Caroline Moorehead

IN AUGUST 1935, Mrs Wanda Luppis, wife of the Italian Consul, joined mothers from the Fascio Femminile, or Women's League, at Glasgow Central train station to see off a group of Italian-Scottish children aged 14 to 18 bound for fascist summer camps in Italy. She handed out ice-creams and smiled, as a reporter for L’Italia Nostra noted, with “maternal kindness” on the teenagers who were being dispatched to absorb the “purest feelings for the Fatherland” during their summer holidays.

Not long before, Mrs Luppis and her husband had inaugurated a new Italian consulate and Casa d’Italia in Glasgow in a lavishly restored house at 22 Park Circus, with columns in the entrance hall and fine plaster work, along with an Art Deco billiards room, a conference hall, a ballroom and a restaurant for Glasgow’s 2000 Italians, most of them members of the local fascio – the name taken from the Latin fasces, bundle, and used by prime minister Benito Mussolini to describe his bands of nationalist followers. For the celebration, the men and boys wore their blackshirts and fezzes and carried banners and there was much singing of Giovinezza, the fascist anthem. A contemporary census had estimated that by then 40 percent of the Italians living in Scotland – some 3000 people – were full members of fasci.

Glasgow had been home since the mid-19th century to a growing Italian community, many of the families following each other into exile from two impoverished areas, the Tuscan hill town of Barga, outside Lucca, and Piccinisco and Filignano just south of Rome. Some of the early arrivals were illiterate, spoke no English and had no trade. But they prospered making ice-cream and in fish and chip shops and set up mutual aid societies. Others, migrating north from the Italian enclave in Clerkenwell, London, brought skills as stonemasons, clockmakers, barbers and carpenters. By 1905, there were said to be 336 ice-cream shops in and around Glasgow, and the British Women’s Temperance Association was fighting hard to ban Sunday trading and to limit their weekday hours. Though fewer settled in Edinburgh, the Grassmarket became known as “little Italy”.

More Italians kept coming. And over the years these immigrants acquired a greater sense of being Italian, rather than Tuscan or Roman, a spirit of national identity much encouraged by the fascists after they came to power in Italy in 1922 – a country that was, after all, only unified in 1861. “Italianita”, a love for the “Patria” or fatherland and veneration for its Duce were exactly what Mussolini hoped to promote in the nine million or so Italians living abroad. Soon after the March on Rome, foreign fasci, to match those nationalist groups that had sprung up throughout Italy, began to form and an eager young fascist blackshirt called Giuseppe Bastianini was appointed by the Fascist Grand Council to “discipline and direct” the movement throughout the world.

At first somewhat slow to embrace fascism, the Italian emigres rallied to Bastianini’s call to “keep alight the flame of patriotic love among all of Italy’s sons”. The first British fascio was formed in London, among the more prosperous Italian businessmen and academics, and it was backed by the ambassador, as well as by the Italian faculty at London University. Mussolini called it “my first-born abroad”. Two of the first British chapters were in Scotland, in Glasgow and Edinburgh; other sections followed in Leith, Dundee, Greenock and Aberdeen. By the end of the decade there were fasci in Shanghai, Melbourne, Montreal, Calcutta, Singapore and Manchuria, described as “outposts of Italianita” and the “moral and spiritual colonizers” for the new Italy. Members were instructed to do what they could to counter any criticism of “misunderstood and defamed” fascist methods, and to see themselves as proud ambassadors “irradiating economic confidence and Italian culture”. Il Legionario, the worldwide paper of the foreign fasci, was described as the “beating heart of collective Italy”. Like ancient Rome, fascism was to give birth to a new civilisation and parties of school children from every corner of the world were sent home at Italy’s expense to learn how to become good fascists.

At first, Bastianini was intent mainly on recruitment and leisure activities. The Glasgow mothers who were members of the Scottish Women's Leagues put their sons into black shirts, shorts and fezes and sent them off on Saturdays to march, swim, cycle, box and play football. Mussolini and the fascists took sport and leisure seriously. In order for their model state to function, its citizens had to work for the national good but also use their leisure time productively, not frittering it away like “loafers, dandies and drunkards”. Leisure, as Mussolini saw it, was not an end in itself but a means of improving mind and body through discipline and self control. Under the Dopolavoro, the national agency set up to regulate after-work activities, Italian of all ages were corralled into playing team games, doing calisthenics and cycling while singing Giovinezza on all possible occasions. Men were instructed to become lean, willowy and sinewy. “I have no pity”, Mussolini declared, “for the fat”. The new Italian was to be “Herculean”, potent, granite-like and made of steel. In Glasgow a squadra azzurra of footballers challenged local Scottish teams, the matches often followed by supper dances in a restaurant, where “Duce, you are the Light of Italy” was sung.

Girls danced, knitted, played tennis and volley ball and gardened and they were given “doll drills” in which they were taught how to hold babies, for Mussolini liked his women in the home, producing children. On no account were they to be allowed to throw a discus or lift weights. (When it was suggested that they take part in rifle practice, so as to become “neither feeble nor gloomy”, Pope Pius X1 protested that if women raised their arms, it should “only and always be in prayer or charitable actions”.) The Italian press was ordered never to portray women with dogs (child substitutes), wasp waists (unsuited to child bearing and probably syphilitic) or excessively thin (probably sterile). The donna crisi – skinny, hysterical, decadent and cosmopolitan – was to be shunned in favour of the donna madre, rural, devout, tranquil and fertile.

The British government and press remained admiring of Mussolini long after the blackshirts had reduced Italian cities to battlegrounds and anti-fascist opponents had been arrested in their thousands and sent off to penal colonies in the south. Winston Churchill, returning from a visit to Italy, called Mussolini the “greatest living legislator”, while Daily Mail proprietor Lord Rothermere approvingly claimed that the Duce would probably dominate the history of the 20th century, much as Napoleon had dominated that of the 19th. But the British grew cooler after the Italian ambassador, Dino Grandi, pushed Mussolini to fund Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and Italian reporters took to pointing out the felicitous similarity between the two men.

Britain was not without its contingent of Italian anti-fascists – estimated by the Italian secret services as about 100 active members – who had been driven into exile by Mussolini’s increasingly repressive laws. Not that it was easy, after the 1920 Aliens Order, for Italians to enter Britain, other than by weekend excursion tickets from France. But, though few, these anti-fascists were extremely vocal, quick to publicise the “black terror” that had befallen their country and to document, through the few supportive left wing papers, the “burning and shooting” blackshirts.

Attacks on the anti-fascists were made in La Cronaca, later renamed L’Eco d’Italia and then Italia Nostra, a broadsheet started by fascist Italian veterans of the First World War. Its tone was belligerent. “Every fascist”, it warned, “is armed with a short stave.... and many have revolvers. The patience of fascists abroad has its limits”. According to La Cronaca, which gave generous coverage to Mussolini’s feats as a sportsman and to his extremely long speeches, there were two types of Italians living in exile. There were the “fossils and the living dead” who turned their back on the wholesome sporting and culture leisure activities provided by the Dopolavoro; and those who showed true “italianita”. Standards for belonging to a fascio – of which there were now 487 across the world – were high. The “antipatriots” guilty of betraying the Fatherland were liable to official sanction, suspension or expulsion.

In due course, the anti-fascists founded their own paper, Il Commento, which, though always so short of funds that it frequently failed to appear, staggered on for several years with its own diet of Mussolini jokes and attacks. Cartoons appeared showing the Duce and his followers as toads and flies. When Mussolini delivered a speech condemning violence that was “sporadic, individual, unintelligent, uncontrolled”, Il Commento asked: “What, then, is intelligent, controlled violence? Is it instructive, kindly, evolved, well-mannered, knowing, perspicacious, courteous, genial?”

Nor was the war between fascists and anti-fascists abroad limited to words. Between 1921 and 1932, 45 members of the various global fasci were killed, and 283 injured. Much was made of these “most pure fascist martyrs”.

In December 1934 there was a skirmish for the possession of wells at Wal Wal, on the ill-defined border between Italian Somaliland and Abyssinia. The Italians demanded compensation; the Ethiopians appealed to the League of Nations. Discussions grew more bitter and the fasci in England and Scotland became bastions of resistance to sanctions against Italy. A legion of Italian volunteers to go and fight in Africa was raised, with more than 100 men from the UK. In October 1935 Mussolini ordered the bombing of Addis Ababa and sent troops into Abyssinia from Eritrea and Somaliland. Though the campaign was extremely brutal, and the Italians used poison gas on civilians, with the Red Cross reporting that screaming women and children were “dying like flies”, Mussolini had never been more popular.

When on December 10 he called for a “day of faith” and invited Italians all over the world to donate their gold to the war, the Glasgow fasci collected the wedding rings of their female members. The community, boasted Italia Nostra, had presented “a symbol of homage and devotion”, and Glaswegian Italians joined the delegation carrying the gold to present to the ambassador in London. It was, it added, a just war, for the Ethiopians were barbarians, and Ethiopia a land of “slavery, lepers and public flogging”. By the time Mussolini declared to his delighted people that Italy at last possessed its own empire, 275,000 Ethiopians had been killed. In Britain, the fasci celebrated by holding “balls of victory”. In Rome, two sumptuously caparisoned camels with decorously robed keepers were brought from Africa to mount guard before Mussolini’s office in the Piazza Venezia.

But the British authorities were now becoming increasingly unsure of their strutting, martial Italian fascists. A wave of ill-feeling broke out and Italian children were called “dirty wee Tallies” in the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Several Glasgow families changed their names, the Nobile becoming Noble. In July 1936, the British government proposed that “informal and friendly suggestions” be made to the Italian government to close down their organisations in the UK since they might, in the event of war, become “ready made instruments of intelligence, espionage and sabotage”. Though no action was taken, the fasci themselves were growing less assertive. Speakers in the Casa d’Italia in Glasgow came to talk not about Italian victories but the glories of the weather and the countryside and the fact that the trains were not only efficient but cheap. Italy, one lecturer told his audience, “is the nursery of laws and customs”. Dr Ferruccio Luppis spoke on “Rimini in History and Love Poetry”.

When Mussolini, after nearly a year of neutrality, declared war on Britain and France in the summer of 1940, a mob of 3000 people attacked the Italians living in Leith and Edinburgh, who soon found themselves interned as enemy aliens. Whatever lingering attachment the Scottish Italians felt to their fascist Fatherland was further dispelled when 446 Italians drowned on the Andorra Star which sank off the Irish coast as it was transporting prisoners and internees to Canada. Though Scotland’s fasci were not formally disbanded until Mussolini’s fall in the summer of 1943, Scottish-Italian children in Leith, Dundee, Glasgow and Edinburgh had long since ceased parading in their little uniforms to the martial beat of Mussolini’s hymns.

A Bold and Dangerous Family by Caroline Moorehead is published by Chatto & Windus on 15 June, £20