by David Renton
The interviewer asked what would happen to those outside that ethnic homogeneity. ‘Well you won’t have any rights at all,’ Webster answered, ‘because you won’t be a citizen of the nation, because you won’t be part of the community.’58 In this exchange, what is striking is how Webster was using racism dynamically, both to win new supporters and to give them a sense of the Front’s whole programme. In just a few words, he was explaining how the Front stood for more than hostility to migration. It demanded repatriation and a racially homogenous Britain.
Red Lion Square
One consequence of the shift from Chesterton’s leadership to Tyndall was that the National Front ceased to rely on a routine of monthly private members’ meetings combined with sporadic election campaigns and began to use public demonstrations to recruit. Under Chesterton, marches had been limited to the annual Remembrance Day parade. Under Tyndall, the number of demonstrations increased rapidly. Chairman Tyndall justified the new visibility of his party on the streets:
What is it that touches off a chord in the instincts of the people to whom we are seeking to appeal? It can often be the most simple and primitive thing. Rather than a speech or printed article it may just be a flag; it may be a marching column; it may just be the sound of a drum; it may just be a banner or it may just be the impression of a crowd. None of these things contain themselves one simple argument, one simple piece of logic . . . They are recognised as being among the things that appeal to the hidden forces of the human soul.59
On 15 June 1974, clashes between anti-fascists and the police at London’s Red Lion Square culminated in a police charge against anti-fascist demonstrators. One anti-Front protester, Kevin Gateley, a student at Warwick University, died.60 He was the first person to be killed at a political protest in mainland Britain since 1919. The context to the events began in April, when the Front booked the large hall at Conway Hall, a venue historically associated with secular humanism and the anti-war left. In early June, the anti-imperialist and anti-racist campaign group Liberation, headed by veteran Labour MP Fenner Brockway, learned of the Front’s booking and attempted to book a room of their own elsewhere in the building. By 9 June, the police were aware that both the Front and its opponents planned to hold demonstrations culminating at Conway Hall. The owners of Conway Hall, the South Place Ethical Society, through their General Secretary Peter Cadogan, released a press statement defending the decision to allow the Front a room on free speech grounds.
There were two demonstrations on 15 June. A Front contingent, about nine hundred-strong, formed up at Tothill Street in central London and approached Red Lion Square from the south-west. They were held by the police and made to wait at the corner of Vernon Place and Southampton Row, about a hundred metres due west of the north-west corner of Red Lion Square. Meanwhile, 1,500 or so Liberation marchers approached Red Lion Square from the north-east.
In a later report, Lord Justice Scarman estimated that within the anti-fascist crowd there were about four hundred to five hundred supporters of the International Marxist Group, a smaller number of International Socialists and about forty to fifty supporters of the Communist Party of England (Marxist-Leninist). The front of the demonstration marched from east to west along Theobalds Road and turned left down Old North Street where it approached Red Lion Square from the north. The organisers had reached an agreement with the police that on arriving at the Square the anti-fascists would be permitted to turn left and march clockwise around the eastern edge of Red Lion Square. They would pass Conway Hall, in the square’s north-east corner and settle in the south-east corner where they would hold a static protest. On arriving at Red Lion Square, it was made clear however to the organisers that the police had changed their minds and would permit a public protest only in the north-west corner of the square, that is, at a much greater distance from the Front meeting. The police therefore instructed the demonstrators to turn right, away from Conway Hall. The Liberation organisers agreed to this re-routing of their protest and about five hundred people followed. The rest of the marchers, however, remained where they were.
As for what happened next, there are two main versions. The first is the account given by police officers to the subsequent Scarman Inquiry. They reported that forty or so Maoists behind a red CPE (M-L)61 banner briefly pushed towards the police line on the north side of the square. In response, the officer in charge, Deputy Assistant Commissioner J. H. Gerrard, ordered his officers to clear all remaining anti-fascists from the northward edge of Red Lion Square. This decision required the police to split the anti-fascist group in two: the Liberation contingent were allowed their meeting in the square’s north-west corner; the remaining anti-fascist were to be expelled from the square northward, leaving the area around Conway Hall free for the National Front to hold their meeting. In this account, it was as the demonstrators were being expelled from the square that Kevin Gateley was killed.
The other version of events is the one found by Lord Scarman. In his account, the Maoists were ignored in favour of members of the IMG (‘a front of determined-looking young men with their arms linked’) who had refused to follow the Liberation organisers and led instead what Scarman termed ‘a pushing affair – the weight of a small number of demonstrators’ against police lines. This tentative push, Scarman found, grew in force, even though the numbers involved were still tiny, becoming at first a ‘vicious scrimmage’, then an ‘unexpected, unprovoked and viciously violent’ assault, and in its final stages a ‘riot’, to which it was the police’s ‘duty’ to respond with unrestrained force.62 To a greater extent even than the police themselves, Scarman was able to blame Gateley’s death not on the officers who struck him but on the IMG whose failure to disperse was (for Scarman) the cause of Gateley’s death.
At forty years’ distance, some of Scarman’s findings just about ring true. The measures of linking arms was a recurring anti-fascist tactic, which had travelled to Britain via the IMG from Paris. The suggestion that a couple of dozen protesters may have pushed at police lines is plausible; the police were, after all, blocking the agreed route to Conway Hall. At demonstrations, it is far from unusual for police pushes to be resisted and for something like a ‘scrimmage’ (i.e. a rugby scrum) to follow between protesters and the police. Members of the IMG, a party which in its subsequent history was never at the militant wing of anti-fascism, may well have seen the CPE (M-L) and may have pushed in the same direction as them. Even if we accept that they pushed as hard as they could while still linking arms (Scarman’s ‘vicious scrimmage’), this is no force at all. Anyone who has attended more than a handful of protests will have seen desultory pushing of this sort; the reason why Red Lion Square is remembered is not because of this push but because of the police response, which was to escalate the conflict by charging at the crowd with batons drawn.
The police repeatedly drove into the anti-fascist crowd. Photographs from the day show mounted police striking at the heads of demonstrators with sticks. Nick Mullen, a 28-year-old student from an Irish family was one of those struck on the head. He had been on Old North Street at the same time as Kevin Gateley and a picture shows Mullen’s face thick with blood. In Mullen’s account, the fatal conflict began when the policemen on foot received an order to attack, causing them to lift their batons. One demonstrator called out, ‘Why don’t you put your truncheons away?’ To which a policeman answered, ‘You must be fucking joking.’ There was a push and one of the demonstrators fell. Mullen claims to have heard a policeman shout, ‘One of the bastards is down. Let’s trample him.’63
The last photographs before Gateley suffered the blow that killed him show the student at the junction of Red Lion Square and Old North Street with his way seemingly blocked by police officers. Between Gateley and Conway Hall, there are mounted policemen, riding their horses into the crowd. Gateley is three rows back from them, facing mounted officers to his front and police on foot to his side. Subsequent photographs show Gateley after he collapsed. Officers reached for G
ateley’s unconscious body and lifted his foot before it fell weightless to the ground.
The post-mortem was conducted by Dr Iain West of St Thomas’s Hospital. West indicated that the cause of death was a haemorrhage resulting from a head injury. He found an oval bruise at the back of Gateley’s ear about three-quarters of an inch long. The injury had been caused by a hard object. It was impossible to tell from the shape of the bruise what had caused the injury, other than that it was likely to be a blunt object, possibly a police truncheon.64
By quarter past four, the police had succeeded in clearing the north-east corner of Red Lion Square, after which they were able to bring in the Front to their meeting. Aside from Gateley, some forty-eight people were reported to have been injured and by the end of the day some fifty-one anti-fascists were arrested.
Martin Walker noted that in the aftermath of the events, the Front was jubilant. It was the Front who ‘emerged as the innocent victims of political violence, the Left who emerged as the instigators’.65 Richard Clutterbuck, an academic writer about terrorism, also read the day as a victory for the Front:
Television films showed the NF marchers standing stock still with closed ranks on one side of Southampton Row while ‘dirty, hairy lefties’ swarmed about in a chaotic battle with the police on the other . . . The result was precisely what the NF would have wished: publicity for the purposes of their demonstration, discrediting of their detractors.66
So assured was the Front of its moral authority after Red Lion Square that Martin Webster wrote to the Home Secretary demanding that ‘the leaders of the International Marxist Group, the International Socialists, the Communist Party and their individual associates on the Executive of the National Union of Students be indicted for conspiracy to incite and promote acts of criminal violence’.67
At Lord Scarman’s Inquiry into the Red Lion Square disorders, Martin Webster admitted that he and John Tyndall had a history of anti-Semitism. He acknowledged the chants used by the Front, ‘The Reds, the Reds, we’ve got to get rid of the Reds’, and admitted that the Front expected their opponents to respond angrily to them. Webster named the two heads of the Front’s honour guard, Ron Tier and Ken Merritt and claimed not to know that just four years before, Merritt had spent six months in prison for robbery with violence. As for the suggestion that the National Front was led by self-confessed Nazis and Hitlerites (i.e. himself and John Tyndall), Webster said that it was led ‘by people who ten or twelve years ago were National Socialists but have long ceased to be so’. Webster became ill-tempered as his evidence wore on and his answers petulant. He later wrote to Scarman, ‘I am a rather quick-tempered person . . . and it may be that I over-reacted. I can only plead that my intentions stumbled over my temperament.’68 Ultimately, Scarman’s conclusions gave succour to the Front, absolving the police and concluding that ‘those who started the riot’, by which he meant the IMG, ‘carry a measure of moral responsibility for [Gateley’s] death’.69
The events at Red Lion Square fit awkwardly into anti-fascist narratives of the 1970s. Undoubtedly, there were periods when physical confrontations with anti-fascists sapped the morale of the Front’s supporters, reducing attendances at marches and public meetings and isolating the Front from potential supporters. But at other times and especially when the Front was able to claim the mantle of victimhood, physical confrontation seems to have boosted the Front’s morale. In June 1974, the academic Nigel Fielding was carrying out fieldwork among Front branches in South London. He records the ‘keen interest’, with which members discussed the possibility of ‘confrontation with opponents’. Branch members wanted to discuss practical plans to prevent anti-fascists from attacking their coaches while the Front marched. Some Front supporters were impressed by the security arrangements at Conway Hall, where sixty-five members of the Front’s Honour Guard had been tasked with protecting the venue. One exchange between members ended with the NF’s branch organiser saying ‘The Front knows how to defend itself.’70
Around this time, Halifax National Front established a ‘flying squad’ with a goal of confronting marches by ‘communist, leftist, immigrant or other groups’.71
Four months after Gateley’s death, the NF branch in Birmingham wrote to its supporters: ‘It is doubtful if many members are aware of the intense hostility which our campaign in Birmingham has engendered.’ The letter described an attack which had been made by members of the IS and IMG on a Front meeting in Handsworth. That had been repulsed. However, it continued:
We have received information that another public meeting, to be held on Tuesday 8 October at 8pm, is most certainly going to be subjected to the same treatment by the opposition who are determined to try and ‘Smash the National Front in Birmingham’. The meeting will be their Waterloo and all activists are urged in the strongest possible terms to attend.72
Populists, Strasserites
Between 1974 and 1976, the presence of former Conservatives within the leadership of the Front such as Roy Painter (previously the unofficial leader of the pro-NF faction in the Monday Club), Anthony Reed-Herbert (previously the chair of Leicester Young Conservatives) and John Kingsley Read (recently the chairman of the Blackburn Young Conservatives) provided the conditions for a two-year inner-party feud concerning whether John Tyndall should remain the leader of the Front.
In September 1974, the TV programme This Week ran a documentary about the Front, during which a former chairman of the National Front, John O’Brien, called Martin Webster ‘the perfect example of the school bully grown large’, and set out the history of John Tyndall’s involvement in neo-Nazi circles. Tyndall was then interviewed. Eight million people viewed the programme and such was its effect on the Front’s members that a month later, also following a change to the Front’s rules which gave every member a vote in elections to the party’s Directorate, Tyndall was voted out as chairman and was replaced by John Kingsley Read.73
Tyndall’s replacement, Kingsley Read, had proved himself outside the fascist milieu, having twice stood for the Conservatives as a councillor in Blackburn. He hoped to be the candidate for the parliamentary seat and on failing to be selected by the Tories, joined the Front instead. The owner of his own wholesale retail carpet and textile business, Kingsley Read went everywhere in a suit and tie. In one picture of clashes with anti-fascists, he was photographed smoking a cigarette through a holder, urbane and relaxed even in circumstances of some danger.74
John Tyndall’s authority was not broken, however, by Kingsley Read’s ascendancy and he resumed his previous role as deputy chairman. The veteran of decades of in-fighting within small groups, Tyndall had not ceased to believe in his own indispensability to the Front and he plotted his revenge against his detractors.
One of the documents given by a mole to the Searchlight archives is a letter from Ralph Marshall to other ‘loyalists’ within the NF, proposing to call a West Midlands District meeting at which a motion would be put condemning ‘the opportunism which exists allowing founder members to be smeared by red terrorists and their lackeys’, and expressing the district’s confidence in John Tyndall. In order to ensure that the motion was passed, it was suggested that it should be opened up even to the small ultra-violent groups to the Front’s right, such as the British Movement, seen as reliable opponents of the Populists. Tyndall was made aware of Marshall’s support, and wrote back to him:,
I would like to know who in the Birmingham branch . . . (a) Is in the ‘populist’ camp. (b) Is in the loyalist camp. (c) Is sitting on the fence. I can assure you that any such information will be kept confidential.75
Martin Webster told readers of Spearhead that Populism meant ‘policy-trimming’, and the victory of the ‘Old Gang parties’. Populism, he wrote, ‘is not Nationalism’. Roy Painter’s response was titled, ‘Let’s make Nationalism Popular’. Tyndall’s supporters in Kent circulated a leaflet demanding his return to the leadership, calling his opponents a ‘power-hungry faction’, and insisting that the Populists were planning
to purge the NF not only of Tyndall but a number of other ‘very long-standing senior official of the movement’. At the Front’s AGM in January, he was met with jeering and hostile chants of ‘Nazi, Nazi’. Tyndall in turn denounced Richard Lawson, the editor of Britain First, who had expressed his disagreement with the politics of Mussolini and the principle of a leadership cult.76
The Populists had a narrow majority of the Front’s Directorate, its leading body, but Kingsley Read hesitated to demand Tyndall’s expulsion. At a meeting on 23 October, one of their number, Walter Barton, abstained, resulting in a 10–9 vote against taking further action. The Directorate then attempted to reconvene with an Executive Council voting for Tyndall’s removal. The Front’s headquarters were occupied and the locks changed. However, Tyndall obtained an injunction from the High Court overturning his expulsion. After that, Tyndall’s Populist critics resigned, forming a rival National Party and taking with them around a third of the Front’s members. In their absence, Tyndall became chairman of the NF once more.
The Populists presented themselves as moderates, but in practice they replicated the Front’s combination of racism, nationalism and electoralism. In particular, they were no less racist than their inner-party rivals. After a young Sikh man, Gurdip Singh Chaggar, was killed by racists, Kingsley Read told a public meeting, ‘Fellow racialists, fellow Britons and fellow whites, I have been told I cannot refer to coloured immigrants, so you can forgive me if I refer to niggers, wogs and coons.’ He then moved to the events of Chaggar’s death, saying, ‘One down, one million to go’.77 Kingsley Read was prosecuted for racial incitement, but he was strongly supported by the judge, His Honour Neil McKinnon, who encouraged the jury to acquit him.