National Socialist Movement (UK, 1962)
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The National Socialist Movement was a British Neo-Nazi group formed on 20 April 1962, Adolf Hitler's birthday, by Colin Jordan, with John Tyndall as his deputy.[1] as a splinter group from the original British National Party of the 1960s.
Impetus for the formation of the NSM came from a 1961 letter to Jordan from George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party. Rockwell stated that he agreed with the BNP, except over their lack of openness about Nazism. Jordan, feeling that a link-up with Rockwell could be beneficial, left the BNP to launch the NSM, and soon after formed the World Union of National Socialists with the American Nazi Party (and later other groups). During the summer of 1962, at an international conference in the Cotswolds, attended by Rockwell who had illegally entered the UK, Jordan was proclaimed "World Führer".[2]
With displays proclaiming "Free Britain From Jewish Control",[3] Jordan spoke at a meeting held in Trafalgar Square on 1 July 1962 which led to a riot. Jordan though believed a majority of the British people would agree with his opinions, and that, from a British point of view, the second world war had been a mistake.[4]
The NSM tried to organise an armed wing, Spearhead, which was observed by the police. Jordan and Tyndall were imprisoned, along with Martin Webster, Denis Pirie and Roland Kerr-Ritchie, under the Public Order Act of 1936. The movement was effectively put on hold until Jordan was released from prison in 1963, when he assumed the leadership again.
The NSM was further weakened in May 1964 when Tyndall formed the Greater Britain Movement. Tyndall objected to the "non-British flavour" of the NSM, and bore a personal grudge against Jordan and Françoise Dior, Tyndall's former fiancée who hastily married Jordan while Tyndall was still in prison simply to avoid being deported from Britain as an undesirable alien.
The Movement entered its last phase of activity in 1965 when it launched a campaign against the "race traitor" Patrick Gordon Walker, the Foreign Secretary. Colin Jordan took to the stage of a public meeting addressed by Denis Healey, who punched Jordan. Membership of the group fell to almost nothing overnight, after the arrest of several members accused of burning synagogues, but the NSM momentum was brought to an abrupt halt when Jordan's wife Françoise Dior finally decided to leave him in March 1966, thus cutting off his main source of finance. During the 1960s, NSM supporters including Dior, organised 34 arsons attacks against Jewish owned buildings.[3]
The movement was affected by new race relations legislation. Jordan was arrested under the new laws and jailed for eighteen months in January 1967 for distributing a leaflet "The Coloured Invasion", "a vituperative attack on black and Asian immigrants".[2] As a result Jordan was not at large when the National Front was launched that same year. It seems unlikely, however, that the NSM would have been invited to join because of the reluctance of both A. K. Chesterton and the Racial Preservation Society to admit open Nazis, and because the bad blood that existed with Tyndall. The NSM finally collapsed without leadership, and the remnants of the group were reconstituted as the British Movement in May 1968, following Jordan's release.
Andrew Brons, current British National Party MEP for Yorkshire and the Humber, was an early member of the NSM in the 1960s.[5]
The present NSM is not directly related to the British Movement.
[edit] References
- ^ Roger Eatwell "Obituary: John Tyndall", The Independent, 21 July 2005
- ^ a b "Colin Jordan: leader of the far Right", The Times, 16 April 2009
- ^ a b Gerry Gable Obituary: Colin Jordan", The Guardian, 13 April 2009
- ^ Transcript of Colin Jordan interview Midlands News, Associated TeleVision, 5 July 1962, as reproduced on the Media Archive for Central England website.
- ^ Duncan Campnell, 'Andrew Brons, the genteel face of neo-fascism', The Guardian 8 June 2009
