English aristocrat and political leader Rotha Lintorn-Orman was BOTD in 1895. Born in London to a wealthy military family, she was raised in Bournemouth where she became an enthusiastic Girl Guide (a para-military organisation for British children created by Robert Baden-Powell). During World War One, she volunteered as an ambulance driver, before being sent to the Serbian war front with the Scottish Women’s Hospital Corps. She returned to London in 1917 after contracting malaria, and became Commandant of the British Red Cross Motor School. In 1923, she placed an advertisement in a right-wing newspaper for “anti-communists” to form a new political movement, inspired by her admiration for Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. She eventually founded the British Fascisti, later renamed the British Fascist Party. Unlike Mussolini, who sought to unite the working classes into a nationalist cause, Lintorn-Orman looked to the aristocracy and middle-classes for support, with the intention of preserving Britain’s class system and property laws and crushing trade unions. As a leader, she failed to unite the party’s disparate membership, eventually losing most of her followers to the British Union of Fascists, led by her nemesis Oswald Mosley. Her political profile was also damaged by rumours of her drug and alcohol addictions, masculine appearance and lesbianism, leading her mother to withdraw her financial support. Penniless and addicted, Lintorn-Orman moved to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, where she died in 1935, aged 40. Little is known about her relationship history, though she is thought to have had an affair with her friend (and fellow fascist) Mary Sophia Allen.