“Throw that man out” shouted Mosely, and several Blackshirts got Frank down and started rabbit-punching on the back of his neck. Frank went into that meeting a Conservative and came out a Socialist.

In order to keep the police busy, bus drivers who were on duty had begun, as soon as the meeting started, driving their double deckers round and round the roundabout in the centre of Oxford, thus stopping all the traffic from London to the West Country, and causing incredible confusion.

Phillip Toynbee (Polly Toynbee’s father), a student at the house and a great friend of Peter’s, came out of the meeting with his face covered in blood where he had been hit by a chair leg. “Don’t wipe it!” we shouted at him, and dragged him into the hotel next door which contained a row of telephone boxes. “Ring the national press! You take the Times – you get the Guardian – you ring the Oxford Mail. Tell them to send a photographer!”

Bernard Flood set off quietly but firmly to find a policeman of his own. His father happened to be in Oxford that day and mention of his name in a very cold voice persuaded a reluctant young bobby to go back with him into the meeting which had restarted with a very much reduced audience. Bernard demanded that someone be arrested for assaulting him.

“Oh yes, son,” sneered the policeman, “and can you give me the name of which gentleman you accuse of hitting you?” The iron entered Bernard’s soul. If, as some think probable, he spied for Russia thereafter, I think it probably the result of that evening. I have heard that he was about to be exposed when as a Labour Member of Parliament he committed suicide, but I think it much more probable that he couldn’t bear to go on living after the death of his wife.

Mosely was still addressing the rump of his audience. Suddenly he caught sight of Phillip Toynbee’s uncle, a mild, respectable Liberal, who happened to wear a beard.

“Throw that man out!” he bellowed again. He obviously imagined that anyone with a beard must be a Communist.

Meanwhile, while most of us milled around outside the hall waiting to catch Mosely coming out, a group of drivers and students went to the car park to find Mosely’s armoured cars – removed the distributor heads and dropped them in the river. The rest of us were hoping to do the same for Mosely himself, but he slipped out a back way, and he and Diana Mitford swept past us in an open car accompanied by a large police escort.