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The Führer of Notting Hill

In the spring of 1964, an American journalist named George Thayer visited a run-down property in Notting Hill, West London. Researching a book on Britain’s fringe parties, he had been granted an audience with John Tyndall, leader of the recently formed Greater Britain Movement. At 76 Princedale Road Thayer found a forbidding building, with steel shutters and wire mesh covering the ground floor windows. Swastikas had been painted on the brickwork, high out of reach of the street, which bore splashes of paint that had been thrown during a recent scuffle with opponents.

Once inside, Thayer was ushered in to a small back room, adorned with a portrait of Adolf Hitler, and found Tyndall: ‘He was a composite of all the characteristics I had vaguely associated with Nazis in Hitler’s Germany,’ wrote Thayer. ‘He had cold, evasive eyes, was blond and balding, and had not the slightest spark of humour. He was suspicious, nervous, and excitable, and moved with all the stiffness of a Prussian in Court.’

‘Jewry,’ Tyndall announced to Thayer, ‘is a world pest wherever it is found in the world. The Jews are more clever and more financially powerful than other people and have to be eradicated before they destroy the Aryan peoples.’

Tyndall went on to explain that his party was seeking to imbue the ideas of Hitler with specifically British characteristics. Details, however, were sketchy, and at the time of the meeting the only concrete proposal was that the swastika armbands worn by members inside the Princedale Road HQ – to wear them outside would have fallen foul of public order laws – would be blue, rather than the traditional red. ‘It will be interesting,’ mused Thayer, ‘to see how he combines the qualities of National Socialism with those of John Bull.’1

There were two guiding stars in John Tyndall’s political universe: Adolf Hitler and the British Empire. Born in 1934, and subsequently a pupil at Beckenham and Penge grammar school in south-east London, he was an undistinguished scholar who spent most of his spare time playing football and cricket, or indulging his passion for fitness. After completing his national service, he flirted briefly with left-wing politics, even visiting a world youth festival in the Soviet Union, before moving swiftly to the right. Tyndall’s conversion, he would later claim, was motivated by disgust at the idea that the British, a nation bound by ‘bonds of race’, as he saw it, might recognize colonial subjects as equals. In this belief, he found a home in a group called the League of Empire Loyalists.2

As the name suggests, the League’s origins lay in a backlash against the decline of Imperial Britain. Formed in 1954, it was not the first far-right group to emerge after the Second World War – that was the Union Movement, formed in 1948 by the former British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley and what remained of his supporters – but it was the first to have an impact on mainstream political life.

A pressure group rather than a political party, the League campaigned against the ‘Butskellite’3 consensus of the 1950s and early 1960s that saw both Labour and Conservative parties adapt, if reluctantly, to reduced influence abroad and the social democratic principles of the welfare state at home. The group’s modus operandi was to disrupt political speeches and public events with heckling and elaborate stunts. Members blew bugles during meetings, hid under speakers’ platforms overnight so they could burst out mid-speech, or bluffed their way in to receptions for visiting dignitaries.

But there was a more sinister edge to the League. The group, which brought together retired military officials and former colonial administrators with the right-wing Tory fringe, also provided a new home for fascists. Its founder was A.K. Chesterton, a cousin of the writer G.K. Chesterton, who had been a propagandist for Mosley’s British Union of Fascists until 1938. A.K. Chesterton fought for Britain against the Nazis during the war, but he was deeply anti-Semitic and a fervent believer in white racial superiority.

By Tyndall’s account, it was during his time in the League of Empire Loyalists that he was introduced to ‘the conspiracy theory’, via the pages of Chesterton’s magazine Candour. He also encountered the League’s West Midlands organizer, Colin Jordan, a young history teacher who was using the League as cover for other activities. Jordan was a disciple of Arnold Leese, the founder of the pro-Hitler Imperial Fascist League, which before the war had scorned the ‘kosher fascists’ of Mosley’s BUF. Leese had a visceral hatred of Jews, stemming, he claimed, from the methods of ritual slaughter he witnessed while stationed in the Middle East as a colonial veterinary surgeon. He was interned during the war, returning to prison in 1947 for helping former Waffen-SS members flee Europe. After his release, Leese promoted his views in his magazine Gothic Ripples, through which he caught the attention of Jordan.

Under the tutelage of Leese, who died in 1956, Jordan formed a neo-Nazi secret circle called The Ring, which painted bridges and viaducts calling for the release from prison of Hitler’s former deputy Rudolph Hess.4 He also gathered followers for his paramilitary White Defence League, members of which physically attacked black immigrants in Birmingham and London. Given a base at Princedale Road by Leese’s widow, Jordan joined other far-right groups in encouraging anti-black feeling before and after the 1958 Notting Hill race riots.

Tyndall fell into Jordan’s orbit and absorbed the theory, inherited from Leese, that Jews were encouraging non-white immigration in order to dilute Britain’s racial stock. By 1957, limited by the Blimpish posturing of the League, Tyndall left and formed the National Labour Party. In 1960, this merged with Jordan’s White Defence League to form the first British National Party, headquartered at Princedale Road.

This British National Party of the early 1960s did not fight elections with any seriousness; rather, it aimed to attract publicity and build up support in the traditional fascist manner, by holding marches, rallies and street-corner gatherings, particularly in Jewish areas of East London. (The size of these should not be overstated: many attracted only a handful of supporters, and were treated with indifference, or contempt, by many passers-by.) What distinguished the British National Party from its predecessors, however, was that it made opposition to non-white immigration its central pitch, calling for an immediate halt and proposing the repatriation of non-whites already in the country. These demands would be at the heart of every subsequent far-right movement.

In what would become a familiar pattern, Tyndall had made alliances by playing down his more extreme tendencies,5 but it rapidly became apparent that both Tyndall and Jordan were primarily interested in recreating the Third Reich, if only in their own imaginations. Tyndall would reputedly travel across London to party meetings wearing jackboots under his trousers.6 Jordan, as head of the British National Party’s External Department, was preoccupied with ‘white world solidarity’ and busied himself building up contacts with neo-Nazis in Europe, the US and Australia.7

In May 1960, the British National Party held a summer camp on the Norfolk estate of its president, Andrew Fountaine. Here, among ceremonies steeped in Nordic mystic fantasy (the opening event was the lighting of an ‘Aryan sunwheel’),8 Jordan and Tyndall unveiled a uniformed group of militants, modelled on Hitler’s SA, that they had named Spearhead. Dressed in grey shirts, Sam Browne belts and jackboots, Spearhead members met regularly at Princedale Road for ‘training’. Throughout the summers of 1960 and 1961 they would camp in various rural locations around England to practice marching, unarmed combat and ‘securing vital bridgeheads’.9 Some of their colleagues were alarmed at this development and in January 1962 both Tyndall and Jordan were expelled from the party.

That year, on 20 April – Adolf Hitler’s birthday – the pair launched the National Socialist Movement. As Tyndall recalled, the party took its name ‘directly from the Hitler party in Germany, together with a programme that in all the essential respects was the same.’10 The National Socialist Movement never numbered more than a hundred or so members, but the very fact of its existence, in a country that only twenty years previously had been at war with Nazi Germany, generated a certain level of public notoriety.

In July, the National Socialist Movement held a rally in Trafalgar Square, at which Tyndall stated ‘the Jew is like a poisonous maggot’. Jewish war veterans and other anti-fascists stormed the platform and Tyndall was sentenced to a month in prison for breach of the peace. The same summer, Jordan held a gathering of international neo-Nazis at a ‘secret’ location at Temple Guiting in Gloucestershire. In attendance was the leader of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, along with representatives of neo-Nazi parties from across Europe. The ensuing ‘Cotswold Declaration’ established a World Union of National Socialists.