by David Renton
The ultimate significance of Powell was not, however, his championing of these views but his inability to win over the Conservative Party to a policy of anti-migrant hostility. From Powell’s failure, still more strident voices would emerge.
Notes
1 R. Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 4.
2 G. Orwell, ‘Not counting Niggers’, Adelphi, July 1939.
3 P. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Boston, MA: Mariner, 2000).
4 T. Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 206–208, 213; T. Kushner, The Persistence of Prejudice: Anti-Semitism in British Society during the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).
5 The Times, 7 August 1972; D. Sandbrook, State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970–1974 (London: Allen Lane, 2010), p. 258.
6 M. Bright, ‘Desperate Lucan dreamt of fascist coup’, Observer, 9 January 2005.
7 R. Clutterbuck, ‘The Colonels and the strikers’, Guardian, 22 September 1974.
8 F. Draper, ‘Citizens’ Army – Tory plan’, Evening Standard, 7 September 1974.
9 Sandbrook, State of Emergency, p. 132.
10 C. Harman, The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After (London: Bookmarks, 1998), p. 263.
11 The Listener, 4 July 1968.
12 P. Sedgwick, ‘Prologue: a day in the life of the “Fifties”’, in N. Harris and J. Palmer (eds), World Crisis: Essays in Revolutionary Socialism (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1971), pp. 21–34.
13 E. Hobsbawm, ‘The forward march of Labour halted?’, Marxism Today, September 1978.
14 D. Sandbrook, Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain 1974–1979 (London: Penguin, 2013), p. 666.
15 S. Cox and R. Golden, Down the Road: Unemployment and the Fight for the Right to Work (London: Writers and Readers Publishing Co-operative, 1977), p. 30.
16 ‘The winter of 1979’, reprinted in D. Widgery, Preserving Disorder: Selected Essays 1968–1989 (London: Pluto, 1989), pp. 162–169.
17 R. Miles and A. Phizacklea, Racism and Political Action in Britain (London: Routledge, 1979), p. 5.
18 M. Billig, Fascists: A Social Psychological View of the National Front (London: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 268, 272, 273, 277.
19 BOAC’s 1962 timetables have been published online at http://timetableimages.com/ttimages/complete/ba62/ba62-11.jpg (accessed 2 June 2018).
20 A. Sivanandan, ‘From resistance to rebellion’, Race and Class 2(31) (1981), pp. 110–152, at 119.
21 The speech was reproduced in the Daily Telegraph, 6 November 2007. Interviews with food-processing workers in Willesden in 1976 showed a similar obsession with the supposed unfairness of the Race Relations Act: Miles and Phizacklea, Racism, pp. 112–113.
22 S. Virdee, Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 116.
23 L. Fekete, ‘Dockers Against Racism: an interview with Micky Fenn’, Race and Class 58(1) (2016), pp. 55–60.
24 D. Widgery, The Left in Britain 1956–1968 (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 411.
25 Y. Alibhai-Brown, The Settler’s Cookbook (London: Portobello, 2009), p. 250.
26 Sandbrook, State of Emergency, p. 256; ‘Demos and deafening silence’, Economist, 2 September 1972.
2
A HISTORY OF COUPS AND EXPULSIONS
The National Front was founded in 1967 following a year of discussions between three right-wing groups: A. K. Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists (LEL), John Bean and Andrew Fountaine’s British National Party (BNP) and the Racial Preservation Society (RPS). All three stood at different points on the spectrum between the fascist and the non-fascist far-right. The LEL had existed since 1954 as a ginger group within the Conservative Party, mocking the Conservatives’ leaders for their willingness to give up British imperial territory. The British National Party had been a militaristic and pro-Nazi movement. Yet in 1964, the BNP had experimented with standing candidates in elections and had won 9 per cent of the vote in that year’s general election in Southall.1 The BNP was, in other words, a fascist group seriously considering going over to electoralism. The Racial Preservation Society was the third player in the discussions – a confederation of anti-immigrant campaigns, some of whose members were to join the Front while others gravitated towards smaller groups on the right.2
Oswald Mosley and the English voodoo
The prominence of these three groups within the British right was down, in part, to the failure of other previously better-known figures. At the end of the Second World War, by far the most important figure on the extra-parliamentary right had been Oswald Mosley. Not yet fifty at the war’s end, Mosley was still tall and lean and his eyes retained something of their old piercing character. Deep into the 1950s and 1960s, Mosley kept the support of thousands of former supporters of the British Union of Fascists, not least the 813 men and women who had been detained during the war under Defence Regulation 18B as potential traitors. Radicalised by the experience, bitter and resentful, this generation of fascists enjoyed a first recovery during the autumn of 1947 when anti-Jewish riots in Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester were followed by weeks of meetings by pro-Mosley groups. The largest, at Ridley Road in Dalston, brought audiences of up to 3,000 to hear Mosley speak.3 Yet while stray individuals in the younger generation were making their way towards fascism, more were moving in the opposite direction. Mosley’s meetings saw counter-protests by anti-fascists, principally from the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Jewish ex-servicemen of the 43 Group. The fascists’ platforms were knocked over, their marches disrupted and even Oswald Mosley himself was unable to find an audience. ‘England’, he complained in 1947, ‘has been turned into an Island Prison . . . No man may start a crusade from within a gaol.’4
Mosley set up a new party, the Union Movement, with a programme: ‘Europe a Nation’. His idea was the former fascist powers of Germany and Italy should be treated as allies and that Europe should form an economic combine to exploit a series of colonies throughout Africa.5 In the 1950s, the Mosleyites campaigned against decolonisation, complaining that ‘one vast territory after another has been abandoned in Africa’, condemning the ‘Black nationalism’ of the continent’s new rulers and demanding that British make peace with Rhodesia.6 It was in these terms that Martin Moloney of the Union Movement addressed a meeting at Kensington Town Hall in 1969, ‘We’ll not hand over our country to Black Power, student power or any other power. If it were not for white civilisation in Africa, they’d still be eating each other.’7
Save for the Notting Hill riots in 1958, when groups of white youths equipped with iron bars, leather belts and butchers’ knives rioted against the black inhabitants of North Kensington (trouble for which Mosley’s supporters were widely blamed),8 the Union Movement was a declining force on the right. Mosley won 2,821 votes at Kensington North in 1959, but a mere 1,126 at Shoreditch and Finsbury seven years later. He attempted to hold a rally at Trafalgar Square in 1962 but the meeting was disrupted by Mosley’s opponents. His supporters found themselves having to write with bravado to their ageing comrades, ‘When we are attacked very hard it means that our progress is good . . . The enemy fire at the living not the dead.’9 Two years later, the American political scientist George Thayer interviewed Mosley, finding him sensitive to slights and wracked by self-doubt: ‘He seemed resigned to his ostracism; the pride with which he once carried it has worn thin.’10
The initiative passed to others, in particular A. K. Chesterton. Born in 1899 at the Luipaardsvlei gold mine outside Johannesburg, Chesterton had arrived in Britain as an immigrant before 1914. He was a Mosleyite in the 1930s and his leader’s biographer, before being dismissed in 1938 when Mosley was short of funds. Despite their falling-out, Chesterton never broke with Mosley’s anti-Semitism. Spoiled, authoritarian in his private relations and dependent on a quick-fire succession of eulogised and then despised men
tors, Chesterton’s allies included Catholic Tory MP Christopher Hollis and Douglas Reed, the novelist and anti-Semite.11 After 1945, he was a leader writer for the right-wing but non-fascist magazine Truth, a literary advisor to Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of the Sunday Express, and the ghost-writer of Beaverbrook’s memoirs. In 1953, Truth was taken over by new owners, the Staples Press. Chesterton’s response was to launch a rival paper, Candour, which won the backing of expatriate British multi-millionaire Robert Jeffery, who lived in Chile and had made his fortune out of manufacturing fertilisers.12 Over the next seven years, Jeffery lavished tens of thousands of pounds on Chesterton’s schemes.
In 1954, Chesterton launched a new campaign, the League of Empire Loyalists. As its name indicates, this was first of all a movement against the loss of Britain’s colonial possessions. Some of the League’s character can be seen from the members of its General Council, which included the Earls of Buchan and Norbury, Baron Ironside of Archangel, Lieutenant General Sir Balfour Oliphant Hutchison and Air Commodore G. S. Oddie. This was a movement of the old rather than the young and of men with social power. Several future leaders of the Front were to pass through the League, including John Bean, John Tyndall and Martin Webster.
The League of Empire Loyalists was best known for actions intended to embarrass their opponents and win the group publicity. In October 1955, LEL supporters forced their way into a United Nations Day event at Trafalgar Square, pulling down the UN flag and trampling on it. At a Tory rally in Bradford in January 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden was interrupted by the League’s Leslie Greene, who approached him on the platform before shouting that the British Empire was the greatest force for peace the world had known and Eden was throwing it away.13 John Bean joined the League in 1955, becoming its Northern organiser. In June 1956, he disrupted a speech by Anthony Eden, handing Eden a black coal scuttle.
In October 1958, the League’s support was at its peak with a claimed membership of 3,000. Not for the first time, the League sent supporters into the Conservative Party conference. On this occasion, however, they were expected. Heckling Prime Minister Macmillan’s speech, blowing the first bars of the Retreat on a bugle and shouting that Britain’s empire had been betrayed, they were struck by stewards and forcibly ejected. Criticised in the press and abandoned by many of its former supporters, the League found itself short of allies and funds.
The most important loss was that of R. K. Jeffery, who died in April 1961. He had promised to leave everything he owned, worth around a million pounds, to A. K. Chesterton. To the Loyalists’ despair, however, there was a deathbed reconciliation between Jeffery and Maria Elba Smith, Jeffrey’s illegitimate daughter. Not one further penny of Jeffery’s fortune made its way to the League.
The Loyalists’ twelfth AGM was held in 1965. A. K. Chesterton was ill and declined to attend. Just fifty people were present. ‘Like an army too long in the battlefield,’ write the group’s historians Hugh McNeile and Rob Black, ‘the League had gradually lost the edge of its fighting spirit.’14
It was the League’s decline that provided the context to the merger discussions on the right in 1966–1967. Groups such as the British National Party saw that the Loyalists were well-funded and believed that they had significant reserves. Chesterton concealed from his allies the events of Jeffery’s death and kept open the possibility that the League might at any time come into a massive windfall.
Just a year after its formation, the National Front was provided with a first opportunity for growth. Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech was met with widespread approval in the press. The day after the speech, Smithfield’s meat porters struck in support of Powell. They were led by Dan Harmston, who had stood for election two years before as a Mosley supporter in South Islington.15 Soon Harmston’s supporters were handing out anti-immigration leaflets at the docks. In the immediate aftermath of Powell’s speech, Chesterton was interviewed in The Times, ‘What Mr Powell has said does not vary in any way from our view.’16 That December, supporters of the NF marched to Powell’s home to declare their support for him.17
According to Robert Taylor, a National Front organiser in Yorkshire
We held a march in Huddersfield in support of what Powell had said and we signed eight people up as members of the branch that afternoon. Powell’s speeches gave our membership and morale a tremendous boost. Before Powell spoke, we were getting only cranks and perverts. After his speeches, we started to attract, in a secret sort of way, the right-wing members of the Tory organisations.18
Taylor’s emphasis on Conservative organisations hints at a key issue for the Front. Disenchanted Powellites were the group’s best potential source of recruits, bringing money and electoral expertise. Yet if such Tories were to join the Front, they would find a party staffed by long-term supporters of British fascism. Plainly, there was every danger that the Conservatives would be put off as soon as they joined.
This risk had been discussed before the Front was even launched. During the merger discussions that led to the NF’s formation, A. K. Chesterton of the LEL and Andrew Fountaine and John Bean of the BNP agreed that they would exclude the two people on the right who they judged had the worst record of arguing for Hitlerism: John Tyndall and Colin Jordan.19 Jenny Doyle, a member of the Racial Preservation Society at the time of the Front’s formation was later to recall a meeting in 1966 at which one of Tyndall’s supporters, Paul Trevelyan, had attempted to persuade the other participants in the merger discussions to change their mind and allow Tyndall to join:
Discussion was brief, five or ten minutes and voted upon. Seventeen others supported my motion that John Tyndall be excluded. Two voters [were] for [Tyndall’s admission] and two abstained. At the very foundation of the National Front, the founders of the Party voted that they didn’t want John Tyndall . . . at any price.20
Given that Tyndall was later allowed to join the Front and was for many years its chairman, it is worth explaining why people who had worked with him before were unwilling to do so again and why the decision to exclude him broke down.
The loved and hated leader
John Tyndall came from a Protestant family in Ireland. His grandfather had been a policeman in the Royal Irish Constabulary fighting the rising forces of Irish Republicanism. Tyndall’s father grew up in the same country before coming to England where he worked as a policeman in Peckham and then as an administrator for the YMCA. He had, according to his son’s unsympathetic account, a ‘vaguely idealistic faith in the ability of the nations and races of the world to come together in such international organisations’.21 John Tyndall spent his National Service with the Royal Horse Artillery in Germany between 1952 and 1954, where he became fascinated by the defeated Nazi regime. Later, he worked as an accountant. A short man with a hard, humourless face and thinning hair, Tyndall’s style was all about conveying an impression of strength. His handshake was over-firm and his conversation grimly serious.22 His speeches were delivered in a plummy iambic pentameter, modelled rather too closely on the platform style of Oswald Mosley.23
After a short period in Chesterton’s League of Empire Loyalists, by 1960 Tyndall was a prominent member of the UK’s small neo-Nazi subculture. He and Colin Jordan worked together in a para-military group, Spearhead, whose members wore Brownshirt-style uniforms and practised arms training. In August 1962, the police raided a Spearhead camp in Gloucestershire which had been addressed by the American neo-Nazi Lincoln Rockwell. They found a jar of poison labelled ‘Jew killer’ and enough explosives to manufacture over a hundred hand grenades.24
The alliance between Tyndall and Jordan broke in 1963 over Jordan’s wedding to the perfume heiress Françoise Dior, an event the couple celebrated by cutting their wedding-ring fingers and letting the drops fall on a virgin copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.25 In the 1970s (by which time Tyndall was the leader of the Front and Jordan of its main rival, the British Movement), the most common image to appear in anti-fascist publications was a photograph of Tyndall dress
ed in his old Spearhead uniform.
At Front events, it was Tyndall’s name that the crowd chanted. And yet he was far from popular with those who worked most closely with him. A letter later sent by Tyndall to Ray Hill (a Searchlight mole in the British Movement) suggests that Tyndall was aware of the way in which he polarised his supporters:
I have many enemies in the camp of nationalism. Some simply hate me because my achievement is greater than that of any other post-war nationalist leader and jealousy in politics is just as corrosive as it is in the world of opera singers, ballerinas or chorus girls . . . Others hate me because I am a rather uncompromising personality, not always best equipped to engage in the game of cajolery and flattery that seems to be part of the political art.26
The character of Tyndall’s politics in the mid-1960s can be seen in early issues of Spearhead, the magazine which he controlled and would bring with him to the Front. The magazine featured openly neo-Nazi messages, cartoons of the right’s Jewish opponents and demands to make every man ‘Jew-wise’27 and Britain ‘Jew-clean’.28 There were repeated Germanisms; Britain was urged to become a ‘volksgemeinschaft of the Anglo-Saxons – within an Anglo-Saxon Reich’.29 Even the magazine’s title Spearhead was printed in a 1930s-style German gothic script.
In 1967, Tyndall was convicted of carrying firearms.30 His release coincided with the merger discussions that led to the formation of the Front. In response to them, Tyndall attempted to tone down Spearhead’s politics: the magazine’s masthead changed, the references to Hitler became fewer and more muted.
One former ally who argued for Tyndall’s exclusion from the National Front was John Bean. He complained that Tyndall was a neo-Nazi revivalist, obsessed with the swastikas and uniforms of National Socialism. In the early 1960s, Bean had been arrested by the police and fined for driving around London in a van with posters demanding the release of Adolf Eichmann, one of the organisers of the Holocaust, who was now on trial in Jerusalem. Bean maintains that Colin Jordan and John Tyndall directed him to drive the van outside a hall in London where Jewish survivors were commemorating the Warsaw ghetto. According to Bean:
