The mysterious tale of England’s fascist cricket captain ...Middle East

In the corner of a graveyard just inside the South Downs National Park lies Arthur Gilligan, one of the most controversial, mysterious, and, perhaps, misunderstood England captains.

It’s an overcast October day in Stopham, West Sussex, six months after The i Paper first started investigating the Ashes tour Gilligan led the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) on in 1924-25.

The grounds of St Mary the Virgin church are hauntingly quiet. Yet the ghosts of Gilligan’s past have reverberated across the 100 years since that trip to Australia.

This all centres on suspicions that during an Ashes series that England, then playing under the auspices of MCC, lost 4-1, Gilligan and tour manager Frederick Toone acted as recruiting agents for the British Fascists (BF).

It is thought a tip-off from the Special Branch in London led to the pair being monitored by the Australian secret service, then known as the Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB), during the six-month tour that took in 11 towns and cities.

Who were the British Fascists?

The BF, formed in 1923 and inspired by Benito Mussolini sweeping to power in Italy the previous year, were the first fascist political entity in the UK.

The organisation, a forerunner to the more insidious and consequential British Union of Fascists (BUF) established by Oswald Mosley in 1932, were virulently anti-communist and, in the wake of the 1917 Russian Revolution, obsessed by the threat of Bolshevism at home and across the Empire.

Very much populated by those on the fringes of the British upper and middle classes, the group were seen as an extreme wing of the Conservative Party and, unlike other fascist groups of the time, namely Mussolini’s National Fascist Party and the Nazis in Germany, they were not intent on a hostile ascent to power.

The BF were nationalistic, xenophobic and antisemitic. But their ideology wasn’t necessarily radical for the time.

Still, the group had done enough to elicit the attention of the CIB and shortly after the Ashes tour concluded in March 1925, they learned that several BF branches had been established in major Australian cities.

Gilligan’s fascist links

It has been argued that Gilligan and Toone played a key role in this.

The theory was posited in a 1991 article for the Sporting Traditions journal by Australian historian Andrew Moore.

Titled “The Fascist Cricket Tour of 1924-25”, Moore argued. “Of course it may be totally coincidental that the Australian chapter of the British Fascists was established so soon after the MCC tour.

“But, on balance, it seems likely that Arthur Gilligan simply followed the advice issued by the Fascists’ Recruiting and Propaganda Department. This was to ‘Talk about the movement to everyone you meet’ and ‘Always carry at least one enrolment form and one of each of the other pamphlets with you wherever you go’.

“The literature of the Fascists probably arrived in the luggage that Gilligan and Toone brought to Australia in 1924.”

It is a fascinating study that has been cited many times since. There is just one problem. Having examined the source material, there are significant doubts about whether Gilligan and Toone did circulate fascist propaganda during the tour.

There is no question about Gilligan’s association with the BF. He even wrote an article for their newspaper, The Bulletin, in May 1925 headlined: “The spirit of fascism and cricket tours”.

In it he writes: “In these cricket tours it is essential to work solely on the lines of Fascism, i.e. the team must all be good friends, and out for one thing, namely, the good of the side, and not for any self-glory.”

Inside the archives

Gilligan’s fascist links, at least for a limited period, are not in question. Yet this story does have plenty of question marks.

The i Paper’s investigation looked at Australian secret service files, MCC tour records at Lord’s, national archives in the UK and Home Office records on fascist activity during the period.

Key to this is the secret service (CIB) file titled “The British Fascist samples of literature circulated in NSW [Box 1]” that forms the bedrock of Moore’s study.

It is unknown how many people other than Moore had looked at this box of documents labelled 318393 before The i Paper had it digitised last summer.

Located half an hour’s drive away from Sydney in the National Archives of Australia research centre in Chester Hill, New South Wales, it was surprising nobody else had digitised it before now given how many had referenced Moore’s article.

Looking at the file, something did jump out.

Of its 54 pages, 22, including a covering note and cover sheet written by the CIB, are undated. The other 32 are dated – but after the time the MCC cricketers left England in September 1924.

This includes a partial copy of the May 1925 edition of The Bulletin that contained Gilligan’s article.

In all, almost 60 per cent of the file was dated after the English squad set sail for Australia.

Some of the undated items, including BF enrolment forms and propaganda sheets, could indeed have been brought to Australia by members of the touring party.

But the fact that so much was dated after England had left home casts doubt on the claim that BF literature “probably arrived in the luggage that Gilligan and Toone brought to Australia in 1924”.

It begs the question of whether there was already an established postal route from the UK to Australia for BF documents before the tour had started.

And if so, is it reasonable to suggest that perhaps all the BF literature collected by the CIB in 1924 and 1925 in file 318393 came by post or was brought to Australia by individuals other than Gilligan or Toone?

Moore is now retired. He proved hard to track down. But after finally locating him, he did reply to an initial email.

Yet he declined several requests to speak either on or off the record. I later asked, via email, about the documents dated after England had left for Australia.

Did he think these were sent by post, or brought to Australia by somebody else?

He politely declined to comment.

The 1924-25 Ashes

This is not to say Moore’s conclusion was not reasonable. But there are questions about Gilligan’s activities on that 1924-25 tour.

These questions are important given he has largely been airbrushed from history since Moore’s article was published 15 years after his death in 1976.

Sussex, the county Gilligan captained with distinction and where he later became chairman, knocked down the stand bearing his name in 2010 during a ground redevelopment. It was replaced by a media centre that does not bear his name.

The modern-day perception of Gilligan is wildly different from the one when he was alive. During his time as England captain, he was lauded for his diplomacy and popularity.

One telegram from the touring party in Australia back to the MCC in October 1924 reads: “The critics at Perth declare there is something of the electric spark about everything Gilligan does.”

By this time, his bowling, which had first seen him called up by England in 1922, had deteriorated following injury.

But his off-the-field savoir faire brought universal praise from the Australians, who lavished gifts on him during the tour, including a kangaroo he later donated to Melbourne Zoo.

A product of Dulwich College and Cambridge University, Gilligan, who rose to the rank of major with the Lancashire Fusiliers during the First World War, was a gentleman in the traditional cricketing sense when the sport was still divided between amateurs and professionals.

He was notable for fighting for the rights of professionals, too, at a time when there was much snobbery about those who were paid to play the game.

He was the perfect figurehead for MCC in Australia. The rave reviews that followed him around the country were in stark contrast to results on the field, with defeats in four of the five Tests extending England’s 13-year wait for an Ashes series win.

It was perhaps closer than the scoreline suggested, with Gilligan’s men only losing the third Test in Adelaide by 11 runs and winning the fourth by an innings.

Opening pair Jack Hobbs and Herbert Sutcliffe also dominated the runscoring charts, while seam bowler Maurice Tate, Gilligan’s team-mate at Sussex, took 38 wickets, still the most by an Englishman in an away Ashes series.

Events on the field were nowhere near as dramatic as those off it, though. As well as Gilligan and Toone being monitored by secret service agents, Australian captain Herbie Collins, a renowned gambler, was offered £100 to fix the third Test.

Cricket Australia’s own website – cricket.com.au – says: “Despite vowing to ‘throw the man [who offered him the money] downstairs’ people still questioned Collins’ choice of bowlers on the final day as Australia wrapped up the tight win.”

Meanwhile, Johnny Douglas, England’s vice-captain, was a passenger in a fatal car crash that saw the driver, a local businessman, killed when his vehicle collided with a horse and cart on a Melbourne street as he was returning from a function before the fourth Test.

The day after England won that match, Douglas, who injured his arm in the crash, was compelled to attend a Melbourne morgue to give evidence at the inquest into the death.

The incident was barely mentioned in the British press.

It says much about the lack of scrutiny cricketers of the time were under, especially compared to their modern counterparts.

His post-England career

Yet the main plotline of the tour remains Gilligan’s fascist links. If we accept there is some doubt about how strong or sustained these leanings were, the complexities surrounding his character deepen when taking into account his actions when captaining an MCC tour to India in 1926-27.

With 26 matches against mainly non-white local teams, journalist and writer Mihir Bose states, in his book The magic of Indian cricket, that Gilligan “met Indians on terms of perfect equality”. He is even credited with encouraging them to set up their own board so they could gain full international status. In 1932, India played their maiden Test at Lord’s, with Bose saying Gilligan’s influence was “immense”.

While there is no doubt Gilligan encouraged India to come into the international fold, his tour report from 1926-27, kept in the MCC library at Lord’s, presents a slightly different picture of his attitude, with, among other things, complaints about the trains, sportsmanship of the opposition and hotel staff.

Still, his behaviour in India was strikingly different to what most people would associate with fascism, and even the prevailing colonial world view – including explicit ideas of racial superiority – held by many British people at the time.

Gilligan’s last documented link with the BF, an article for the British Lion, previously The Bulletin, came in June 1927.

But there is no evidence he had any association with Mosley’s BUF in the 1930s. Indeed, a search of the Home Office database on British fascism during that period brought up nothing on Gilligan.

This suggests his association with fascism ended well before the end of his playing career in 1932, if not earlier.

That is backed up by his role as an RAF welfare officer during the Second World War. Fascists were interned without trial during the war under Defence Regulation 18B.

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By now Gilligan was already a popular cricket journalist and radio commentator.

However, his legacy has been muddied further by involvement in perhaps the most controversial episode in the history of English cricket, when Basil D’Oliveira was not selected for the 1968-69 tour of apartheid South Africa.

The Cape Town-born all-rounder, classified as “Cape Coloured” by the apartheid regime, was eventually picked following an injury to Warwickshire’s Tom Cartwright.

It led to the cancellation of the tour by the South African government, who regarded the inclusion of the mixed-race D’Oliveira as a direct challenge to their regime.

The whole tawdry episode left a lasting stain on the reputation of those involved.

Gilligan was MCC president at the time and although he was involved in selection discussions, his influence was thought to be negligible, with treasurer Gubby Allen regarded as the most dominant administrator in the room.

Peter Oborne, D’Oliveira’s biographer, wrote: “It would be wrong to make too much of Gilligan’s embarrassing past. Given presidents are appointed for only a year, it was a very strong president indeed who could impose his personality on the permanent MCC secretariat and Gilligan was not a strong president.”

Like his actions in Australia in 1924-25, Gilligan’s part in the D’Oliveira affair remains a mystery given the minutes of the selection meeting have never come to light.

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Maybe, his life, and what has been uncovered since his death, is a useful lesson for us all.

People are complicated. Not everything in life is black and white.

And the longer time passes and perceptions of the world shift, those shades of grey become ever more pronounced.

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