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Rotha Lintorn-Orman is a British dissident, writer and politician. Lintorn-Orman is notable for founding the short-lived British Legion, a fringe political party advocating national conservatism and ultra-royalism, just prior to the start of the British Revolution. In the post-revolution period she founded the loyalist terrorist, the Legion of St. George which was the Union's first major anti-syndicalist organisation to operate across the country.
Biography[]
Early Life and the Weltkrieg[]
Born as Rotha Beryl Lintorn Orman in Kensington, London, she is the daughter of Charles Edward Orman, a major from the Essex Regiment, and his wife, Blanch Lintorn, née Simmons. Her maternal grandfather is Field Marshal Sir Lintorn Simmons. The Orman family adopted the surname of Lintorn-Orman in 1912.
With her friend Nesta Maude, Lintorn-Orman was among the few girls who showed up at the 1909 Crystal Palace Scout Rally wanting to be Scouts which led to the foundation of the Girl Guides. In 1908 they had registered as a Scout troop, using their initials rather than forenames. In 1911 she was awarded one of the first of the Girl Guides' Silver Fish Awards.
In the Great War, Lintorn-Orman served as a member of the Women's Volunteer Reserve and with the Scottish Women's Hospital Corps as an ambulance driver. She was decorated for her efforts during the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917 but was sent home, invalid with malaria. In 1918 she became head of the British Red Cross Motor School in Piccadilly to train drivers in the battlefield. In these early years she developed a strong sense of British nationalism, and became a staunch monarchist and imperialist.
Post-Weltkrieg Politics[]
Following Lintorn-Orman's war service, she returned home bitter and rudderless. With the war being fought for nothing and returning home to find glory and public positions snatched up by men, she drifted into alcoholism. She moved to a dairy farm in Somerset, but she missed active duty and began to spurn female fashion norms. Opting to crop her short to a more masculine look and wear shirts, ties and a fedora along with displaying her medals on dinner jackets. Contemporaries found her androgyny highly odd but she cared little for the judgments against her.
By 1921 she began to associate with radically far-right circles and blame the defeat at the hands of the Liberal-led Coalition government and liberal democracy in general. According to her own testimony the victory of the Communards in France and the ongoing labour dispute concerning disgruntled miners led to an unusual Spring epiphany. Shortly after Black Friday, while weeding her kitchen garden, she came to the realisation that socialist infiltration of Britain had ruined the nation and it was up to 'brave patriots' to save Britain from the scourge of organised labour and socialism. She immediately placed an advertisement in the right-wing journal The Patriot seeking prospective anti-syndicalists. This led to the foundation of the British Legion on the 6th of May that year, an ultraconservative paramilitary political group, in her words as a response to the growing strength of the Labour Party, a source of great anxiety for the virulently anti-syndicalist Lintorn-Orman. She felt Labour was too prone to advocating class conflict and internationalism, two of her pet hates. Harold Nicolson, who had briefly met Lintorn-Orman in London, claimed that 'what terrified her more than the thought of the Communard flag fluttering above Buckingham Palace was the prospect of watching her life seep into the herbaceous borders, tending to nature but never mastering it.'
Financed by her mother Blanch, Lintorn-Orman's party nonetheless struggled due to her preference for remaining within the law and her continuing ties to the fringes of the Conservative Party.
Lacking a real ideological basis at its inception, it found more cohesion through a shared fear and hatred of left wing politics, having scattered beliefs that focused mostly on economic measures to support the aristocracy and a complex organisational structure as a result. The party became notorious for claims of inflated membership such as the ridiculous notion it had upwards of 200,000 members. Despite its byzantine organisational structure, it was able to establish local branches across the country and small paramilitary organs, primarily filled with Weltkrieg veterans which formed the basis of its paramilitary, the British Defence League. The BCL also had female-only paramilitary units, and entirely separate female structure for its sizable female membership. To encourage the involvement of mothers it created the 'British Children's Club', as a creche and after-school nursery care for party members known for its short stint holding middle-class garden parties and days to the country for its member families. At one of the club's Christmas parties, Lintorn-Orman dressed up as Father Christmas and dispensed presents.
Despite her pleas to the contrary, Lintorn-Orman was essentially a Tory by inclination but was driven by strong anti-syndicalism and attached herself to more authoritarian and Royalist themes out of a growing interest in the politics of Germany. This interest in Germany spurred a schism in the group when R. B. D. Blakeney led a mixture of party moderates like himself and elements hostile to the leadership to defect to the newly created and equally short-lived National Conservative League. The rump of the BCL then participated in numerous schemes to re-energise the organisation, with the most notable being attaching itself to Ulster Loyalism but these plans were cut short by the outbreak of civil war. The victory of Labour in the 1923 election saw increased interest in membership but also terrified Lintorn-Orman greatly, so much so according to contemporary accounts she began ordering her followers to begin stockpiling weapons in preparation for a forth-coming civil war and stepped up recruitment efforts for the paramilitaries. Sources from the period indicate that Lintorn-Orman had planned to build a 'massive private army' of some half a million men, that could be 'mobilised in less than 24 hours' to launch an insurrectionary counter-coup in case a Labour government attempted a self-coup.
The Revolution & Reactionary Activism[]
An associate of Lintorn-Orman and British exile, Leopold Canning, claimed that Lintorn-Orman had gotten the idea to save Britain from syndicalism one day in the summer while she was weeding her kitchen garden. Canning also claimed that when Lintorn-Orman learned of the outbreak of civil war hostilities she was 'thrilled it was time to smash up the reds'. She had petitioned for a place in the National Government and offered the BCL to the newly created Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies but she was rejected on both accounts. Spurned by the government, she had began organising the remains of the BCL into a combined far-right militia force via its paramilitary wing and established the Q-Division in its place. Nevertheless, this group gradually drifted from her leadership to undertake independent ventures and Lintorn-Orman focused on her own military volunteering. She initially took up a position with the government propaganda office before briefly serving as an ambulance driver and motorcycle courier towards the end of the conflict.
Lintorn-Orman's career in the civil war was largely undistinguished and marked by repeated attempts to solicit her way into the National Government. Despite her movement having collapsed, she still regarded herself as a major politician in opposition to the 'Reds' and hoped that the civil war could elevate her career. Following the conflict's end, she opted to remain in Britain, to this dismay of her mother, and involved herself with counter-revolutionary guerrillas. An ardent Loyalist, she became an administrative organiser and courier for the Loyalist League, later becoming the editor of its newspaper after being seen as a 'prophet' by many Loyalists for her supposed prediction of the civil war. Lintorn-Orman spent the next year living around East Anglia and was a minor figure in the loyalist movement prior to her arrest. Around the Summer of 1926, Linton-Orman was captured by the SOE and sentenced to internment, with English Patriot operations consequently drying up. In prison, she remained as committed to her beliefs as before and began to interact with other far-right figures. At the end of her internment in the winter of 1926, she founded the Legion of St. George between herself and other far-right associated prisoners and was shortly released as part of a general amnesty.
Outside of prison, Lintorn-Orman found work running a hotel in Southwold, Suffolk, which she despised and felt was beneath her. The Legion was based out of the basement of the building and she ran a secret publishing outfit out of the hotel pub next door. The Legion of St. George began to attract interest after she started reprinting English Patriot and rapidly took on members from the collapsing Loyalist League. Unlike the League, which was more loose-knit and served to allow for cooperation between separate bodies, the Legion of St. George aimed to be a true political party and paramilitary terror group. Indeed, it was able to organise many terror attacks during its brief existence and its newsletter was spread across the nation. By late 1927 however, the scale and frequency of these attacks waxed and waned as did the movement's fortunes. Owing to its poorly organised nature it struggled to make any real impact outside of minor terror attacks.
Post Revolution Wilderness[]
Around late 1928 the movement was gradually falling apart and in an attempt to breathe new life into the organisation, Mrs D. G. Harnett, a close friend of Lintorn-Orman, revived attempts of the failed BCL to ally with Ulster Loyalism and potentially lead a Loyalist uprising against the Brugha government in Northern Ireland. The plans collapsed when it emerged that Harnett's allies in Ireland had only managed to recruit a force of 20 men who's only major activity was sending antisemitic letters to Robert Briscoe and other prominent Irish Jews. The Legion's final days were marked by an attempted merger with Graham Seton Hutchison's ephemeral 'National Workers & Farmers League' when it emerged that, short of having the 20,000 members in Mansfield alone as he claimed, the party had no other members beside himself and a misled aviator. English Patriot's publication became sporadic and by 1929 the group had apparently disappeared.
Neil Francis Hawkins, a once fellow traveller of the far-right and repeated subordinate of Lintorn-Orman, claimed that the Legion's 'collapse was inevitable' as Lintorn-Orman was an ineffective organiser and maintained clout entirely off of the funding of her mother Blanche. He claimed she 'was good at renting friends but bad at keeping them'. With the collapse of her political fortunes, she lapsed into alcoholism and drug abuse, with rumours in the town floating of 'salacious orgies' being hosted at her hotel. Her mother eventually discovered these happenings and threatened to cut off Lintorn-Orman from funding so in an attempt to rehabilitate herself, she returned to political activities in earnest and was arrested for sedition in 1930. It was here that she encountered the London barrister and loyalist, John Sanderson along with the royalist intellectual, Anthony Ludovici. Sanderson had taken on cases defending loyalist-aligned dissidents and had been into prison himself for sedition. He defended Lintorn-Orman in her trial and following her 2-month stint in prison, he provided her with works published by his 'English Mistery' society. Lintorn-Orman was 'impressed' by Sanderson and his works, immediately maintaining contact with both Sanderson and Ludovici though she never joined. In her own writings she admits to having become fascinated with Sanderson's concept of English nationalism as opposed to British imperialism.
For the next two years she was a sporadic contributor to the Mistery's journal and other underground far-right publications, going as far as to embrace antisemitism in an attempt to court political influence once-more. Nevertheless, she was denied entry into the exclusive Britons and the even more exclusive and mysterious Nordic League among other far-right groupings. Politically in the wilderness, she remained largely rudderless and only a fringe figure until 1932 when she was invited by Nancy Astor (who had maintained correspondence with her) to join the Committee for the Restoration of Great Britain. Lintorn-Orman attempted to pursue a leading role in the movement but was similarly rebuffed, ironically by many ex-BCL members, and forced to take a minor position as a conduit and organiser within Britain proper. She continued in this role, acting as an informal coastal smuggler and conduit of funds and information for the CRGB's elaborate web of loyalist partisans and terrorists. However, Nancy Astor wrote that 'Rotha remains very depressed, she misses when she was in action as she says. She talks of when our friends will rise up and cause another civil war to kick out the reds. She becomes restless and desperate. Really, I think she just misses the War.'
Disappearance & Exile in Europe[]
By 1934, Lintorn-Orman had become a notable name in the CRGB but was becoming increasingly depressed and reliant on drugs. Having relapsed into her alcoholism, Astor was informed by associates in Britain that Lintorn-Orman was 'attending meetings inebriated, if she attends them at all' and was becoming less dependable in the CRGB's smuggling chain. She became increasingly ineffective and refused visitors going in 1934 as she began to experience alcohol-related health issues. Sanderson, who still maintained contact with her, claimed that she had 'gone completely off the deep end' and was facing bankruptcy after her mother Blanche had cut off contact. Blanche Lintorn-Orman believed her daughter was being 'plied with booze and drugs' to hand over the money her mother was supplying her for political scheming.
By April of 1934 her hotel had closed down and Lintorn-Orman had disappeared. A missing person's notice was placed in the county registry by unknown persons though this was retracted only three weeks later. Her hotel was seized by the local council and the assets sold on, with it being speculated at the time among the local town and her far-right colleagues she may have died from her spiraling health issues.
However, just under a year later, Lintorn-Orman re-emerged in the city of Ghent, Belgium and living with her mother, Blanche. According to her testimony, she had faced bankruptcy and mounting health issues and opted to leave Britain so as to convalesce in Europe under the care of her mother. Having seemingly recovered, she began an active role in the British Exile movement again, being listed as a leading member of the CRGB and beginning speaking tours across European exile communities. She condemned the Norwegian May Revolution and helped organise the CRGB's British Emergency Relief Council as a response in helping British exiles in Norway evacuate to Germany.
Despite her return to involvement, she was briefly involved in scandal at the start of her return when she began canvassing a Belgo-British exile conference for her 'British Patriot's Society', an ephemeral organisation and probably a clandestine publishing front, that she claimed had 1,000 members in Britain. There is no evidence to indicate it existed and it was supplanted by a new organisation and publishing front: the English National Society. The ENS published works by William Sanderson (who may have been involved) and others on English nationalism, with it being regarded as a means of introducing Sanderson's works to the wider exile movement. Comparatively, the BPS is regarded as Lintorn-Orman's last-ditch attempt to regain control of the far-right underground and mostly campaigned against the Norwegian Revolution. The BPS/ENS had disappeared by the end of the year and the previously marginalised Lintorn-Orman was now listed as a member of the CRGB's Executive Council.