Henry Hamilton Beamish

Who was Henry Hamilton Beamish?

Henry Hamilton Beamish was a leading British antisemite and the founder of The Britons.

The son of an admiral who had served as an A.D.C. to Queen Victoria, Beamish served in the Second Boer War and settled in South Africa afterwards. However he left the country having decided that the Jews held too much influence there.

Returning to London in 1918, Beamish set up The Britons as a specifically antisemitic propaganda organisation and also became involved with the Silver Badge Party. He ran as an independent in a 1918 by-election in Clapham on an anti-immigrant platform, supported by right-wing MP Noel Pemberton Billing, but did not win, receiving 43% of the votes cast. Along with Lieutenant-Commander E.M. Frazer, Beamish produced a poster in 1919 denouncing Commissioner of Works Sir Alfred Mond as a traitor. This poster resulted in a libel suit filed by Mond, who was successful and was awarded £5000, although Beamish left Britain without paying. Following his departure from Britain, Beamish travelled the world preaching antisemitism. He was one of the earliest developers of the Madagascar Plan for Jewish deportation. He spoke in Germany where he claimed, rather dubiously, to have taught Adolf Hitler. In the early 1920s Beamish announced that "Bolshevism was Judaism." He served as Vice-President of the Imperial Fascist League for a time and was a member of the Nordic League.