Militaria: Rare WW1 1918 Khaki Pattern Royal Air Force Pilo...

Hammer

£800

Militaria:

Rare WW1 1918 Khaki Pattern Royal Air Force Pilots Service Dress Tunic, Breeches Ft Lieutenant Henry Drummond-Wolfe, later as a Conservative MP he gained notoriety for his leanings towards fascism and Oswald Mosely. The tunic bears a label for Walter and Co Military Taylors and has a name tag sewed into the collar Henry Drummond-Wolfe as do the breeches.

Henry Drummond Wolff was educated at Radley and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst and from 1917-1919 was in the Royal Flying Corps and the RAF. Henry Drummond Wolff was elected Conservative member for Basingstoke at a by-election in March 1934.

Such was the notoriety of Drummond Wolff with regards to his support for Nazism that he was used as an unofficial intermediary with Nazi Germany during the late 1930s. He was one of a number of leading British figures who regularly visited Germany in 1939 to hold talks with representatives of the Nazi government in an effort to avert war. Officially, such talks were not sanctioned by the government but in fact they were generally arranged with the support of Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, his Undersecretary R.A. Butler, or even Neville Chamberlain himself. In 1939, Conservative Central Office operative and former MI5 spy, Sir Joseph Ball, acting on behalf of Chamberlain, facilitated four lengthy visits to Germany by Drummond Wolff, who undertook negotiations with Helmuth Wohlthat and Walther Hewel, political advisers to Hermann Göring and Adolf Hitler respectively, amongst others. In the last of those trips, Drummond Wolff even held talks with Göring himself. However, the meeting accomplished little because, by that point, Drummond Wolff was so pro-Nazi that he would agree with the Nazi view and simply present it to the government, rather than suggesting compromises. A leading industrialist, his visits to Germany were excused as being on behalf of the Council of Empire Industries Association, of which Drummond Wolff was a leading member.

MANNEQUIN NOT INCLUDED