‘The projection of Britain’ and the BC’s mission in Florence and worldwide

The foundation of a cultural institute that aimed to strengthen the Anglo-Italian alliance based on reciprocal cultural and political understanding must be seen in the wider context of the birth of British propaganda at the end of the First World War. This combination of ‘advertising’ and ‘diplomacy’, outside the sphere of the war propaganda published by the Ministry of Information, developed gradually from 1918 onwards. Initially the key player in this shift was the Foreign Office News Department, based on close collaboration between the Foreign Office (FO) and the national press. This new direction contrasted with the ideas that had driven the policy of British diplomats during the nineteenth century, which hinged on the conviction that the prestige of the United Kingdom was clear in the eyes of the world and therefore did not require explanation, especially after the ‘success’ achieved with victory in the First World War. The rise of anti-British propaganda first appeared at the end of the First World War, and stemmed in particular from Germany. Hit hard by defeat in the war and its treatment in the Treaty of Versailles, Germany aimed to damage Britain’s image and prestige abroad, as well as undermining its commercial interests (Taylor Reference Taylor1978, 244–264; Taylor Reference Taylor1981, 11–56).

Although there were some rudimentary moves made in response to the new political climate, the idea ‘that Britain must begin to take more positive steps to make [itself] better known and understood abroad’ became properly established for the first time in the late 1920s and early 1930s, culminating with the establishment of the British Committee for Relations with Other Countries in 1934 (Taylor Reference Taylor1981, 66). From the word go, the aim of the BC was to foster an appreciation of British culture and civilisation abroad. This was to be achieved by encouraging people to study and gain an understanding of English language and literature and by contributing to the development of the arts and progress in the sciences, engineering, philosophy and politics.

The attempt to spread knowledge of British culture, ideas and political life across the Continent and further afield was pursued through many channels, one of the main ones being the circulation of books highlighting the key principles of British life by founding and stocking libraries abroad (Donaldson Reference Donaldson1984 1–4, 22–24, 32; Coombs Reference Coombs1988, 1–6). The BC focused its efforts in this regard in 1935–1940 through a specific committee, the Books and Periodicals Committee, launched in 1935. As research by Douglas Coombs (Reference Coombs1988) reveals, from 1 April 1936 onwards plans were made to build generic English libraries in 96 institutions across 36 different countries, with a particular focus on structures like professional and research institutes and bodies dedicated to relations between Britain and foreign nations, generally focusing on the study and teaching of the English language and British society. This occurred at the Portuguese library at the University of Coimbra in 1934–1936 and in 1938 with the establishment of the Anglophil (sic) Society Library of the Chilean society of the same name. Many of the earliest libraries founded were tied to the reading rooms at the BC’s centres, for example in Lisbon, Alexandria, Baghdad and Valletta, where libraries were created in 1938–1939 (Coombs Reference Coombs1988, 7–8, 13).

It was during the second half of the 1930s that the exporting of books started to take root as a foreign policy tool, and therefore developed a growing role in international cultural diplomacy. The illuminating studies by Gary Kraske (Reference Kraske1985) and Richard Arndt (Reference Arndt2005) show that this trend was exemplified by the USA. The use of cultural and book-related policies as a tool to foster cooperation between the United States and Latin America took hold both in the Roosevelt government and within private institutions and funders such as the American Library Association and the Rockefeller Foundation from 1936 onwards, following the Conference for the Maintenance of Peace in Buenos Aires, and, more dramatically, following those held in 1938 and 1939, dedicated respectively to analysing relationships between the United States and American republics and inter-American cultural cooperation. The diplomats and heads of US funding bodies aimed to base this new relationship between the two Americas on an accentuation of American life, ideas and politics, similar to the concepts the United Kingdom had been promoting since 1935 in relation to South America, as well as to Europe and the Near East.

One of the main reasons both North America and the United Kingdom had to undertake this type of national advertising was the danger presented by the clear and well-structured cultural propaganda campaigns organised by the Western totalitarian regimes, devised with the aim of promoting their own political, economic and commercial interests through the creation of zones of influence, as happened in Latin America, for example (Taylor Reference Taylor1978, 257–259; Kraske 1985, 4–38; Arndt Reference Arndt2005, 49–74). This region played an important role at the time in absorbing American and British investments in the financial sector, and was therefore a fruitful market for US and UK businesses. During the 1930s, the economic dominance of the USA and Great Britain risked being jeopardised by most of the rest of Europe and other non-European countries, who had the south of the American continent in their sights. The Italian and German manoeuvres caused particular worry for the American and British governments for two main reasons. Firstly, along with Japan, these countries were creating propaganda modelled on the founding principles of right-wing totalitarianism, and spreading it in South America, often combined with propaganda disparaging their rival powers. And secondly, considerable numbers of migrants from both Germany and Italy were arriving in the continent. The direct consequence of this was the formation of communities that tended to establish subversive social and political orders, based on despotism and a lack of regard for key democratic principles (Taylor Reference Taylor1978, 259; Arndt Reference Arndt2005, 51–55).

The BC’s initial rush to promote Britain’s national image, culture and politics abroad should therefore be seen as a result of the investment by governments of other countries like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy in propaganda to expand their own image and prestige and therefore promote nationalist expansionism and psychological penetration and political and economic interests tied to controlling foreign markets, often to the detriment of Great Britain.Footnote ¹ As Philip Taylor (Reference Taylor1981) recalls in his pioneering research into the history and role of the British Council during the twentieth century, the collection of ideas that underpinned British foreign propaganda between the wars was known as ‘The Projection of England’, a term coined in 1932 by Sir Stephen Tallents, secretary of the Empire Marketing Board from 1926 to 1933. Embodied perfectly by the BC and later becoming better known as ‘The Projection of Britain’, this ‘project’ was based on the idea that British political and commercial interests had been undermined by the lack of adequate ‘representation’ abroad, due both to the country’s insular location and attacks by foreign competitors in the field of foreign policy.

To counteract this lack of ‘representation’ of Britain’s culture and civic and political ideas, the government had to work hard to create publicity on a sufficiently large scale to influence foreign public opinion, aiming to support the preservation of the nation’s prestige, politics and trade by ‘explaining’ British civilisation and policy (Taylor Reference Taylor1978, 249–251; Taylor Reference Taylor1981, 84–91). In the mid-1930s, employing a technique also borrowed by the US government, the BC took on the onerous task of tackling propaganda from totalitarian regimes in Europe and beyond without appearing to compete with them, which would have risked exacerbating the situation through an unproductive raising of nationalist feeling. Instead, the key mission that underpinned this crucial era for the BC was to act as an international foreign policy tool, with the ultimate aim of promoting, through the example of democratic civilisation, the elements that stood at the heart of maintaining world peace: understanding, cooperation and dialogue between nations (Taylor Reference Taylor1978, 260–261; Taylor Reference Taylor1981, 123).

The following pages will show how the operational policy dictated to the management of the British Institute of Florence by the fascist-supporting Harold Goad deeply betrayed the more profound objectives that lay behind the drive to expand British culture abroad in those years. Goad’s work in Florence had a major impact on the policies created and the decisions taken in both London and Florence, thereby shaping the history of the institute. As we will see, the new positions it took also influenced the more general propaganda conducted by the BC in Fascist Italy from March 1939 onwards, beginning with Ian Greenlees’ appointment as coordinator of propaganda in the country.

The BRI, the BC, and Fascism, 1922–1939

To fully understand the history of the BC and the switch from defending the British cause to promoting democratic dialogue between European nations, several aspects must be considered. One of these is the relationship that the BRI entered into with Fascism between the early 1920s and 1939. Another is the views on Italian politics of leading figures within the BC following the invasion of Abyssinia. The founding members of the BC included both Italian and British citizens, many of whom were well-known in the worlds of journalism, literature or academia. These included Gaetano Salvemini; the historian of Risorgimento Italy George Macaulay Trevelyan and his wife Janet Penrose Trevelyan; and Caroline Lucie (Lina) Waterfield. Several of these intellectuals were opposed to fascism, including Waterfield (1874–1964) – her aversion to events in Italian politics, as she herself narrated in her autobiography Castle in Italy, began during the era of Fascist squadrismo (Reference Waterfield1961, 177). A writer and Italian correspondent for several British newspapers, Waterfield developed openly anti-fascist views. She interviewed Mussolini several times before and after his ascent to power and was imprisoned by the Italian authorities as a result of her virulent accounts of these meetings and her articles.

Waterfield’s opposition to fascism was first revealed when she worked as Italian correspondent for the Observer in 1922–1935, clashing in her views on Italian politics with the paper’s editor, James Louis Garvin (1868–1947). It is no coincidence that Garvin sacked Waterfield in 1935 (Ayerst Reference Ayerst1985, 254; Downing Reference Downing2013, 257–261, 273–283). Following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the editor of the Observer had developed deeply anti-German political views. A supporter of the need for rearmament in Great Britain in case of a German attack, from 1937 onwards he championed the idea of Britain winning Italy’s backing in order to isolate Germany (Ayerst Reference Ayerst1985, 243–246). Garvin’s political ideology reflected that of an elite group of Conservative British politicians connected to the FO and to Neville Chamberlain, who had a decision-making role in the management of the BC, and therefore the BRI, from 1937 onwards. Of these, a crucial role was played by Lord George Ambrose Lloyd (1879–1941), chairman of the BC from 1937 to 1941 (Donaldson Reference Donaldson1984, 46–49; Bloch Reference Bloch2009, 57; Chanter and Platzer, Reference Chanter and Platzer2014).

These positions, and in general the way British cultural diplomacy developed in Italy, cannot be separated from the context of the political relationship between the two countries in the 1930s. It is well-established that October 1935 marked the start of a gradual breakdown in Anglo-Italian relations. Between November 1935 and early July 1936, with the imposition of economic sanctions against Fascist Italy, and then again between 1937 and early 1938, in the run-up to the Easter Accords between Italy and Britain, in Italy Britain was seen as the country most responsible for the ‘societal siege’ against it and the biggest obstacle to it proclaiming its Empire. As highlighted by Denis Mack Smith (Reference Mack Smith1973) and Claudia Baldoli (Reference Baldoli2003), this state of affairs was accompanied by the ratcheting up of savage anti-British propaganda, both in Italy through the newspapers that played a fundamental role for the regime, such as Gerarchia and Il Popolo d’Italia, and among communities of Italians abroad, and particularly those living in London.

Anglo-Italian relations further deteriorated following the outbreak of war in Spain in July 1936 which, given the subsequent consolidation of ties between Rome and Berlin, marked the first rapprochement between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Baldoli Reference Baldoli2003, 68–116, 159–160). Nevertheless, as stated above and in contrast to the findings of previous research (Bosworth Reference Bosworth1970), various groups within the British intelligentsia and Conservative sections of the British parliament supported the need to maintain a positive attitude to Italy, backing the foreign policy espoused by Chamberlain, who had secured a significant ‘triumph’ in Munich (Baldoli Reference Baldoli2003, 142–146). However, other Conservatives disapproved, culminating in the dismissal of the foreign secretary Anthony Eden, the principal opponent of the policy of appeasement, in 1938.

Until Italy’s declaration of war, approaches to the handling of propaganda and advertising abroad reflected the split in opinion within the British parliament. The most emblematic case of ideas that contradicted Chamberlain’s views being applied to the ideology pursued in foreign propaganda was that of Reginald (Rex) Leeper (1888–1968). A founding member of the BC in 1934–1935 and a major supporter of the mission embodied by the ‘Projection of Britain’ project, Leeper was general secretary of the BC until 3 September 1939, and therefore the dominant force in the coordination of British advertising and propaganda abroad throughout the 1930s (Pocock Reference Pocock2010, 63–64; Taylor Reference Taylor1981, 41). After the imposition of sanctions on Fascist Italy and for the whole of 1937 he defended the need to foster Anglo-Italian collaboration in support of peace, but turned against this possibility after November 1937, due to the growing amount of anti-British propaganda spread by both Germany and Italy (Taylor Reference Taylor1978, 260; Taylor Reference Taylor1981, 30–37).

The attitude towards Fascism from the most influential founding members of the BRI, combined with the aforementioned division in opinions, goes a long way to explain why between 1922 and 1939 the pro-Fascist line imposed on the British Institute by its director, Harold Goad, caused so much discord, supported as it was by defenders of a potential Anglo-Italian alliance but the subject of deep resentment from those who opposed appeasement. Harold Elsdale Goad (1878–1956) became honorary director of the BRI in 1922, the year of the March on Rome. After 17 years of directorship, he was definitively removed from his public position in 1939, when for five years the running of the BRI was tied to the BC. Goad was a British intellectual who taught Italian to university students and wrote poetry, essays and journalism. He was a liaison officer on the Italian front during the First World War (Chini Reference Chini2009, 160; Pocock Reference Pocock2010, 70; Colacicco Reference Colacicco2016, 11) and also held the position of reader in Italian language and culture at University College London (Chini 160). He displayed unequivocal support for the Fascist regime in public, in particular supporting corporatism and the possibility of exporting this economic system to Great Britain (Goad Reference Goad1931; Goad and Currey, Reference Goad and Currey1933). Documents relating to propaganda in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS) in Rome indicate that the regime greatly appreciated Goad’s interest in fascism and corporatism in particular. Indeed, it used one of his works on the latter, The Working of a Corporate State (1933), written with Muriel Currey, for propaganda purposes abroad in English-speaking countries. For example, as highlighted by Claudia Baldoli (Reference Baldoli2003, 20), in May and June 1934 the Italian Embassy in Washington was supplied with copies of this volume so they could be distributed around the consular district.

Goad was not the only British intellectual to hold these ideas at the time. On the contrary, although he was not formally enrolled with the British Union of Fascists, Goad was one of a number of Italophiles who included figures like the historian Charles Petrie, the writer and journalist Muriel Currey and the journalist and fascist-supporting propagandist James Strachey Barnes.Footnote ² Deeply anti-German and predisposed to an alliance between Italy and Great Britain, they shared the point of view of the pro-Italian politicians. These Italophile intellectuals, Goad included, were part of a London-based organisation tied to the Royal Institute of International Affairs, which set itself the aim of studying Fascist foreign policy and the corporative system, investigating the latter in the context of its application outside Italy, and therefore treating it as an international foreign policy issue. After the imposition of economic sanctions on Italy, the Italophiles supported Italian imperialism in the Mediterranean and the push for a proclamation of the Italian Empire (Baldoli and Fleming, Reference Baldoli and Fleming2014, 2–3; Chini Reference Chini2009, 162–163).

Harold Goad’s correspondence filed in the archives of the BRI clearly demonstrates the director’s attempts to use the institute to educate the British public on fascism during the 1930s. In doing so, he was acting against the thinking of the founding members of the Institute and the intellectual tasks bestowed upon the BRI with its launch and the issuing of the Royal Charter, and against the latest efforts for British cultural diplomacy abroad embodied by the concept of ‘The Projection of Britain’. For example, between October 1933 and February 1934, Goad worked on a plan to found an International Corporatism Study Centre in Sanremo on the Italian Riviera, which would in large part have taught English students from London and Oxford, with the aim of promoting ‘the understanding of the Italian State abroad and for the solution of social problems’.Footnote ³ The school, according to his initial plans, was to be held periodically with three courses a year, and then ‘develop into a special institution for the consideration of other problems of great importance’ both for Great Britain and Italy and their allies.Footnote ⁴ The library of the study centre was to be expanded thanks to a direct intervention from Mussolini, and the courses offered were to be taught by lecturers from the University of Pisa and the University of Florence.Footnote ⁵ However, despite his ambitions, the project clearly seemed like wishful thinking compared to the aims and objectives of the BRI, and it was abandoned in early February 1934.Footnote ⁶

Analysis of the Bollettino degli Studi inglesi in Italia: organo dell’Associazione fra i diplomati dell’Istituto britannico, the journal printed by the BRI in 1932–1938, shows that Goad also attempted to spread knowledge of fascism by circulating various types of political texts. For example, between 1933 and 1934, several titles publicised in the Bollettino praised fascism for its anti-Bolshevik function, comparing communism unfavourably with the Italian dictatorship, as was the case with Gaetano Ciocca’s Giudizio sul bolscevismo (1933), or promoting an understanding of corporatism, as in Goad and Currey’s text on the functioning of a corporative state, which was sent to America.Footnote ⁷ Furthermore, in early 1936, while debate was raging in Italy about ‘cunning’ Britain’s ‘economic siege’, Goad sought to spread ideas in support of the dictator’s foreign policy. For example, in January of the same year he promoted the organisation of a conference at the institute’s headquarters, with his co-author of The Working of the Corporate State one of the speakers: she defended the imperialistic actions of the Fascists in the Mediterranean, praising Italy’s actions in Ethiopia as an endeavour aimed at civilising and saving the African populations (Currey Reference Currey1936; Chini Reference Chini2009, 165–166).

Goad also tried to spread this point of view by encouraging the supply of books to Florence that outlined a pro-Italian position in the area of foreign policy. The most interesting example of this trend is the book Ethiopia: An Empire in the Making, written in English by an employee of the Studies Office of the Ministry for Italian Africa, Ferdinando Quaranta. The text highlighted how Italy

The work also highlighted the contribution supposedly made by Italy to indigenous populations in various fields, including the development of local agriculture, predominantly coffee plantations, and the modernisation of agricultural techniques in place of primitive African systems (Quaranta Reference Quaranta1939, 6–35).

Although a substantial number of the activities promoted by Goad were intended to have an impact on the British population, they sat alongside the institute’s more wide-ranging programme of teaching English language, history and culture to Italians and promoting an improved image of Great Britain through various forms of cultural propaganda. The institute’s Annual Reports reveal that numerous ‘methods’ were adopted to promote British cultural propaganda, in order to educate the Italian public on various aspects of British culture and history.Footnote ⁸ These included, for example, three different levels of courses in English language and culture, public lectures, trips to England for alumni and members of the BRI, organised through a summer school, and various performances, including concerts from renowned British musicians of the era at the institute in Florence. The contents of the English language and culture courses ranged from grammar and diction to literature, philosophy and political history, from the Middle Ages to contemporary politics.

The summer school, meanwhile, founded in 1926, aimed to foster improved knowledge of the English language and an understanding of British cultural and political institutions through guided tours around the University of London and the main monuments of political, historic and artistic interest in Great Britain, including:

These visits were usually followed by further lessons on the architecture, art and history of British institutions.Footnote ¹⁰ In Florence, the BRI also ran a series of approximately 20 lectures per year. The topics discussed naturally varied from year to year, but all dealt with various aspects of British civilisation, which was taken to mean a range of British ideas, traditions and customs. For example, during the 1926–1927 academic year, the lectures focused on English phonetics, British history and contemporary drama, and, more widely, reflected

As one can deduce from the brief summaries of the BC’s cultural propaganda activities in Florence in the BRI’s Annual Reports, from 1937 onwards an important feature of the BC’s cultural diplomacy was its commitment to fostering better knowledge of Britain’s imperial history. This commitment included organising conferences on the topic, with speakers chosen by the BC itself. One example was William Wedgwood Benn, who gave a speech entitled The British Empire and its Diversity of Government, presented in Florence during the 1937–1938 academic year. The BC’s position is also clear in the books it supplied, again on the British Empire, for the colonial section of the library of the BRI.Footnote ¹²

As the next section will explore, from 1939 onwards similar cultural propaganda initiatives, involving the supply of books of essays on historical topics, began to lead to a clash in Italy between Great Britain’s foreign policy on the one hand and Italian and German foreign policy on the other. Organised to a large extent by one of the key players in the handling of British culture in Fascist Italy, Ian Greenlees, these deliveries revealed an attempt to spread an alternative approach to handling government and politics from that espoused at the time by the European dictatorships.

Ian Greenlees, the BC, and British propaganda in Italy, 1939–1940

Although official diplomatic agreements between Italy and Great Britain continued until spring 1938, Goad’s ability to manage the cultural policies of the British Institute of Florence started to wane in the last few months of 1937, following Italy’s signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact alongside Germany and Japan and Italy’s departure from the League of Nations on 11 December that year. Public approval for the director’s regime jeopardised the intrinsic founding objectives of the institute and the guidelines for British foreign propaganda in those years. This made Goad’s position difficult, both in Florence and in London, despite the fact that he was strongly supported by the chairman of the BC, Lord Lloyd. Lloyd planned to allow him to remain in his post for the whole of 1939, leading to bitter criticism from Janet Trevelyan, the secretary of the BRI, who had liberal political leanings, and Lina Waterfield. Documents in the National Archives in London (TNA) indicate that the initial plans to replace Goad were made two months before Italy’s tacit acceptance of the annexation of Austria by Germany in March 1938, by a joint commission that included members of the management bodies of both the BRI and the BC, which in that year was highly influenced by Rex Leeper, who was opposed to appeasement.Footnote ¹³ Goad officially retired four months before war broke out in Europe. On 1 May 1939, approximately 20 days before Italy and Germany signed the Pact of Steel, an official event was held at the BRI to mark the transfer of the directorship to the musician and music critic Francis Toye.Footnote ¹⁴

As far as can be gathered from the British press, Goad’s retirement and his replacement with Toye coincided with the growing involvement in the arrangement of cultural diplomacy in Italy of Ian Greenlees, who, between March 1939 and 9 June 1940, was given the role of coordinating British propaganda across Italy. Born in London, Ian Gordon Greenlees (1913–1988) graduated in Italian with a first-class honours degree from Magdalen College, Oxford. A deep admirer of Italy, which he considered almost his second home, in the early 1930s he was appointed language assistant at the University of Rome in Mario Praz’s department of English language and literature, a position he held for some years (Stace Reference Stace2014, 43). As highlighted by his biographers (Chanter and Platzer, Reference Chanter and Platzer2014), Greenlees hated fascism from the very start, unlike various contemporaries of his such as Winston Churchill and Lord Lloyd, and his dislike of the dictatorship intensified when the Italian army became involved in the war in Spain in 1936 (Stace Reference Stace2014, 49–50). After the signing of the Pact of Steel in Berlin in spring 1939, his opposition to fascism was ‘visceral’: ‘he disliked Mussolini’s bellicose nationalism, his facade of anti-Communism’. However, at the same time, in his view, ‘Italy was a broken reed, incapable of doing much harm to her neighbours’. He even saw its alliance with Hitler as ‘comic-opera stuff, never meant to be taken seriously’: the true threat, in his eyes, came from Germany, not from Italy (Stace Reference Stace2014, 72).

There are no documents in either Italian or English that attest to Greenlees’ outspoken opposition to the regime, nor to any persecution he suffered. Nevertheless, it is documented that he was friendly with Benedetto Croce, inferable in particular from a document produced by the Political Police of the Italian Ministry of the Interior, held in Rome at the ACS.Footnote ¹⁵ In addition, it should be borne in mind that a British cultural institute linked to the BC, founded in Naples in early September 1939, was based at what is now Palazzo Filomarino, the residence of the well-known philosopher and liberal member of the Senate (Pocock Reference Pocock2010, 71). Two documents from the ACS, dated 7 October 1938 and 20 November 1938, show that as early as the year before he was given the role of coordinating propaganda in Italy in 1939, Greenlees was suspected of espionage by the Italian authorities, in part because of his personal relationship with Croce.Footnote ¹⁶

Greenlees’ influence on propaganda in the final two years of the 1930s can be used to chart the course of British propaganda in Italy between early 1939 and Italy’s decision to declare war against Great Britain, and to trace the ideologies on which the BC based its cultural diplomacy in Italy during this period. The role assigned to Greenlees from early 1939 onwards included responsibility for opening branches of the BC in the country’s main cities, from Naples and Turin to Palermo, as well as selecting the printed material to send to the reading rooms and libraries of these British cultural centres in Italy.Footnote ¹⁷ Studying these printed materials reveals that two key aspects of this organisation’s supplying of books in this period were firstly to promote knowledge of British policy in the Mediterranean, and secondly to increase knowledge of its democratic system of governance. In April 1940, for example, London prepared to send out volumes from the collection British Life and Thought drawing attention to these topics, often through negative comparisons with Italy and Germany.Footnote ¹⁸ This series emphasised aspects of British history such as its naval tradition and the parliamentary monarchy system of governance. One aspect of the system highlighted was the ‘strong tendency in Great Britain to organise the party cleavage on much simpler lines than those which are found in most democratic countries’. In addition, ‘the absence of any public control over the parties’ was stressed, and, consequently, the benefit of encouraging citizens’ wide-ranging participation in public life (Robson Reference Robson1940, 17). However, above all, unlike events in Italy and Germany, the British spirit was characterised by something considered fundamentally important: ‘the absence of oppression’. Indeed,

The project undoubtedly gave the history of the Commonwealth a prominent role, as it formed a powerful tool to counteract the advance of the Nazi dictatorship. Following the outbreak of war, this was demonstrated by the rapid decision in 1939 by Canada, Australia and New Zealand ‘to take part in the war against Germany’s effort to dominate Europe’ and therefore to create a new order on the Continent inspired by the principles of justice and freedom that characterised British civic life (Keith Reference Keith1940, 32). The mission of the British Empire during the Second World War was therefore identified as fighting the madness of the European dictatorships and, at the same time, spreading an alternative model of government both within foreign nations oppressed by dictatorships and through foreign policy. In the case of the latter, this message was once again spread by promoting the British attitude to the legality of conquest and the spirit of help and protection lent to the populations of territories that had come under its control over the centuries, given that ‘in many cases peoples have placed themselves under British protection’ and only ‘in a few cases’ did countries become part of the Commonwealth as the result of an invasion. ‘At no time, however, has the Empire closely resembled that of Rome, which was the result of the subjugation of foreign peoples and the maintenance over them of sovereignty by armed power’ (Keith Reference Keith1940, 17). The Commonwealth’s methods and aims were therefore placed in clear contrast to those adopted by the Roman Empire, from which Fascist imperialism drew constant inspiration.

As this was a period in which war had already broken out across Europe, and Britain, alongside France, had already declared war on Germany back in early September 1939, it is understandable that the TNA documents on further activities by the BC in Italy and their content are extremely patchy. Similarly, Greenlees’ private archive, held at the Biblioteca Comunale Adolfo Betti in Bagni di Lucca, the small town in Tuscany where he died in 1988, having held the role of director of the BRI from 1958–1981, seems to have been ‘purged’, and so does not contain any information that would allow his work to be reconstructed in any detail. However, as a letter sent to London by Greenlees on 12 November 1939 makes clear, his work in the period involved yet another relaunch of Great Britain’s image in Italy with an anti-German mission, aiming to divide Italy and Germany and encourage Italians to move under the British sphere of influence.Footnote ¹⁹

The documents Greenlees produced to send to London during his mission show that it was only in May 1940 that he and British diplomats began to realise that successfully navigating an Anglo-Italian manoeuvre against Germany was nothing more than a utopian dream. Indeed, during that month the anti-British verbal propaganda spread by the Italian regime and amongst communities of Italians abroad led to violent demonstrations against the British. To Greenlees, everything appeared ‘more or less in suspense’, since ‘demonstrations of pathetically young schoolchildren have been organised throughout Italy and some of these demonstrations have taken place in the different Institutes’, and specifically in Palermo, Milan and Florence. For this reason, despite hoping that Italy would choose to remain neutral, before Fascist Italy entered the war, and beyond anything he had expected, he ended up ‘reassuring members of the staff and making plans for possible eventualities’, working in partnership with the British Embassy in Rome to ensure that anyone who wanted to could leave a country that increasingly seemed, in their eyes, like an enemy.Footnote ²⁰