JOHN COLIN CAMPBELL JORDAN
COLIN Jordan, who was hailed as the godfather of British nazism by people who shared his far-right inclinations he denounced other British fascist leaders as cowardly or corrupt has died at his home at Pateley Bridge in northern Yorkshire. He was 85.
The high point of Jordan's career was when he mounted a platform at a National Socialist Movement rally in Trafalgar Square in July 1962 with a banner proclaiming "Free Britain From Jewish Control" and "Britain Awake", which echoed the slogans of Hitler's regime.
Wearing the NSM's paramilitary uniform of brown shirt with a pagan sunwheel armband, and boots, he regaled about 5000 people about 4200 opponents and 800 supporters with abuse. By the time police arrested the speakers, a riot had begun and many of Jordan's supporters were injured and their military-style Land Rovers damaged.
Later that year Jordan and his core officers, including John Tyndall, who went on to lead the National Front and launch today's British National Party, were convicted at the Old Bailey central criminal court in London for organising and equipping a paramilitary force for political ends. Jordan was jailed for nine months.
The son of a postman, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in World War II. After the war he graduated in history from Cambridge, where he was attracted to the ideas of Arnold Leese, who had led the prewar Imperial Fascist League.
Leese, who as early as 1928 had advocated the gassing of Jews, had been in open conflict in the 1930s with what was then Britain's main far-right organisation, Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Leese labelled the BUF "kosher fascist".
At Cambridge Jordan formed a "nationalist club", and after graduating set up the Birmingham Nationalist Book Club. In 1956 he collected his first conviction, for insulting words and behaviour during a protest by a fascist front, the League of Empire Loyalists. He formed the White Defence League, which he ran from a Notting Hill property left to him by Leese, who had died that year. Later, Jordan merged his group with the National Labour Party to form the original British National Party in 1960.
In January 1962, after a disagreement with colleagues who felt Jordan's open nazism was a bar to progress, Jordan and Tyndall stormed out. On April 20 (Hitler's birthday) that year, they formed the NSM. That summer George Lincoln Rockwell, leader of the American Nazi Party, entered Britain illegally. At a weekend camp in the Cotswold hills, attended by Nazis from around Europe, Rockwell and Jordan produced the "Cotswold Declaration", which led to the formation of a "World Union of National Socialists".
Its statement of the "modern national socialist world view" contained principles that are echoed by the British far-right parties today. The presence of these would-be members of the master race in the vicinity led to a vigorous, physical attack by locals.
Jordan made frequent court appearances during the 1960s and '70s. These included taking part in an anti-Semitic demonstration in support of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was executed in 1962 after being kidnapped by Mossad agents in Argentina and flown to Israel. In the mid-1960s, NSM supporters carried out 34 arson attacks against Jewish buildings in London.
One attack, on a Stamford Hill theological college, left one student dead and another seriously injured. Members of the Jewish defence organisation, the 62 Group, helped the police uncover the perpetrators, who included a Welsh Guardsman, a former paratrooper, several maladjusted youths and Jordan's then wife, the French heiress Francoise Dior, a niece of the fashion designer. Dior, engaged to Tyndall in 1962, married Jordan in 1963. The marriage collapsed in mid-decade.
In 1967, Jordan was jailed for 18 months for peddling racist literature. In his absence the NSM was re-formed as the British Movement (BM). After his release, Jordan led the openly Nazi BM but allowed some of his followers to form the would-be terrorist National Socialist Group. The NSG plotted to assassinate prime minister Harold Wilson, stockpiled weapons and obtained car bomb diagrams. After exposure the group dispersed.
In 1975, Jordan was fined for stealing three pairs of red knickers from a Tesco supermarket, which did little to boost his credibility. He passed on the BM leadership to Michael McLaughlin, a Liverpool milkman.
In later life Jordan devoted himself to advocating the formation of a "vanguard" to carry out "guerilla activities" against the state until the time was ready for "the physical seizure of state power by our people". He resurrected Gothic Ripples, a publication Leese had begun in 1945, and wrote two novels on the theme of a violent takeover of society. More recently he gave a video interview and made small donations to the tiny Nazi British People's Party.
He is survived by his partner Julianna Safrany.