Action replay - Hamm, Jeffrey

In the introduction to his autobiography Left Hand, Right Hand! Sir Osbert Sitwell
says: 'The hour has now struck for me to start on this journey to recapture the past. Already I am nearing fifty and the grey hairs are beginning to show. I have reached the watershed and can see the stream which I must follow down hill toward the limitless ocean ... It is indeed time to begin.'

As yet I have no grey hairs, but I have passed the fifty mark, and so must start on the same journey myself. But why, it may be asked, should I want to write an autobiography at all? To this I answer that, in my opinion, every human life ought to
hold enough of interest to merit some record, if only as a contribution to family history. But because the greater part of my life has been spent in the service of the
political movements founded and led by Sir Oswald Mosley, both before and after the
war of 1939—1945, and because for several years I was closely associated with Sir
Oswald as his private secretary, up to his death in December 1980, I believe that the story of my life has a wider interest, and that I write as a witness of events of more than passing significance.

In writing of my wartime experiences in the Falkland Islands and South Africa I have
drawn on material contributed by me to The European, a magazine of the nineteenfifties. For the verification of dates and other points of detail I have relied chiefly on My Life by Oswald Mosley and Oswald Mosley by Robert Skidelsky. My grateful thanks are due to Father Brocard Sewell for helpful advice and for kindly preparing and editing the original typescript, which has subsequently been considerably amended.