Richard Reynell Bellamy was brought up in the aftermath of the Great War of 1914-1918. For many years afterwards, men with severe disabilities and disfigurements were a common sight on the streets of Britain: the result of injuries sustained in the carnage of the trenches.

Long before the Great Depression of 1931 the pinched faces of hungry children told of widespread poverty in northern industrial towns in what was the richest Empire the world had ever seen. The jobs of their parents had long ago passed to the cheap sweated labour countries of Asia and elsewhere.

Bellamy was not one to grumble in the comfort of an armchair and leave the solution to others. He joined the Blackshirts almost at the start and went out onto British streets to fight for peace and prosperity through Mosley's policies of a high wage economy, economic autarky, a Corporate State - and no more wars unless Britain was attacked.

This brought him into daily conflict with communists, democratic socialists and capitalist supporters. But he remained true to what he believed in and in 1940 paid for it with imprisonment without charge or trial under the infamous Defence Regulation 18B.

In the course of his political odyssey Bellamy, came to know just about every British Blackshirt worth knowing and attended all the major Leader meetings and many local ones besides.

Towards the end of his life, at Oswald Mosley's request, he wrote it all down for posterity - providing this unique inside story of the British Union of Fascists.