Page 117 - They Also Served

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Archibald Ramsay 1913.
Archibald Henry Maule Ramsay
was born in 1894. From a Scottish
aristocratic family, he attended Eton and
Sandhurst, where he was a cadet corporal
before being commissioned into the
Coldstream Guards in 1913. Serving in
France right from the start of the war
with the BEF, he sustained a severe head
wound and was invalided from the front
in early 1916. He was seconded to the War Office until 1918, then served with the British War Mission in Paris, retiring as a captain in 1920.
Living in Scotland, Ramsay became involved in politics
and successfully stood as a Conservative candidate for
Peebles and Southern Midlothian in the 1931 general
election. Regarded as likeable and charming, he was an excellent public speaker but not considered a candidate for high office, the pinnacle of his parliamentary career being a government member of the Potato Marketing Board. During the Spanish Civil War, Ramsay was a vocal supporter of the Nationalists under General Franco and a strong critic of the Russian involvement in the war and what he regarded as BBC bias against Franco. Over the next two years, Ramsay’s anti-communist views became intertwined with anti-Semitism as he began to drift towards support of European fascism. In May 1939, Ramsay founded The Right Club with William Joyce (later reviled as the wartime traitor ‘Lord Haw Haw’) as an early member as well as the Duke of Wellington. The names of its members were kept in a lockable notebook, The Red Book. The anti-Semitic nature of the organisation was epitomised by its badge featuring an eagle killing a snake with the initials PJ, which stood for ‘Perish Judah’.
One of the last people to join The Right Club was Tyler Kent, a cypher clerk at the US embassy. He used his position to copy correspondence between Churchill and President Roosevelt, some of which were sent by an associate to Berlin. As Kent had diplomatic immunity, Ramsay entrusted the Red Book to him for safekeeping. However, Kent was under surveillance by MI5 and was arrested, his immunity waived by the ambassador, and the book seized. As the two were obviously connected,
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