Rotha Lintorn-Orman
Rotha Beryl Lintorn Lintorn-Orman (7 February 1895 – 10 March 1935) was a female British political activist and World War I veteran as well as the founder of the British Fascists. The dashing tomboy was considered bisexual.
Life
Born in Kensington, London as Rotha Beryl Lintorn Orman, she was the daughter of Charles Edward Orman, a Major from the Essex Regiment. Her maternal grandfather is Field Marshal Sir Lintorn Simmons. The Orman family adopted the surname of Lintorn-Orman in 1912. With her friend Nesta Maude, Lintorn-Orman was among the few girls who showed up at the 1909 Crystal Palace Scout Rally wanting to be Scouts which led to the foundation of the Girl Guides. In 1908, they had registered as a Scout troop, using their initials rather than forenames. In 1911, she was awarded one of the first of the Girl Guides' Silver Fish Awards.
She served in World War I as a member of the Women’s Reserve Ambulance and was decorated for her contribution at the Great Thessaloniki Fire of 1917. She also served with the Scottish Women's Hospital Corps. In 1918, she became Commandant of the British Red Cross Motor School at Devonshire House, which put her in charge of training all ambulance drivers for the Red Cross. In these early years she developed a strong sense of British nationalism, and became a staunch monarchist and imperialist. She continued her work in the field of military medicine after the war, becoming head of the Red Cross Motor School to train drivers in the battlefield.
Following her war service, she placed an advert in The Patriot journal seeking anti-communists. This led to the foundation of the British Fascisti in May 1923 as a response to the growing strength of the Labour Party. Financed by her mother, Lintorn-Orman's party nonetheless struggled due to her preference for remaining within the law and her continuing ties to the fringes of the Conservative Party.
The party was subject to a number of schisms, such as when the more radical members resigned to form the National Fascisti, and ultimately lost members to the Imperial Fascist League and the British Union of Fascists when these groups emerged. For her part Lintorn-Orman would have nothing to do with the BUF, it was to this group that she lost much of her membership when Neil Francis Hawkins became a member in 1932.
In 1933, Lintorn-Orman was taken ill and was sidelined from the British Fascists, as effective control passed to Dorothy Grace Harnett, née Waring (8 June 1891 – 25 April 1977), who sought to breathe new life into the group by seeking to ally it with Ulster loyalism.
- By 1934, Lintorn-Orman had become a notable name in the CRGB but was becoming increasingly depressed and reliant on drugs. Having relapsed into her alcoholism, Astor was informed by associates in Britain that Lintorn-Orman was 'attending meetings inebriated, if she attends them at all' and was becoming less dependable in the CRGB's smuggling chain. She became increasingly ineffective and refused visitors going in 1934 as she began to experience alcohol-related health issues. Sanderson, who still maintained contact with her, claimed that she had 'gone completely off the deep end' and was facing bankruptcy after her mother Blanche had cut off contact. Blanche Lintorn-Orman believed her daughter was being 'plied with booze and drugs' to hand over the money her mother was supplying her for political scheming. By April of 1934 her hotel had closed down and Lintorn-Orman had disappeared. A missing person's notice was placed in the county registry by unknown persons though this was retracted only three weeks later. Her hotel was seized by the local council and the assets sold on, with it being speculated at the time among the local town and her far-right colleagues she may have died from her spiraling health issues. However, just under a year later, Lintorn-Orman re-emerged in the city of Ghent, Belgium and living with her mother, Blanche. According to her testimony, she had faced bankruptcy and mounting health issues and opted to leave Britain so as to convalesce in Europe under the care of her mother. Having seemingly recovered, she began an active role in the British Exile movement again, being listed as a leading member of the CRGB and beginning speaking tours across European exile communities. She condemned the Norwegian May Revolution and helped organise the CRGB's British Emergency Relief Council as a response in helping British exiles in Norway evacuate to Germany. Despite her return to involvement, she was briefly involved in scandal at the start of her return when she began canvassing a Belgo-British exile conference for her 'British Patriot's Society', an ephemeral organisation and probably a clandestine publishing front, that she claimed had 1,000 members in Britain. There is no evidence to indicate it existed and it was supplanted by a new organisation and publishing front: the English National Society. The ENS published works by William Sanderson (who may have been involved) and others on English nationalism, with it being regarded as a means of introducing Sanderson's works to the wider exile movement. Comparatively, the BPS is regarded as Lintorn-Orman's last-ditch attempt to regain control of the far-right underground and mostly campaigned against the Norwegian Revolution. The BPS/ENS had disappeared by the end of the year and the previously marginalised Lintorn-Orman was now listed as a member of the CRGB's Executive Council.[1]
Death
Lintorn-Orman died of an alcohol-related illness at the age of 40 on 10 March 1935 at Santa Brígida, Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands. By then, her organisation was all but defunct. She was buried in the Cementerio inglés of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (grave 475).
