ABSTRACT
With the advent of peace, movements such as the British People’s Party and the Constitutional Research Association (CRA) lost much of their raison d’être. The CRA’s lunches continued (now mainly at Brown’s Hotel). Lord Sempill became the chairman, and new members were added (including a number already well known to us from other activities of theirs, including John Scanlon, Captain Arthur Rogers, Colonel Creagh Scott and Edward Greene). But with the defeat of Nazi Germany, the impetus for activity had naturally agged. Edmonds, Domvile and others tried to formulate a new role for the group, and a number of new causes were taken up, including opposition (spearheaded by Domvile), based on the usual presumptions about International Money Power, to the Bretton Woods proposals for an international nancial system (NMM DOM 58). In another attempt to nd a role (possibly inuenced by Mosley’s new European initiatives) Edmonds at one stage declared that the future aim of the CRA would be ‘to further a western European union on an economic basis which should be Catholic, anti-Communist and opposed to international nance’ (TNA KV 2/ 874). The post-war activity for which CRA is best remembered
is, however, its espousal of the cause of the Nazi war criminals being tried at Nuremberg (a cause in which, it must be said, it stood alongside perfectly respectable gures like Bishop Bell of Chichester, Frank Pakenham (the future Lord Longford), Richard Rapier Stokes MP and Reginald Paget KC, MP) (Macklin, 2007: 126-33). After this, the group gradually faded away, and we hear no more of it.
