John Hutchyns Tyndall - A text book study in personal and political failure

By Gerry Gable | Wednesday, 20 July 2005 Source: Searchlight

John Tyndall (left) poses with fellow Spearhead members in the Notting Hill headquarters of Colin Jordan's National Socialist Movement in 1962

Few people will mourn the passing of John Tyndall, founder of the British National Party, apart from a few thousand far-right extremists. John Tyndall, lifelong national socialist, died on 19 July aged 71.

His life was marked by failure. The son of a doting mother and a father who run one of the biggest YMCA hostels, King George's House in Southwark, south London, Tyndall left school with just three O levels. After doing his national service and a short spell of employment installing one-arm bandits in sleazy Soho clubs, he moved into politics full-time. His biggest missed opportunity came in the 1970s when he led Britain's largest postwar fascist organisation, the National Front. He liked nothing better than being a big fish in a small pond and his authoritarian leadership style was wholly unsuited to a party that had 17,500 members at its peak in 1973 and 64,000 people passing through its ranks between its foundation in 1967 and 1978, when Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party.

Tyndall started his political career in 1956 in A K Chesterton's wildly anti-Jewish League of Empire Loyalists, where he first mixed with established nazis and fascists such as Colin Jordan and John Bean. He appeared to be politically confused because in summer 1957 he attended the communist-run World Youth Festival in Moscow. Soon afterwards he and Bean moved off to form the National Labour Party and Jordan set up the White Defence League. The two groups merged in 1960 in the first version of the British National Party.

Over the following 18 months Tyndall, who already had a conviction for threatening behaviour, formed the illegal paramilitary group Spearhead with a group of fanatical nazis and criminals. It was to be the hit squad for the British nazi movement, viciously attacking its opponents and training in the countryside with explosives and arms.

Running true to form, the first BNP did not last long and in January 1962 Jordan and Tyndall departed to form the National Socialist Movement, taking Spearhead with them. By December 1962 the NSM leaders were behind bars for the activities of Spearhead and for causing a riot at their anti-Jewish rally in Trafalgar Square on 1 July.

Tyndall and Jordan fell out over the affections of the French nazi perfume heiress Françoise Dior. Tyndall had got engaged to her while Jordan was finishing his prison sentence but, she told me in the 1960s, she was disappointed with Tyndall's inability to perform sexually with her on three successive nights. After Jordan's release she rapidly married him in a disastrous alliance.

This left Tyndall in a crisis over his political future. His attempt to solicit funds from an Egyptian Muslim extremist officer serving in his country's embassy in London ended abruptly after Searchlight's intervention during a visit to Britain by the US nazi leader Lincoln Rockwell, later to be assassinated. Jordan treated Tyndall like an errand boy. Smarting at the loss of the Dior fortune and distrusted by Jordan, Tyndall approached representatives of the Jewish community and suggested that if they gave him around £4,000 to buy a smallholding he would leave far-right politics. This was a lot of money in the early 1960s and more than they thought his offer was worth. He was shown the door.

Shortly afterwards he left the NSM and formed the Greater Britain Movement, taking with him most of the NSM's tiny membership. It was at this time that he set up his magazine Spearhead, of which he remained owner, editor and publisher until his death. The title was indicative of where he remained in the nazi camp.

The mid-1960s saw a wave of attacks on Jewish buildings in London carried out by teams of self-styled nazi commandos drawn from both the GBM and the NSM. Tyndall was never charged or directly implicated in these crimes but Dior was later convicted and sent to prison for her role in one arson. Although police documents from the investigation showed that Jordan had prior knowledge of at least one of the arsons, he was never charged.

Through the 1960s Tyndall, with Britain's leading gay nazi Martin Webster at his side, indulged in a number of staged activities including a vicious attack on the elderly President of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta.

On another occasion he and his thugs drove into Notting Hill in a lorry filled with improvised weapons and targeted a group of people selling Searchlight. The nazis were chased off and later arrested for possession of the weapons. Tyndall was remanded in custody.

Released again, he was soon to be convicted and imprisoned for possession of a hand gun and ammunition.

He was still in prison at the launch of the National Front in 1967. Jordan and the ageing Oswald Mosley had declined to have anything to do with the new party and the first leader of the NF, A K Chesterton, excluded the GBM because it was too violent and openly nazi, although its officers had taken part in all the negotiations leading up to the NF's formation.

Eight months later the GBM was allowed into the NF by the back door and its 132 members soon controlled an organisation with thousands of members, growing very rapidly as a result of a stream of defectors from the Conservative Party under Edward Heath's leadership.

The next few years saw Tyndall flying the Union Jack for the consumption of the British public while writing to the leaders of the US Nazi Party with promises that he would hoist up the swastika banner when the NF was strong enough. He was a frequent visitor to the USA and Europe, where he met some of the richest and most hardline nazis and Jew-haters.

His own praetorian guard of hardline nazi activists helped him repel an early leadership challenge from John O'Brien, who many thought was a state asset. Tyndall's supporters knew exactly where he stood on issues vital to them. He had written about using medical measures against those seen as socially or racially unacceptable to any future nazi state, on the same lines as the monstrous Dr Mengele. They also respected Tyndall's courage as a street fighter at the head of his storm troopers and the fact that kept himself physically fit.

Tyndall saw himself as an economic genius but had no grasp of real world economics. His writings were tedious but he was an orator in the style of Churchill and Mosley and could always rouse an audience to action.

He was also dull socially. He once had lunch with the late Alan Clark, the former Conservative minister. Afterwards Clark related that it was the most boring hour and three quarters he had ever experienced in his political career.

What held Tyndall back was his unerring belief in the führer principle. He personally ruled the party and treated its directorate as his personal fiefdom. This alienated many of the former Tories and occasional former Labour supporters who had joined the NF and wanted a say in its political direction. The NF in the mid-1970s had more than twice as many members as the BNP today and could have achieved greater success, but Tyndall stifled talent.

He weathered a major upheaval when John Kingsley Read split the NF and set up the National Party. The NP soon tottered along into oblivion and Kingsley Read himself defected to Searchlight.

Martin Webster, the NF's national organiser, constantly quarrelled with Tyndall when they shared a room in a house in Winchmore Hill. It became the scene of what resembled a bar room brawl in a western movie. Later Tyndall was to attack Webster publicly for being gay, claiming he had never known. This drew sniggers from long-time nazis.

His close friendship with John Vassall, the gay spy for the Soviet KGB, was at odds with his claims to be a super patriot and anti-gay. He was never able to explain this relationship.

Whatever political prospects Tyndall had as leader of the NF evaporated after Thatcher took control of the Tory Party, triggering a mass exodus from the ranks of the NF to whence they had come. With the NF down to around 4,000 members and splitting in all directions, Tyndall tried to set up alternative organisations.

It was another three years before a new BNP emerged under his leadership. In its early years he was unchallenged at its head but like in the NF, it soon became apparent that he was unable to rise to the challenge of fighting elections and attracting a wider audience. Party membership was stagnating and the deaths of some of his staunchest allies left him weakened.

In the mid 1980s he was back in prison for inciting racial hatred in what was then the BNP newspaper British Nationalist. In his absence a number of former far-right Young Conservatives moved in on the party but they were shown the door once he was free.

Later he started relaxing his hold and allowed some of his younger and brighter members to develop new ways for the BNP to move forward. One of these was Eddy Butler, a professional planner as well as a street fighter, now the BNP's elections officer. The election of Derek Beackon in a Tower Hamlets council by-election in 1993 on a "Rights for Whites" slogan was a major achievement for the BNP. He lost the seat the following May, but a month later Tyndall polled 9% in a parliamentary by-election in Dagenham – the first time the BNP had saved its deposit in a parliamentary election.

Tyndall withdrew the party from the streets, ending its marches, and started to soften his political line, at least in public. By the mid nineties he started for the first time thinking about appointing a successor.

His first choice was the convicted bomber Tony Lecomber. The problem was not Lecomber's convictions but the fact that he had no money. Tyndall was then drawn towards Nick Griffin, who came from a well-to-do family. As a mark of his confidence in Griffin, Tyndall also allowed him to edit Spearhead.

The reason why Griffin's independent financial means was so important to Tyndall became clear when Griffin asked about the substantial amounts of money that had been left to the BNP in Tyndall's name. It rapidly became clear that Tyndall viewed these legacies as his personal pension fund.

Tyndall and Griffin fell out and fought each other for leadership of the BNP. Griffin's victory in 1999 resulted in many of Tyndall's closest allies defecting to Griffin.

Tyndall fought back, was expelled from the BNP in 2003, readmitted, expelled again and proscribed. He remained popular with many BNP members, who invited him to speak at party meetings in defiance of Griffin's wishes. It was BBC undercover film of one of these meetings, for the documentary A Secret Agent, that led to him being charged in April with incitement to racial hatred. His death came two days before he was due to appear again at Leeds Crown Court alongside Griffin and Mark Collett, a young BNP activist.

No longer in the best of health, Tyndall was drinking too much especially on his speaking tours. Searchlight had dogged him since the early 1960s and never let go. His latest arrest was largely the responsibility of Searchlight, which had worked closely with the BBC programme-makers.

With Tyndall no longer a threat the BNP was able to be conciliatory towards the memory of the man Griffin had helped to destroy. Stuart Russell, the BNP's press officer, described Tyndall as an "excellent chap with a keen analytical mind". The BNP website admitted that, "Without John Tyndall, it is doubtful whether the British National Party would even be in existence", and for the first time acknowledged that Tyndall faced the same charges as Griffin and Collett, whom the party had previously described as the Free Speech Two. But it was not all praise. "He tried to criticise the current leadership, and he should not have done that," Russell told the press.

Tyndall's death leaves Griffin free to consolidate his vision of the BNP free from any serious political challengers within his party or among those he expelled and proscribed. But like Mosley, Jordan and Tyndall, he still has to learn the most important lesson, which is that the British people do not take kindly to tinpot self-serving extremist politicians.