Archibald Henry Maule Ramsay (4 May 1894 – 11 March 1955) was a British Army officer who later went into politics as a Scottish Unionist Member of Parliament (MP). From the late 1930s, he developed increasingly strident antisemitic views. In 1940, after his involvement with a suspected spy at the United States embassy, he became the only British MP to be interned under Defence Regulation 18B.
In 1939, Ramsay formed the explicitly pro-Nazi Right Club, intending to unify far-right extremists across Britain. According to reports by MI5, he was plotting a fascist coup, intended to take place if and when German troops landed on British soil. In furtherance of this plan, he placed informants within the police, the Ministry of Economic Warfare, Air Ministry censorship branch, and Churchill's War Cabinet.
Family and early life Ramsay was from a Scottish aristocratic family; his grandfather was Sir Henry Ramsay, a younger brother of George Ramsay, 12th Earl of Dalhousie. He was educated at Eton College and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, then in September 1913 was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards. After the outbreak of the First World War, Ramsay served in France for two years, then received a severe head injury and transferred to the War Office in London. Here he met and on 30 April 1917 married Lady Ismay Crichton-Stuart, the only daughter of Jenico Preston, 14th Viscount Gormanston and widow of Lord Ninian Crichton-Stuart MP, who had been killed on active service in 1915. His wife was the mother of three surviving children. The couple later had four sons together; the eldest died on active service in 1943.
As the war was coming to an end, Ramsay served at the British War Mission in Paris. He was placed on the half-pay list "on account of ill-health, caused by wounds" in 1920 and retired from the Army in 1922 with the rank of captain. He spent the 1920s as a company director, near Arbroath, Angus, and became active in the Unionist Party. In the 1931 general election, Ramsay was elected as MP for Peebles and Southern Midlothian. He was not considered a potential candidate for high office; the most senior appointment he obtained was as a Government member of the Potato Marketing Board. Ramsay was regarded as a "gentleman politician" that was common in rural Scotland at the time, a scion of the Scottish aristocracy, a graduate of Eton and Sandhurst who had served in the British Army, and lived in a castle. Ramsay represented a rural constituency in the House of Commons, and almost all of his questions in the House of Commons prior to 1937 related to agricultural questions, especially Scottish agriculture. Ramsay was generally known as "Jock" instead of Archibald or "Archie", and was popular in his seat.
Spanish Civil War After the Spanish Civil War broke out, Ramsay became a strong supporter of the Nationalists under Francisco Franco, largely arising out of his opposition to the violent anti-clericalism of the Spanish Republicans and their attacks on the Roman Catholic Church. Ramsay was a Protestant, but his religious zeal led him to side against the "godless" Spanish Republic. In the early months of the war, he objected in Parliament to what he saw as bias in BBC news reports on Spain; he pointed to links between Spanish Republicans and the Soviet Union. The British historian Richard Griffiths noted that Ramsay's career up to 1937 had been "fairly uneventful" with him playing the part of a Conservative backbencher holding the standard views associated with a Tory MP, but the Spanish Civil War radicalised him. The news that the Soviet Union had intervened in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Spanish Republic was taken by him as a sort of declaration of war upon himself, and he committed himself to the victory of the Spanish Nationalists over the "godless" Spanish Republicans. In 1937, the German "pocket battleship" Deutschland which had been operating off the coast of Spain in support of the Nationalists was damaged in a Soviet air attack. In a speech in the House of Commons on 4 June 1937, Ramsay called the air attack on the Deutschland as having been "organised by international Communist agencies with the object of embroiling as many countries as possible in an European war". In July 1937, he denounced France for signing a military alliance with the Soviet Union in 1935, and called the Franco-Soviet alliance an opportunity for "Soviet subversive propaganda", which was "a more formidable weapon than the Soviet Army" to threaten Great Britain.
Late in 1937, Ramsay formed the 'United Christian Front' to combat attacks on Christianity "which emanate from Moscow". Many distinguished peers and churchmen joined, but the organisation was criticised in a letter to The Times by senior religious figures, including William Temple (Archbishop of York) and Donald Soper. The objectors said that while they supported Christian unity, they could not support the United Christian Front, as it was mainly concerned with the Spanish Civil War and "adopts a view of it which seems to us ill-founded".
Ramsay became aware of a plan to hold a conference of freethinkers in London in 1938, which was being organised by the International Federation of Freethinkers. Together with his supporters in Parliament, he denounced this as a "Godless Conference", organised by a Moscow-based organisation. On 28 June 1938, he asked for permission to introduce as a Private Member's Bill the "Aliens Restriction (Blasphemy) Bill" to prohibit conference attendees from entering Britain; he won the vote by 165 to 134, but the bill went no further. Ramsay's opposition to communism led him to look to other countries for examples. On 13 January 1938, he had given a speech to the Arbroath Business Club in which he observed that Adolf Hitler's antipathy to Jews arose from his knowledge "that the real power behind the Third International is a group of revolutionary Jews".
Some time later in 1938, he read The Rulers of Russia by a reactionary Roman Catholic priest from Ireland, Father Denis Fahey, which contended that of 59 members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1935, 56 were Jews, and the remaining three were married to Jews. Ramsay became a believer in anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and credited the Jews with being the guiding force behind the English Civil War with Oliver Cromwell acting as their agent against King Charles I. Ramsay also blamed the Jews for the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War. He become convinced as he put it that "Bolshevism is Jewish" and that Nazi Germany was the world's only hope as Hitler was the only world leader "who grasped to the full the significance of these happenings and perceived behind the mobs of native hooligans the organisation and driving power of World Jewry". At the same time, Ramsay was becoming ever more sympathetic to Germany; in September, he wrote to The Times to defend the right of the Sudetenland to self-determination.
On 15 November 1938, Ramsay was invited to a luncheon party at the German Embassy in London, where he met British sympathisers with Nazi Germany, including Barry Domvile. In December he introduced another Private Member's Bill called the "Companies Act (1929) Amendment Bill", which would require shares in news agencies and newspapers to be held openly and not through nominees. In his speech promoting the Bill, Ramsay claimed the press was being manipulated and controlled by "international financiers" based in New York City who wanted to "thrust this country into a war". Ramsay was given permission to introduce his Bill by 151 to 104; again it went no further.
Controversy On 10 January 1939 Ismay Ramsay gave another speech to the Arbroath Business Club, at which she claimed the national press was "largely under Jewish control", that "an international group of Jews ... were behind world revolution in every single country" and that Hitler "must ... have had his reasons for what he did". The speech was reported in the local newspaper and attracted the attention of the rabbi of the Edinburgh Hebrew Congregation, Salis Daiches, who wrote to The Scotsman challenging Mrs Ramsay to produce evidence. Ramsay wrote on her behalf citing Father Fahey's booklet, and the resulting correspondence lasted for nearly a month—including a letter from eleven ministers of the Church of Scotland in the County of Peebles repudiating the views of their MP.
Some members of Ramsay's local Unionist Association in Peebles were not pleased by what they considered negative publicity. However, Ramsay reassured them that he would continue to be a supporter of Neville Chamberlain and the National Government. Ramsay made attempts to make controversial speeches to private meetings rather than in public. On 27 April he spoke to a branch of the (antisemitic) Nordic League in Kilburn, London, attacking Neville Chamberlain for introducing conscription "at the instigation of the Jews" and claiming that the Conservative Party "relies on ... Jew money".
The Right Club
After the controversy over Mrs Ramsay's January speech died down, Ramsay decided to influence others so that they would rid the Conservative and Unionist Party of its alleged Jewish control. To this end, he set up the Right Club in May 1939, noting down those who had joined in a red leather-bound and lockable ledger (the "Red Book"). There were 135 names on the men's list and 100 on a separate ladies' list; the members of the Right Club include a broad spectrum of those known to be antisemitic (including William Joyce and the Member of Parliament John Hamilton Mackie), those who were in some respects "fellow travellers" with antisemitism, and some friends of Ramsay who may have joined without knowing the actual functions of the club. Ramsay wrote in 1952: "The main object of the Right Club was to oppose and expose the activities of Organised Jewry in the light of the evidence which came into my possession in 1938... Our hope was to avert war, which we considered to be mainly the work of Jewish intrigue centred in New York". The founding of the Right Club in May 1939 was a direct response to the Danzig crisis, which had threatened war with Germany, and reflected Ramsay's unhappiness over the foreign policy of the Chamberlain government. Ramsay kept the membership of the Right Club a secret, but known members of the Right Club included William Joyce, Admiral Wilmot Nicholson, Frances Eckersley and Anna Wolkoff. At its early meetings, the 5th Duke of Wellington took the chair.
While Ramsay was attempting to launch the Right Club, he spoke at a meeting of the Nordic League at the Wigmore Hall at which a reporter from the Daily Worker was present and reported Ramsay as saying that they needed to end Jewish control, "and if we don't do it constitutionally, we'll do it with steel" – a statement greeted with wild applause. The popular magazine John Bull picked up on the report and challenged Ramsay to contradict it or explain himself. Ramsay's local newspaper, the Peeblesshire Advertiser, made the same challenge and Ramsay responded by admitting he had made the speech, citing the fact that three halls had refused to host the meeting as evidence of Jewish control. During the Danzig crisis, Ramsay was one of the few MPs who continued to defend Nazi Germany on the floor of the House of Commons even as Britain moved closer and closer to war with Germany as the crisis intensified in the summer of 1939. Griffiths noted that there had been other MPs who expressed pro-Nazi feelings before the crisis, but almost all of them chose to distance themselves from their past views in 1939 lest they lose their seats in the next general election, and Ramsay along with Cyril Culverwell were 'eccentric' MPs who continued to express such views, regardless of the damage they were doing to their re-election chances.
Outbreak of war