John Tyndall

2,231 words

Part 7 of 8

Edited by Greg Johnson and Peter Jacobi

In 1995, Jonathan Bowden self-published his Collected Works in 6 volumes (London: Avant-Garde, 1995), edited by Jürgen Schwartz, one of Bowden’s pen names. The six volumes comprise 27 distinct books, 12 of which had been previously published. Altogether, the Collected Works contain more than 2,600 pages of rare early Bowden.

Onslaught is the third book in volume 2. It had not been previously published. We will publish it online in 8 installments. The titles are editorial.

Like many of the Collected Works volumes, Onslaught covers a wide range of political and cultural topics, interspersed with fictional narratives that may be loosely based on real people and events.

Eventually, a fully annotated version of Onslaught will appear at the Jonathan Bowden Archive. It will then be followed by similar editions of the rest of the Collected Works, plus a couple more early volumes that were not included. — Greg Johnson

The struggle in the National Front, of course, had by no means ended once the more open dissidents had been expelled to form the National Party. Indeed, it is interesting to note that during the struggle for the leadership, Tyndall himself had made contingency plans for another party. Unknown to most of the historians of the National Front, such as Richard Thurlow, Tyndall had been in secret contact with Jordan over a new party. Moreover, Tyndall and Jordan had met secretly in a Leicester hotel room when the struggle with Kingsley Read and the dissident nationalists had reached fever-pitch. At this meeting he proposed that a new organization be formed—an unadulterated neo-Nazi organization—with Jordan as its president. In a sense, therefore, Tyndall intended to kick Jordan upstairs as an honorary president, whilst keeping all of the political power in his own hands. Nothing came of this initiative, however, because Tyndall won his internal battle with Kingsley Read and the Populists who left to form their own organization. (Although this party was formed several years later when Tyndall left the National Front and formed the British National Party with the aid of defectors from British Movement.) The Populists who had been expelled from the National Front, however, were to have the last laugh in that they were responsible for Tyndall’s expulsion from the Front. Towards the end of the nineteen eighties various members of the National Party began to circulate round robin letters at branch and constituency level. These letters purported to be denunciations of Martin Webster, Tyndall’s loyal associate, and these letters concentrated in particular on Webster’s sexual antics. Martin Webster’s homosexuality, his penchant for young men, had been known on the extreme right for many years, and most members were relatively relaxed about it as long as it was kept private. The stream of correspondence worried Tyndall, however, particularly when he was confronted by his father-in-law, Charles Parker, who demanded immediate action on this matter. This is something which is not surprising when you consider that Charles Parker had once addressed an NF branch on the evils of masturbation, something which would have been difficult in his case because he only possessed one arm. Nevertheless, Tyndall felt that he had to act on this matter, and a meeting of the National Directorate was called for the express purpose of sending Martin Webster before a disciplinary committee. Unbeknown to Tyndall, however, there was no demand at branch level for Webster’s expulsion, and those who had put Tyndall up to this intended to purge him and not Webster from the Front. At the meeting the vast majority of members, ten out of twelve in fact, refused to act against Webster, and the latter, infuriated by the charges of homosexuality, called for Tyndall’s expulsion. This was backed, much to Tyndall’s consternation, by a majority of ten to two on the national directorate, with the sole exception of the lone acolyte, Edmonds,[1] who voted with Tyndall. Tyndall, the erstwhile leader of the Front, then found himself subject to the disciplinary action which he had contemplated for Martin Webster, his deputy. It was only then that Tyndall realized how he had been outmaneuvered, although as his autobiography The Eleventh Hour makes clear, he still does not understand the nature of that maneuver, i.e., the fact that it was engineered by many of his opponents, particularly individuals like Steve Brady and Joe Pearce, who had former National Party connections and who had returned to the Front, some even to the directorate.

You can order Jonathan Bowden’s The Cultured Thug here.

After this disastrous meeting Tyndall then fought with considerable energy, a steely resolve, to turn the situation in the Front in his direction—although it soon became apparent that the tide which was running against Tyndall had become irreversible, and he soon began to look for other options, options which lay outside the National Front. At first Tyndall set up an organization, the Committee for Nationalist Unity, ostensibly as a means of unifying the far right, in actuality an attempt to poach members from all of the existing groups. Finally, Tyndall set up his own organization, the New National Front—in actuality a very old form of the National Front—which was able to set up thanks to Charles Parker’s largesse. According to rumors which I have received, Parker gave Tyndall several thousand pounds in the first instance which enabled him to set up his new group. After a while and with the influx of British Movement members post-Michael McCloughlin, a new party was formed which was called the British National Party, harking back to the organization which Jordan and Tyndall had left in the 1960s. They had left the BNP, essentially John Bean’s group, because it was not Nazi enough in order to form the National Socialist Movement; now Tyndall had become convinced—in his only contribution to political science—that the swastika had to be draped in the Union Jack. As a result, the British National Party is actually the Greater Britain Movement, Tyndall’s little sect, masquerading as a British version of the NSM several decades on. Ultimately, it is doomed to isolation and despair, even ghettoization, as the only example of a hard-core Nazi or National Socialist party in Britain.

Verrall, who was Tyndall’s theoretical associate, was fond of mordant and depressing images, particularly in relation to the inevitability of racial decline. While Tyndall was more fascinated by the issue of homosexuality, and when he left the National Front he declared that a once great organization had been taken over by “homosexuals and skinheads.” Nevertheless, an important point remains here in that homosexual men are attracted to the politics of the extreme right, even the political fringe. In a sense it is the attraction which effeminate men, inverted men, and in some respects sub-men have for open statements of masculinity. They are attracted to the bravura of masculinity, its honor, show, and sense of form. As a result, they are attracted towards a certain despondency within the self—an inverse upon the cartilage. If you like, it is an attraction towards the surface, in the direction of the way things appear; in short, it represents a certain magnetism. When this is an attraction to epiphenomena, towards the sheen and luster of things—towards what we might call circumambient glamour. As a consequence, the homosexual, the denizen of the Third Sex à la Edward Carpenter, feels enamored of masculine wrath. Indeed, we might go further and say that the invert sees in rightwing politics a way out of the cul-de-sac; an escape from the forcing house of desire. In a sense he feels comfortable with a politics which is by definition the opposite of sodomitic licentiousness. While he is also attracted, let it be said, to a certain Sturm und Drang sensibility—a type of masculine derangement and joy. Indeed, we can see a simulacrum—an objective correlative as T. S. Eliot would have called it in The Criterion—in the work of the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon. When the appeal, even the negative appeal, of Bacon’s work is its tableaux vivant quality, its manufacture of a new wave in sensibility—something which relates it very strongly to images of racial degeneration in Count Arthur Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races.

[At this point I extracted an excursus reprinted under the title “Francis Bacon and Right-Wing Nihilism.”]

If we were to talk about ‘guards’ in relation to the National Front, however, then we would have to talk about Richard Verrall’s view of ‘Strasserism.’ This was a term which Richard Verrall used in relation to internal feuding in the Front, chiefly to describe the Populists around Kingsley Read. In a sense Verrall—and later Tyndall—had discovered a nice, neat little neo-Nazi metaphor with which to trap their opponents and erstwhile colleagues. Moreover, every time Verrall used the term it was replete with various quotations, emendations, and selections from Mein Kampf. In a sense the term, if not the way it was used, was meaningless, and it is doubtful if Roy Painter and other populists knew what the term meant. None of which perturbed Verrall, of course, who was determined to pin upon the anti-Tyndall faction a derogatory term, a National Socialist heresy, a form of leftwing deviation. When the anti-Tyndall faction in the National Front, as confused as it was, was a motley collection of ex-Tories, populists, nationalists, racialists, and others who were opposed to Hitlerism. In a sense they were opposed to Tyndall and his ideology, a form of British Nazism, a type of Hitlerism without Hitler, which was an absurdity in any respect. As a consequence, they were opposed to Tyndall’s Hitler cult; his neo-Nazi caucus which contained many ex-GBM members and which masqueraded as a British nationalist party. Ultimately what the Populists were opposed to was an even more minor cult than Hitlerism itself, namely the Fuhrer-like pretensions, the delusions of grandeur of an erstwhile ladder salesman. Nevertheless, it is wrong to suggest that Tyndall was the undisputed leader of the GBM, his own faction which he closed down before he entered the Front. Indeed the hundred or so members of the Greater Britain Movement were asked to join the National Front individually, and many of them did so, but not all of them remained loyal to Tyndall. For instance, Martin Webster regarded Tyndall as a “useful idiot,” with a powerful speaking manner modelled on Mosley, who could be his personal drummer boy within the Front. In a sense many of these conspiracy theorists, like Webster, entertained a large number of parallel conspiracies in relation to the internal politicking of their own organization. It was as if the outside world—dominated as it was in Chesterton’s New Unhappy Lords by Jews and occasionally Masons and others—was replicated within the Front. Moreover, several other members of the GBM knew Tyndall too well to take him altogether seriously, and these individuals also dreamed of outright authority. While other individuals, such as Andrew Brons, who had been with Tyndall in the days of the Greater Britain Movement voted against Tyndall at crucial moments, such as his show-down with Webster on the executive.

You can buy Jonathan Bowden’s Extremists: Studies in Metapolitics here.

Whereas Strasserism itself, of course, was a doctrine with little appeal to ex-Tories and it essentially represented a form of left fascism, a form of National Socialism with an accent upon the socialism. As a consequence, it was a pure (i.e., national) form of socialism à la Goebbels (particularly in his early years) rather than a form of nationalized socialist doctrine. In a sense, therefore, it had connections with fascist as well as solidarist beliefs, and it advocated a socialist ethos, as well as state socialist planning, of a sort which was tried and found wanting elsewhere.

Finally by the end of the nineteen seventies a large amount of fissiparity had denuded the National Front of its strength. By this time at least five factions existed, and these were the continuing National Front, John Tyndall’s New National Front (later the BNP), the National Party led by Kingsley Read, Andrew Fountaine’s the National Front Constitutional Movement (the NFCM), and a small Leicester-based split led by Reed Herbert [Anthony Reed Herbert], the British Democratic Party. The National Front itself, of course, was now led by Martin Webster, who then pronounced that street-fighting was the way to power and who began to cultivate the skinhead cult. All of which led with the inexorable pathos of Greek tragedy—something which is putting it far too high—to Webster’s expulsion from the National Front when the youth-wing of the party ousted him from the organization in a carefully planned coup. Martin Webster then left in high dudgeon and attempted to form his own outfit, Our Nation—partly financed by Francois Dior—which later collapsed out of lack of interest, particularly after its first rather dismal rally at the Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London. The youth-wing of the National Front now effectively took over the organization and this group consisted of Joe Pearce, Steve Brady, Nick Griffin, Derek Holland, Ian Anderson, George Williamson, Richard Lawson, Patrick Harrington, and Martin Wingfield, together with Andrew Brons from the old directorate.

Note

[1] Richard Edmonds?