Camels and Spode

Reading Ferdinand Mount's review of two books on Mosley in the latest London Review of Books, I noticed a mention of Arnold Leese, vet, author of the One Humped Camel in Health and Disease, and leader of the Imperial Fascist League. Leese was typical of the bizarre and sinister world of British fascism; Mount also refers to Lord Lymington, " a ubiquitous figure in Fascist circles of the 1930s, whose English Mistery movement advocated selective breeding and unpasteurised milk and regarded the decline of the feudal system as the greatest misfortune to have befallen the English people" or "Rotha Lintorn-Orman, the Girl Scout known as ‘Man-Woman’[...]and Valerie Arkell-Smith of the National Fascisti, a transvestite who spent many years masquerading as ‘Sir Victor Barker’." P G Wodehouse found in Mosley the inspiration for the character of Sir Roderick Spode and his Black Shorts in the Code of the Woosters.
When I ran the RCVS Library, we had a copy of Leese's privately-published autobiography, Out of step : events in the two lives of an anti-Jewish camel-doctor , a work of considerable craziness. In it he denounces Mosley as a "kosher-fascist', feeling him to be insufficiently committed to the extermination of Jews. In 1948, after his conviction for harbouring escaped German POWs, members of the SS, an unsuccessful attempt was made to strike him off the RCVS Register. I searched the College archives to see if there was any detail to explain why the attempt failed, for in those days vets who had any sort of brush with the law, including fairly trivial driving offences, were frequently struck off. Apart from the bare facts, there was nothing to shed any light.
His work on the camel was, I was told by more than one vet, scientifically very sound, and the above-mentioned book on the dromedary remained the standard text for a long time. It is at first sight puzzling that someone like Leese should have had any scientific ability whatsoever but, as Mount remarks of Mosley in his review, "...while interned, he read Goethe, Winckelmann, Schiller, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Plato, Aristotle and Freud – which shows that the redemptive power of literature has its limits, because he emerged utterly unrepentant."
Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism by Stephen Dorril London: Viking, 2006 0670869996
Hurrah for the Blackshirts: Fascists and Fascism between the Wars by Martin Pugh London: Pimlico, 2006 1844130878