My Autobiography
Now that I am 76 years old, and on the last lap, I have decided to write my autobiography. What follows is only 5,000 words but I have tried to give an accurate account of my political life. This will be concluded in the April issue of European Outlook.
Early Days
St Mark's Church of England Primary School in the 1950s was run by a remarkable woman called Miss Hatfield. She was very patriotic and on Empire Day she had us marching around the playground like little soldiers. The school was decorated with Union Jacks and pictures of the Royal family. And on one notable occasion we were inspected by Field Marshall Montgomery. His father had been the vicar of St Mark's Church at Kennington. We were almost bursting with pride as the great man walked amongst us.
In 1952 the girls and boys assembled for dancing lessons. The teacher turned on a huge radio tuned to the school's program, but instead of dancing music we heard the Funeral March and a voice repeating over and over, "The King is dead. God save the Queen." We were all sent home for the day. When I walked into my mother's kitchen she said "what are you doing at home?" I replied "The King is dead. God save the Queen." This earned me a slap for being so wicked. She was a working class Tory who believed in corporal punishment.
To mark the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 we were taken to the Granada cinema in Kennington Lane to see a film of the ceremony. The second feature was a film showing how Great Britain was. It showed shipbuilding on the Clyde, steel making in South Wales, coal mining in Yorkshire, car making in the Midlands, and locomotive workshops in Swindon. I rushed home and told my stepfather how we led the world in industrial production. He said: "Yes son, and do you know why? Because Germany, Italy and Japan have been flattened." He was a cynical ex-Royal Navy stoker who was unimpressed by propaganda.
But I was taken in by jingoism and outraged when Britain and France were forced to withdraw from Suez in 1956. The Suez crisis happened about the same time as the Soviet invasion of Hungary, which also upset me. It never occurred to me that our invasion of Egypt was no different to Russia's invasion of Hungary. The Daily Express said that we were defending democracy and the Soviets were trying to destroy it; and I believed them.
There was a boy at school called Paul Barnes who liked to fight. He was younger than me but taller and more aggressive. One day we were locked in mortal combat outside school when we were separated by his father, Bill Barnes. It was he who later introduced us to politics by taking us to Oswald Mosley's Union Movement meetings in Trafalgar Square and Kensington Town Hall. Bill was the proud owner of an AC Tourer that he used to drive us to country pubs where we would sit in the garden drinking cider and discussing politics.
Bill Barnes with his son Paul and me in the AC.
Bill had been in several of the fascist groups before the war and he knew most of their leaders. He told me that William Joyce had been set up by Special Branch who told him that he could avoid detention under Defence Regulation 18B by going to Germany where he would be protected by his American birth. The result was that he was executed for 'treason' for broadcasting for the enemy in time of war. Bill's best friend was John Beckett who had fallen out with Oswald Mosley in 1937. He was Paul's Godfather. Like Joyce and Beckett, and hundreds of others, he was on the 18B list but he avoided arrest by going "on the run" during the war
In 1961 Bill married a beautiful Irish girl called Rita Waters. They had a daughter called Diana who was killed in a motor accident when she was fourteen.
In 1959 Paul and I were cycling past Trafalgar Square when we came across a meeting of John Bean's National Labour Party. We were so impressed by the flags and banners and the fiery rhetoric of the speakers that we wanted to join straight away but Bill Barnes said we were too young and that was that. Two years later, however, we joined the League of Empire Loyalists, which despite its royalist image, was just as dangerous as the NLP.
Off to Work
I left school at 15 without qualifications. I was good at English and Geography but so hopeless at maths that I didn't bother taking my exams. Nevertheless, I got a job with the News Chronicle newspaper as a trainee teleprinter operator. A teleprinter was a machine that used punched tape to send messages at high speed via a landline. The teleprinter keyboard was the same as a normal typewriter so I was given a typewriter and told to teach myself to type. From the Foreign News department of the News Chronicle I typed out propaganda tracts that would have outraged my bosses if they had read them.
My career in Fleet Street lasted less then a year but it taught me to type and to drink. At that time the newspaper industry was fuelled by alcohol. One week I worked so much overtime that my wages came to £5.00 which was paid to me in the form of a five pound note. It was difficult in those days to change a fiver but somebody told me that I could change it in the White Swan, which we called the Mucky Duck. I approached the landlord and asked him if he could change my fiver. He said "This is a pub not a bank. What do you want to drink?" I ordered a brown ale which cost a shilling and pocketed my change. For those who don't remember the old money there were 12 pennies in a shilling and 20 shillings in a pound.
When the News Chronicle folded I got a job with an advertising agency looking after artwork and ordering photographs. I was also responsible for a photo copy machine that required a negative to be made of each item. This was the latest technology but compared to a modern machine it was prehistoric. The work was satisfying and my employer wanted me to go to night school to study copywriting, but I was more interested in politics.
Punch Up Politics
In 1960 the NLP merged with Colin Jordan's White Defence League to form the British National Party, not to be confused with John Tyndall's movement which came 20 years later.
On April 20th 1962, Adolf Hitler's birthday, Colin Jordan, John Tyndall and a dozen others broke away from the NLP to form the National Socialist Movement. They wore Stormtrooper style uniforms to stage mock battles in the Kentish woods, and were duly prosecuted under the Public Order Act. To add to the comedy Colin Jordan and John Tyndall competed for the hand of Francoise Dior. She was a French heiress who was briefly engaged to John Tyndall before marrying Colin Jordan in a bizarre ceremony involving the dripping of blood on to the pages of Mein Kampf. It's one of the mysteries of life that two such intelligent men behaved as they did, but love makes fools of us all.
With Avril Waters after a skirmish at Mahatma Gandhi Hall
In June 1962 the NSM held a rally in Trafalgar Square that was broken up by gangs of screaming anti-fascists. I was at that meeting sporting a eye patch from an earlier LEL confrontation with the Movement for Colonial Freedom. I couldn't see very well but I remember Martin Webster, another ex-Empire Loyalist, waving a flagpole defiantly at a homicidal mob that were trying to kill him.
The NSM's major achievement was to smuggle the American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell into the country in 1961. At their Cotswold Camp they founded the World Union of National Socialists with Colin Jordan as leader. This made the headlines in every newspaper and strengthened the government's resolve to clamp down on the far-right.
But the NSM wasn't the only group to wear uniforms. Keith Goodall and Roy Robinson broke away from Union Movement to found the National Union of Fascists, soon to be rechristened the European Union of Fascist following complaints from the National Union of Farmers which shared their initials. The EUF operated in Brixton market and one of their members, Denis Whereat, got himself arrested for wearing a political uniform and giving fascist salutes to the Jewish stallholders. He refused to recognise the court and was remanded for medical reports.
Meanwhile, the BNP, stripped of its Nazi faction, achieved a good result in the 1964 general election in Southall where John Bean won 9.2% of the poll, the highest vote for a nationalist candidate since the war. But lacking funds and manpower he began talks with AK Chesterton, the leader of the Empire Loyalists, that eventually led to the founding of the National Front.
We held street corner BNP meetings at Earls Court on Wednesdays, Brixton on Saturdays, and Cheshire Street in the East End on Sunday mornings. I began to speak at these meetings and soon learned that in order to draw a crowd one needed to exaggerate. This resulted in me getting a ticking off from a Special Branch officer for saying that blacks were pouring into the country and committing "rape, arson and buggery."
With so many meetings every week our speakers inevitably repeated themselves. Jack Lelieve used to refer to "Half caste negroid types from Suez and points east." And John Bean told the story of Seretse Khama the Paramount Chief of the Bangwato tribe of Botswana who was married to a British woman Ruth Williams. This marriage was controversial in those days but nobody would take any notice of it today.
My Commonwealth Tour
In 1965, after the excitement of the Southall election, I was so fed up with the lack of activity that I decided to go overseas. I had already hitch hiked through Germany, called on Jan Kruls, the leader of the Northern League, in Amsterdam, and visited the headquarters of the Falange in Barcelona. Eager for more travel I departed for South Africa together with another BNP member, Roy Chester. He was from South Wales and addressed meetings in the style of Nye Bevan, or Jeffrey Hamm.
Paul Barnes, Bill Barnes and Roy Chester.
We flew from Heathrow to Johannesburg on South African Airways and on the way we read leaflets that they gave us. They said that Apartheid was separate development but it soon became obvious to us that it was all about cheap labour. The separate development idea was a hoax. Roy Chester, who was a shrewd observer of politics, concluded that the capitalist that owned the gold and diamond mines didn't care who ran South Africa so long as they had the mineral rights. The Afrikaners are decent God-fearing people but the regime they supported was in the grip of high finance. I stayed in the Cape for three years, and Roy and his family stayed until he died a few years ago. South Africa is beautiful country but she has too many problems.
In 1968 I sailed to Australia on HMS Himalaya, a P&O ship full of British immigrants. At that time the country was desperate for labour but they still had the White Australia policy. I understand that the situation is very different now with the influx of Africans and Asians. I got a job at a paper mill in Sydney that offered good money and on the job training. I came off night shift one morning and followed my workmates to the pub next door that catered for shift workers. A man dressed the same as the rest of us in shorts and a singlet bought me a beer and asked if I was working at the papermill. He turned out to be a director of the company. I can't imagine the same thing happening in the UK, but it was typical of Australia. However, I only stayed there for a year. After the temperate Mediterranean climate of the Cape I found the oppressive heat and humidity of Sydney to be too much. So I left for New Zealand.
As the plane circled over Sydney I looked down on the parched landscape, but when we arrived in Auckland my first impression was of greenery. I had operated a winding machine at the Australian papermill and on the strength of that I got a job with the Auckland Herald newspaper. New Zealand really is a lovely country with good people and a pleasant climate. I stayed there a year and then headed for home on the MV Castle Felice, an Italian liner that had originally been the British troopship HMS Kenya.
Our first port of call was Tahiti, a French possession in the Pacific. I saw an attractive girl in a café and asked her in halting French if she would like a drink. It turned out that she was on the same ship as me and that she came from Highgate in North London.
We called at Panama City. In those days the Americans controlled a strip of land either side of the Canal that was air-conditioned, clean and well organised. But Panama proper was fiercely hot, dirty and falling to bits. I walked into a cantina and saw a local newspaper on the bar. I can't speak Spanish but I could understand the caption to a photograph on the front page. There was the president, the archbishop, the governor of the Bank of Panama, and various military officers. I asked the barman how it was that the rulers of his country are white but most of the people are black. "Where do they live," I asked. Without hesitation he replied "Switzerland."
As we approached Lisbon I was on deck with a Dutchman, a German, and a Portuguese. And when we saw the lights of the city we toasted our return to Europe, our native land.
Back Home Again
At Southampton we were faced with a dock strike and had to wait ages to go ashore. Nothing much had changed in the UK while I was away, except that prices seemed to have doubled. But I was glad to be back home. I got a job in the construction industry and married the girl I had met in Tahiti. Margaret had a daughter called Susan and the three of us set up home in South Woodford, a middle class part of East London.
I never felt sufficiently at home in South Africa, Australia or New Zealand to engage in politics, but now that I was back home I felt the urge to get involved. In 1973 I started a duplicated newsletter called 'Nation', which is why my other blog is called 'Nation Revisited'- because I revisited it after many years. I only produced about 50 copies per issue but I had some good writers, including Bill Barnes, Terry Savage, and Roy Chester who reported from South Africa. I used to distribute 'Nation' from the Bladebone pub in Bethnal Green. Jeffrey Hamm of Union Movement was given a copy and since my views were in line with his, he invited me to write for 'Action'. I took up his offer and joined UM. My first article was called 'A Well Armed Europe is the Price of Freedom', it appeared in 'Action' No 196 June 1st 1975. The name of the movement was later changed to Action Society but in June 1975 the masthead read 'Supporting Union Movement'.
This was the time of Harold Wilson's referendum on our membership of the Common Market. We took an active part in the 'yes' campaign and held various demonstrations. One such demo was outside Shoreditch Town Hall where a meeting was being held. A taxi drew up and the huge figure of Cyril Smith, the liberal MP, emerged. Roger Clare gave him a copy of 'Action' which he promptly threw to the ground. We then heard Roger say "pick it up you fat bastard." When Jeffrey Hamm heard of this he admonished Roger for jeopardising our chances of joining a Government of National Unity.
The only NF activity that I took part in was an anti-immigration march in September 1974, at which Kevin Gately, an anti-fascist agitator, had a fatal encounter with a policeman's truncheon. The Reds were out in force but the police dealt with them magnificently and Martin Webster organised a successful march from Victoria to Red Lion Square.
The National Front grew steadily with their policies of 'stop immigration. start repatriation, and get Britain out of the Common Market'. But they were too insular for me. When John Bean took his British National Party into the National Front in 1967 his progressive policies of Workers Partnership and European Confederation were ditched by the Empire Loyalist leadership. The Party crashed in the 1979 general election when Margaret Thatcher said that she understood people's fears of being "swamped" by immigration.
On the 1974 NF March from Victoria to Red Lion Square
Unfortunately, Union Movement was struggling to survive. Oswald Mosley died in 1980 and it became increasingly difficult to preach revolution in a time of plenty. People were keen to take package holidays and buy their council houses but they didn't relate to a movement that was founded in the ruins of post-war Britain to fight for returned servicemen and their families.
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