by David Renton
For several years after this incident I had a recurring dream, more of a nightmare, where I was driving an open lorry through the streets of an unrecognisable city. People walking by would stare at me and turn their backs. I turned my head to see what was on the back of the lorry. I saw that it was full of emaciated corpses dressed in concentration camp clothes.
For years, Bean would chastise himself for having allowed (in his words) the ‘emotion of a bad taste, sickening, sixth-form prank . . . to dominate the intellect’.31
Others involved in the discussions were also sceptical about John Tyndall. For the Front’s first chairman A. K. Chesterton, the new party was intended to be an ‘elite’ rather than a popular group – a party open to Tory grandees who just wanted to protest against their leaders and bring them back on track. Chesterton wrote in his magazine Candour that ‘If the NF does not become an elite movement it will fail.’32 Tyndall and his generation were in Chesterton’s mind when the latter warned at the Front’s first 1967 Conference of
certain kinds of louts who, unless kept in check, can and certainly will wreck any movement . . . The man who thinks this a war that can be won by mouthing slogans about ‘dirty Jews and filthy niggers’ is a maniac whose place should not be in the National Front but a mental hospital.33
While Tyndall saw himself as principled and victim of his own consistency, during the crucial 1966–1967 negotiations his behaviour conveys the opposite impression. In a 1966 pamphlet, ‘Six Principles of British Nationalism’, Tyndall accepted that nationalists should stand for election and that the imagined nationalist future could come about only through democratic means. This move was intended to persuade the likes of Bean and Chesterton of his willingness to engage with their new project. It succeeded; while Tyndall himself was excluded from the Front in the group’s first year, his supporters were allowed to join. Behind the scenes, moreover, Tyndall was telling his international contacts that his politics remained the same as they had always been. In March 1967, in a letter to the US neo-Nazi William Pierce, Tyndall characterised Chesterton’s followers as a ‘liberal element’ and promised that his supporters, ‘the National Socialist faction’, would capture the Front.34
Kicking their way into the headlines
While all these internal intrigues were taking place, the National Front faced a further difficulty, which was how to maintain press interest in its activities. ‘The Front badly want publicity’, noted Sally Beauman of the Sunday Telegraph after one interview, they
will dismiss all journalists as liberals . . . On the other hand, they seem fascinated by them; they know their names, the life histories of those few journalists who have reported their activities – they want to know if you know them too: they want to gossip about them.35
The Front’s leaders were aware of their isolation and impatient with it. They believed that their politics was capable of acquiring majority support. The more time that their party spent in the headlines, the better.
When immigration was in the news, as it was in spring 1968, journalists rushed to interview the NF’s leaders. At other times, the papers ignored the Front. Such leaders as A. K. Chesterton sought to raise the visibility of their organisation by copying the tactics of the League of Empire Loyalists, going to the meetings of other groups and heckling the speakers. Over time, this approach would morph into chanting, cat-calling and attempts to close down the meetings of its left-wing opponents. The development was not, however, immediate. Press reports from 1970 and 1971 include accounts of NF supporters attending Fabian meetings in Colchester and heckling the speaker,36 picketing the offices of Prime Minister Edward Heath and accusing him of treason,37 or standing with anti-Communist placards outside a Sunday service given by Blackheath vicar Paul Osterreicher.38 The National Front targeted the various community relations officers, appointed by local authorities to give effect to their duties under the Race Relations Act. In Luton, they heckled the local officer, Leslie Scafe,39 and similar tactics were attempted elsewhere.
According to John Bean, there was a slow, cumulative, process in which heckling (a legitimate tactic and far from the sole preserve of the extreme right) was replaced by violent attacks on opponents: ‘Week after week from 1969 to late 1973 teams of NF activists, first twenty, then forty, then sixty and eventually hundreds strong, would infiltrate and rowdily lambast every left-wing meeting in London.’40 Bean’s account is exaggerated; the National Front did not have enough supporters to attack every meeting in London. But these attacks are a matter of record and on occasion had high-profile targets. A speech in Newham by senior Labour MP Roy Jenkins, who as Home Secretary had overseen the introduction of the Race Relations Act, saw National Front supporters bussed in from Manchester pelting Jenkins with flour bombs, bags of soot, ash and even manure. Jenkins was attacked again when delivering another speech in Chichester. So was the anti-apartheid activist Peter Hain when he addressed a meeting in Hemel Hempstead on Rhodesia.41
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, the Front also began to experiment with calling street demonstrations, a tactic which Chesterton had always criticised. The Front’s first chairman had a particular objection to chanting, which seemed to him to epitomise the old mob politics that he associated with Mosley.
One procession which Chesterton did not block was the National Front’s Remembrance Day procession, during which the Front marched through central London, ending with speeches in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This event was held in support of white Rhodesia. The marches were led off by a flag party and pipe band, with Union Jacks and the flags of Rhodesia and South Africa much in evidence. Former servicemen were encouraged to march, showing off their decorations. These displays were intended to present the Front as part of the mainstream of British public opinion.
After three years as chairman, Chesterton resigned, saying that his health required him to live half the year in South Africa and an active role was beyond him. Tyndall’s ally Martin Webster, a former member of the LEL and GBM, had already been appointed as the Front’s National Activities Organiser and was able to facilitate Tyndall’s rise. Like his mentor John Tyndall, Webster was a polarising figure on the right. Other nationalists gossiped about his weight, his sexuality, the money he had inherited at a young age. On Chesterton’s resignation, Tyndall was promoted to vice-chairman of the NF. By 1972, John Tyndall was the Front’s chairman – its leader.
Opportunities, modernisation
Tyndall’s capture of the position of chairman in 1972 was followed soon afterwards by the Conservative government’s muted acceptance of migration to Britain by the Ugandan Asians expelled by Idi Amin. Guardian journalist Martin Walker describes Amin as ‘the best recruiting officer the NF ever had’.42 The Front organised a picket of Downing Street. Over the next ten days, NF supporters were able to spark a walkout by the Smithfield meat porters, echoing the protests in support of Powell in 1968. The group’s members also picketed Manchester and Heathrow airports where, in the recollection of one new arrival, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, the Ugandan Asians were met by ‘lines of “patriots” with obscene placards . . . mothers with buggies, East End butchers, miners, the National Front’.43 On 16 September, the Conservatives’ Monday Club held a rally on Uganda at Central Hall. The Front attended the rally, took it over and directed those participating to march on Downing Street.44 Through winter 1972–1973, the membership of the Front doubled, reaching its peak of 17,500 the following summer. Council elections in Blackburn in 1973 saw NF candidates winning 18 and 23 per cent of the vote. At a parliamentary by-election in West Bromwich in May 1973, Martin Webster won 16 per cent. John Tyndall, as NF chairman, claimed credit for the victory.
The Front’s relationship with the Monday Club had been a matter of press speculation for years. Formed in 1961, from 1965 the Club had been trying to build itself as a mass membership organisation and in that year, it removed the requirement for its members to be Conservatives. In 1965, the Monday Club supported racist Rhodesia against the policy of its
own party, which declined to recognise Rhodesia’s independence. As early as 1967, mainstream Conservatives were warning that the Monday Club was acting as a bridge between Conservatives and the extreme right and asking their party to take action. In 1968, Enoch Powell was the guest of honour at the Monday Club’s dinner. The following year, the Monday Club published a pamphlet by George K. Young, Who Goes Home? It demanded the repatriation of Commonwealth migrants.45 After the 1970 election, thirty-five of Heath’s MPs were members of the Monday Club. Numerous local supporters of the Club, however, had links to fascism. They included John Ormowe who told an undercover Mirror journalist in 1971 that he was an admirer of Hitler, ‘If you read Mein Kampf, you will see it has been wrongly derided’, and a young Neil Hamilton, who attended the 1972 Conference of the neo-fascist MSI in Italy, with his airfare and expenses paid for by that party.46
At times the Front welcomed the existence of the Monday Club and sought to work with it; at other times it deprecated the Club as over-moderate. In February 1973, John Tyndall addressed a Monday Club meeting at Chelmsford.47 By now, the Club was coming under scrutiny from Conservative headquarters. The Club’s chairman, Jonathan Guinness, was both Oswald Mosley’s stepson and an ambitious politician with his own hopes of making it to Parliament. In March 1973, Guinness stood for the Conservatives at a by-election in Lincoln, suffering a 20 per cent swing to the winning candidate Dick Taverne. Re-elected chairman of the Monday Club in April 1973, Guinness pledged to exclude the Front’s supporters. In June, he expelled Len Lambert, the man who had given Tyndall a platform in Essex. Over the next six months, a battle waged for control of the Club, with its Provincial Council opposing Lambert’s removal and a special general meeting voting by 236 to 54 to demand the resignation of Guinness. However, the Club’s chairman remained in place and the remaining NF supporters left, including the key figure of Roy Painter.48
Tyndall understood that the Front needed to modernise if it was to appeal to supporters of the Monday Club and other Conservatives. He was equally determined that this process should not change the NF’s basic character. The equivocal nature of his programme of renewal can be seen from Spearhead, the magazine which Tyndall took with him from the GBM and became the voice of the Front’s leadership. Spearhead’s racism remained consistent; its fascism, however, became muted. The magazine told the members of the Front to change. Yet this task was posed as a question of presentation rather than belief. In one ‘Message from the Chairman of the National Front’, Tyndall warned the Front’s members against ‘surround[ing] themselves with obscurantist regalia, tap[ping] the sides of their armchairs to martial music and defer[ring] to political leaders of a bygone age’. The Front, he argued, had to find a middle path between populism and militancy:
Just as there exist within some of us yearnings for greater ‘moderation’ and ‘respectability,’ there exist within some others of us yearnings – at least at moments – for greater militancy; an even more uncompromising enunciation of our policies and even more aggressive methods of promoting our party and opposing its enemies.
In the place of such old-style politics, members were invited to engage in ‘practical, business-like political activity’ while ‘not sacrificing the strength of their inner convictions’.49
The Front insisted that it was not a fascist party; it had, however, no consistent alternative to fascism. Spearhead defended Tyndall from accusations that he was a Hitler supporter. This allegation was characterised as ‘the lowest depths of gutter journalism’ and Tyndall was said to be ‘critical of certain of Hitler’s policies, particularly his foreign policy’.50 In another piece, Tyndall acknowledged that ‘The “Nazi” label is the most widely employed smear weapon of our enemy.’ He went on to identify the Front with Hitler’s economic and social policies and with territorial expansion. Unlike in Germany under Hitler, he continued, the Front could achieve the same goals peacefully, without needing dictatorship or racial war. Britain could rebuild her African empire by negotiation: ‘a policy whereby Britain and her partners use their combined assets . . . for common advantage’.51
The National Front’s presence was felt in several workplaces. In October 1972, there was a strike by Asian bar loaders at Mansfield Hosiery in Loughborough, in protest against racist recruitment policies which restricted black employees to the least skilled and worst paid work. Among the strikers’ principal opponents was the National Union of Hosiery and Knitwear Workers (NUHKW) which accepted the workers’ subscriptions but had no local branch and supported the existing allocation of labour and the exclusion of Asians from better-paid roles. The Race Relations Board found that the union was collaborating with management to restrict Asian workers to worse pay. Indeed, such was the frustration of black workers that they decided to occupy the union’s offices. The Front offered its support to white workers who did not support the principle of equal pay. Ken Sanders, a member of the NUHKW at Mansfield Hosiery, joined the Front and later stood as an NF parliamentary candidate.52
Two years later, the National Front responded to a strike by around five hundred Asian workers demanding equal conditions at Imperial Typewriters in Leicester by seeking to organise the white workers as strike-breakers. Again, the key grievance was the restriction of the best-paid manual roles (setters) to whites. As one Asian striker complained:
Every morning when we come to work . . . white women push past us and clock in first . . . The setters set the white women’s machine first . . . White women also get the jobs of their choice. We have to do what the setter gives us.
The TGWU refused to make the dispute official or pay strike pay and denounced all outsiders in equal terms, whether they were helping the workers or, like the Front, the bosses. The Front leaked management proposals to settle the strike, helping to undermine any prospect of settlement. It called a march through Leicester behind a banner, ‘White workers of Imperial Typewriters’, to demand that the company stand firm. The strike ended in the closure of the company’s Leicester and Hull factories.53 A foreman at Imperial Typewriters Tony Cartwright stood for the National Front in the October 1974 general election at Leicester South.
An anti-fascist mole attending a National Front meeting at the ‘Shakespeare’ pub in central Birmingham records the local group as engrossed with the idea of emulating perceived Communist success in infiltrating the unions:
Tom Finnegan gave a report on the proposed bulletins for various areas – displaying a map with several hundred coloured pins on it he outlined how things would be done – the communist cell system would be applied with several people in each branch covering a set number of members . . . John Finnegan then took up the question of trades unions and said that NF members must gain union posts. Communist training classes were referred to and possible emulation commented on.54
While several of the Front’s older members were lifelong fascists moving slowly in the direction of electoralism, its young recruits relished the violence and wanted to push Tyndall to the right. One was Joe Pearce, who joined the Front when he was just 14 years old. The product of a rural Suffolk upbringing who had moved to East London and then rejected his new comprehensive school, Pearce established a Young National Front magazine: Bulldog. ‘It would be true’, Pearce would acknowledge decades later, ‘that Bulldog’s ultimate purpose was to incite racial hatred.’55
The left-libertarian paper Big Flame interviewed an anti-fascist who had grown up in Wolverhampton and had supported Enoch Powell:
Just like lots of lads and girls, racism was attractive to me, in that it meant you could rebel against the system with the implicit support of your family . . . But the real clincher for why I became a firm Powellite was the reaction of the middle-class, whose abstract, liberal tolerance was totally irrelevant, ill-informed and patronising.
He could remember vividly
a TV discussion following on a documentary about racism in Wolverhampton in which a Hampstead do-gooder said, ‘To be terribly frank, one finds the speech of the white
people in Wolverhampton quite as alien as that of the ethnic minority.’
Any effective anti-racism had to break through the link that could sometimes bind racism with elements of class feeling. ‘I still get creeps’, the former Powell supporter wrote:
when I hear that ‘One race, the human race’ line, because it allows the NF to manipulate the germ of class-consciousness in a racist direction. That’s why they try to nail the revolutionary left as ‘nigger lovers’, students and ‘do-gooders’.56
The future actor Ricky Tomlinson briefly joined the National Front in Liverpool. ‘I was politically naive and poorly educated,’ he remembers. ‘I had a mixture of left- and right-wing views, having been a shop steward and at the same time coming from a very patriotic family.’ The Front presented itself as a single-issue anti-immigration campaign: ‘I just wanted to draw the line under how many we could take because there didn’t seem to be enough to go round.’57
‘Members and supporters are attracted predominantly by the National Front’s stand on immigration,’ wrote Zig Layton Henry, ‘and for this reason this is the issue which dominates NF campaigns and publicity.’ Harrop suggested that as many as three-quarters of all new recruits to the National Front joined out of racism. Indeed, the Front was happy to claim the mantle of white prejudice. In one interview, its National Organiser Martin Webster told the BBC:
The reason why we publish a poster saying ‘The National Front is a Racialist Front’ is because we are a racialist front. You must understand what that means. It means that we support the concept of the nation as the means whereby our society is to be organised and we believe the only rational basis for having nations is some kind of a degree of ethnic homogeneity.