Wilfred Risdon
His life and career encompassed coal mining, trade union work, First World War service with the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), political and animal welfare activism.
Wilfred Risdon was born in Bath, Somerset, England, on 28 January 1896, the youngest of ten surviving children of Edward George Fouracres Risdon (1855–1931), a bespoke boot and shoe maker born in Devonport, Devon, and Louisa née Harris (1851–1911) from Exeter, Devon, who also worked intermittently as a shoe machinist.
At the time, many Somerset coal miners moved to South Wales for better career prospects, and at some stage, Risdon joined the exodus.
Risdon finished his war service with the rank of sergeant but had also suffered shell shock, which affected his heart for the rest of his life.
[3] One of those links was with Fircroft College, "a residential college for working men" and so, as well as meeting his future wife at one of the socialist summer schools in the Birmingham area, he also encountered for the first time his future colleague, mentor and employer, Oswald Mosley, most probably at the 1925 Independent Labour Party (ILP) Easter Conference in Gloucester.
Mosley, a recent convert to socialism, was determined to dislodge one of the highest profile members of the "Birmingham Caucus",[4] Neville Chamberlain.
He was only narrowly defeated at Ladywood, Birmingham, in the 1924 election, and that aspiration had to take second place to his desire to return to Parliament, which he was able to do in 1926 albeit in an adjacent constituency, Smethwick.
[6] However, by then, Mosley had already started making plans for a new political party, including an office at One Great George Street, Westminster, in January 1931, and the same month, the proposals contained in the Memorandum and the Manifesto were published as a 61-page pamphlet, A National Policy, with the authors given as Aneurin Bevan, W. J.
His first major responsibility for the fledgling party was as election agent for Allan Young at the April 1931 by-election at Ashton-under-Lyne, a Labour seat, near Manchester.
The Labour supporters were angry at their candidate being beaten into second place and formed a raucous mob outside the polling station, but Mosley faced them down and commented to Risdon, "We saw worse than this in the war, Bill".
[10] Mosley meanwhile initiated a plan for an "active force" of stewards (forerunners of the later controversial "Blackshirts"), who were supplied in part by a nationwide network of athletic clubs that was aimed at British youth.
Meanwhile, Mosley was moving ever closer to fascism, visited Italy in January 1932 to study the Italian version at close quarters and met Benito Mussolini.
[12] His main area of responsibility was organising Mosley's public meetings, the first of which was held at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 12 March.
A few months after the notorious Olympia meeting of 7 June that year, and the Blackshirt stewards were then accused of using excessive force in ejecting troublemakers.
Risdon had been in his new post for less than a year when he was arrested under Defence Regulation 18B, which facilitated internment without charge or trial, on 23 May 1940 as a potential fifth columnist, along with around 80 other present and former members of British Union, men and women, and taken to Brixton Prison, as was Mosley.
[16] His most audacious public relations coup came in 1964 when he engineered the move of the NAVS headquarters to 51 Harley Street in the heart of the medical establishment.
[17] It was ironic that Risdon died from a heart attack at his home in Harley Street on 11 March 1967, but his tireless work undoubtedly advanced the cause of anti-vivisection in Britain.
She was from Cardiff, south Wales, and already had two children, Sheila (born 1923) and Brian (5 September 1925 – 13 January 2003) from her previous marriage to Alfred Geen, a flour mill worker.
