Name Henry Beamish | ||
Died March 27, 1948, Southern Rhodesia | ||
Henry Hamilton Beamish (2 June 1873 – 27 March 1948) was a leading British antisemite and the founder of The Britons.
The son of Rear-Admiral Henry Hamilton Beamish, who had served as an A.D.C. to Queen Victoria, Beamish was born in London. He served in the Second Boer War and settled in South Africa afterwards. However he left the country having decided that the Jews held too much influence there.
Returning to London in 1918, Beamish set up The Britons as a specifically antisemitic propaganda organisation and also became involved with the Silver Badge Party. He ran as an independent in a 1918 by-election in Clapham on an anti-immigrant platform, supported by right-wing MP Noel Pemberton Billing, but did not win, receiving 43% of the votes cast. Along with Lieutenant-Commander E.M. Frazer, Beamish produced a poster in 1919 denouncing Commissioner of Works Sir Alfred Mond (Alfred Mond, 1st Baron Melchett) as a traitor. This poster resulted in a libel suit filed by Mond, who was successful and was awarded £5000, although Beamish left Britain without paying.
Following his departure from Britain, Beamish travelled the world preaching anti-Semitism. He was one of the earliest developers of the Madagascar Plan for Jewish deportation. He spoke in Germany where he claimed, rather dubiously, to have taught Adolf Hitler. In the early 1920s Beamish announced that "Bolshevism was Judaism." He served as Vice-President of the Imperial Fascist League for a time and was a member of the Nordic League. In 1932 he addressed a meeting of the New Party alongside Arnold Leese on the subject of "The Blindness of British Politics under the Jew Money-Power", although he otherwise had little involvement with the initiatives of Oswald Mosley.
Described by a judge in South Africa in 1934 as an "anti-Jewish fanatic"., Beamish travelled to the United States in 1935 where he was actively working as a representative of the German government as a Nazi agent. In September 1936 he visited Japan, and then spoke at a meeting of the Canadian Nationalist Party in Winnipeg in 1936. before embarking on a major lecture tour of Nazi Germany as a guest of Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. He met fellow fanatical anti-Semite Julius Streicher in Nuremberg in January 1937. In the same year he spoke at several meetings in North America with Canadian fascist leader Adrien Arcand including some organized by the German American Bund.
Eventually he settled in 1938 in Southern Rhodesia, where he served as an independent MP and was interned in 1940 for his pro-Nazi sentiments. He remained President of The Britons until his death in Southern Rhodesia in 1948.