ABSTRACT
When considering the wartime situation of Jenks and his BUF comrades, it is easy to project backwards their ultimate fate, to imagine a miasma of failure and impending oblivion. In actuality, despite severe problems, they still had grounds for optimism. First in Italy and then Germany, fascism had gone from one triumph to the next; the Popular Front had squared up to it over Spain but had been defeated. The stunning victory of the Wehrmacht in Poland gave them no reason to doubt that the march of history was going their way. Writing to Pound – in an allusive way because of the possibility of censorship – Jenks said of the war: ‘I shall be surprised if it doesn’t effect a considerable clearance among certain things which we have reviled loud and long.’1
