ABSTRACT

Jenks’ primary contact at fascist headquarters was the BUF’s main ideologue after Mosley, Alexander Raven Thomson. Thomson was a Scot, who, during the 1920s, had worked for a German engineering firm and attended Heidelberg University. After a short time in the Communist Party of Great Britain, he joined the BUF in 1933 and soon became a top official.1 He had a reputation as a philosopher, having written Civilization as Divine Superman (1932), a development from Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918-1922). Contemporaries considered him ‘likeable, though reserved’, ‘a man of pleasant personality’.2 He summed up Jenks as a ‘sound writer, roots in soil’,3 and was involved with him initially as Director of Policy and editor of The British Union Quarterly and then, from April 1939, also as editor of Action. Jenks regularly visited London for meetings with Thomson and brought him his latest book, which was completed by May 1938.4

The Scot was probably among the ‘better-qualified students of national problems’, thanked in Spring Comes Again for providing ‘assistance and stimulus’.5 Originally, Jenks’ second book was to be published through the fascist book club that Thomson was planning.6 The second half of the 1930s was the moment of the political book club with the Left Book Club started by Victor Gollancz and the Right Book Club associated with W.A. Foyle and his daughter Christina.7 The British Union Book Club did not materialise and instead Spring Comes Again was issued in Spring 1939, under the imprint of The Bookshelf, of 85 Fetter Lane, in the City, the address of a BUF bookshop.8 Given the financial circumstances of the movement, it is probable that Jenks paid for all or part of its production.