaving the Fascist movement.
This book will appeal to those interested in British Fascism, far-right history and family memoirs.
Prologue 1. 40 Blandford Square, Marylebone, London 1948 2. London, 1948 3. London, 1951 -1956 4. Blandford Square in the Early and Mid-1950s 5. London, 1956 6. Trafalgar Square, 1957 (1) 7. London, Trafalgar Square (2) 8. Wounds That Let in the Light 9. On the move at Long Last 10. Port Bou and Barcelona, 1958 11. North Kensington, London 1958 /1959 12. North Kensington, 1959 13. London, October 1959 14. North Kensington and a New Beginning, 1960 15. London, 1961-1965 16. The Beatles and Beyond 17. False Start and a New Beginning 18. Ndola, Lusaka, Livingstone in Zambia 19. London, April 1991 Epilogue: Selling, Kent, October 2010
Biography
Trevor Grundy is an English journalist who lived and worked in Central, Eastern and Southern Africa from 1966 to 1996.
Praise for the previous edition:
‘This is a biography written in blood, love and tears in the tradition of Gosse’s Father and Son.’ Philip Howard, The Times.
‘Have you ever wondered how even the most dedicated anti-Semite could stay an unashamed Jew-baiter once the 1946 newsreel footage of the concentration camps, with their corpses piled up like firewood, had been seen. Trevor Grundy’s touchingly honest memoir goes some way towards answering that question.’ Maurice Gran, FT.
‘In Trevor Grundy’s household Oswald Mosley was a god and anti-Semitism a religion. Fifty years on, he tells how he escaped his hateful upbringing and how he discovered his mother’s terrible secret.’ Murray Armstrong, The Guardian.
‘Trevor Grundy’s childhood autobiography is a chilling confession which is bound to cause ripples. It reminds us how the corrosive influence of fascism dripped through British society from the House of Windsor to the proletariat.’ Julia Pascal, The Independent.
‘Young Grundy was fed on a diet of anti-Semitism, race hatred and the belief that all would be well when Mosley became Britain’s leader. Grundy describes his early years and escape from the shackles of Mosley’s Union Movement (the racist party he founded in 1948) with insight and humour. The surprise is that he can write about this with sanity and honesty.’ Stephen Boyd, The Sunday Times.
‘With both parents now dead, Trevor Grundy has at last been able to let in the light. He has written a remarkable book, an understated very English example of how evil and corruption in a family and a political movement were finally defeated by decency and truth.’ Anne Chisholm, Times Literary Supplement.
‘Memoir of a Fascist Childhood is a salutary reminder that ordinary people – star-struck women, spellbound children – were affected by what, for Mosley’s languid friends, often seemed like an upper-class game.’ Ben Pimlott, The Guardian.
‘Trevor Grundy was once a bright young hope of British Fascism. At the age of 17, he spoke at a meeting in Trafalgar Square on behalf of the Fascist movement and its leader Sir Oswald Mosley. How he got into this predicament, and then how he escaped, is an extraordinary story, revealing and pitiful at the same time.’ David Pryce-Jones, The Evening Standard.
‘The very fact of his being able to write so dispassionately and so well about such strange beginnings is a kind of victory for the human spirit.’ Robert Hanks, The Independent on Sunday.
‘This book is compelling and moving. You can get books that tell you more facts about fascism. But nothing else offers the colour and texture of the times and the people.’ Francis Beckett, New Statesman.
‘Trevor Grundy’s survival is remarkable. And his book is salutary, because it is often funny and tells effectively of Fascism as farce. Accounts solely of gruesomeness have been told often enough and can encourage what they aim to defeat.’ Nicholas Mosley, Daily Telegraph.
‘It is as if someone brought up in the asylum eventually got over the wall to bring the world tales of lifelong derangements, dangerous obsessions, malevolent stupidities and the crippled soul of permanently damaged inmates. Grundy’s account of this is simply written but is clearly propelled by anger at a life so distorted. His journalistic skills are employed to great effect to produce a crisp, no-frills memoir of shocking intensity.’ David Nathan, Jewish Chronicle.
