Douglas Francis Jerrold

Jerrold became a director of Eyre & Spottiswoode in 1929, chairman in 1945 and retired in 1958. Between 1944 and 1948, Graham Greene was his director, in charge of the fiction list.[6]

Jerrold was at his core a Tory and was hopeful of a career in politics, but he was critical of the alliance between the Conservative Party and big business; he felt that the party had become too nakedly capitalist. His views were not popular with the party leadership, and in 1931, Jerrold's hopes of a parliamentary seat were dashed by Central Office.[7]

Sidelined in mainstream politics, Jerrold became editor of The English Review, which he ran from 1931 to 1935. He advocated "real Toryism as opposed to the plutocratic Conservatism represented by the official party", under the relatively liberal leadership of Stanley Baldwin.[7] He was a romantic anticapitalist and a devout Roman Catholic who was strongly attracted to the fascism of Mussolini's Italy, the Catholic nationalism of Franco,[8] and the rule of Antonio Salazar in Portugal as well as to that of Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria. In addition, Jerrold, unlike his English Review colleague, the historian Sir Charles Petrie, was an imperialist who was opposed to Britain's policy in India, which had recognised the inevitability of self-rule. Moreover, Jerrold favoured a greatly-strengthened executive government at home, if not an outright dictatorship.[9] If not a fascist, Jerrold was undeniably sympathetic to fascism.[10]

On 21 November 1933, Jerrold's English Review hosted a dinner, presided over by Lord Carson, which was intended to be the climax of Jerrold's campaign for a new corporatist approach to government. However, the dinner was not as successful as Jerrold hoped. The 350 guests were united in their opposition to the National Government but otherwise held divergent views. Soon afterwards, Jerrold gave his views on parliamentary democracy:

There is no folly more fashionable than the saying that the English will never tolerate a dictatorship. Under constitutional forms of a very flimsy character the English have invariably insisted on being governed either by a close oligarchy or a virtual dictatorship.... It is because the party machines have notably failed to govern that they are losing the public confidence, and unless Parliament under universal franchise can fulfil the indispensable task of leadership, a dictatorship is not only inevitable but necessary.

– Douglas Jerrold, Current comments, English Review, December 1933[11]

In 1945, he launched and ran a successor, the New English Review, later known as the English Review Magazine, with Charles Petrie and support from the Conservative Party. In 1950, it merged with the National Review.[12]

In a July 1933 article in the English Review, Jerrold argued that because of the threat of communism to Britain, "the forcible overthrow of Herr Hitler's administration would be a disaster".[13] Jerrold also joined the January Club, founded by Oswald Mosley in January 1934, to generate sympathy and some element of respectability for fascism and particularly to court conservative opinion.[14] The January Club was not explicitly fascist but was "in sympathy with the fascist movement". Meetings were held over dinners at London hotels, where its leaders advanced a corporatist agenda and insisted that "the present democratic system of government must be changed".[15] However, Jerrold was no Nazi and supported the efforts of Benito Mussolini to avenge the 1934 murder of Engelbert Dollfuss, which had been carried out in Austria by pro-Hitler forces.

During the Spanish Civil War, Jerrold strongly supported the Nationalist cause of General Francisco Franco[16] and was among those who argued that the destruction of Guernica had been caused not by Nationalist bombers but by retreating Republican forces.[17]

In his 1938 book The Future of Freedom: Notes on Christianity and Politics, Jerrold outlined his support for the pro-Catholic dictatorships of Franco and Mussolini. He wrote, "Christians not only can but must wish and pray for General Franco's success".[18]

Jerrold, in fact, took an active and personal role in Franco's successful coup. He had been involved in the events of July 1936, when Captain Cecil Bebb and Major Hugh Pollard piloted a de Havilland Dragon Rapide aircraft from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco, taking Franco with them and thereby igniting the Spanish Civil War. The flight itself was planned over lunch at Simpson's-in-the-Strand, where Jerrold met with the journalist Luis Bolín, London correspondent of the ABC newspaper and later Franco's senior press advisor. Jerrold then recruited Pollard to join the enterprise, along with Pollard's daughter Diana and one of her friends as "cover".[1][2]