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.
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