John Tyndall

John Tyndall at a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert addressing the Nationalist Alliance

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First as tragedy

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Then as farce

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Not to be confused with the 19th century physicist of the same name.

“”My experience as a campaigner against the multi-racial idea in Britain and in favour of our country's centuries-old tradition of racial homogeneity has brought home to me beyond any doubt the fact that Jews are to be found at the forefront of opposition to British racial self-preservation.

—John Tyndall

John Tyndall (1934–2005) was a far-right British politician, notable for leading the National Front and founding the British National Party.

Early years

Tyndall developed a strong dislike of the political process during his youth. In his teenage years he developed an interest in socialism, seeing it as a more active and revolutionary alternative to contemporary conservatism, which he considered complacent; however, he described himself as being insufficiently convinced to join a socialist organisation. However he soured towards the left, deciding it was anti-British.

During this time Tyndall began noticing what he interpreted as signs of national decline. "Everywhere one could see the cinemas and theatres catering to human depravity... I began to be troubled by the profusion of effeminate-looking men everywhere, unmanly in their facial expressions, in their speech and in their bearing. What was the breed of Drake and Cook coming to?" He went on to comment that these people "were the advance guard of the 'gay' plague that later was to sweep through society like a poisonous virus."

He was particularly troubled by the increasing numbers of non-whites in Britain. He argued with his middle class peers that, if the British were leaving their former colonies in Africa and Asia, then Africans and Asians should also stay out of Britain, but was not taken seriously.

Lurching further to the right, Tyndall became interested in the fascist views of Oswald Mosley but was turned off by Mosley's vision of a single European nation. Instead, Tyndall ended up joining A. K. Chesterton's League of Empire Loyalists (LEL), an organisation which appealed to his deeply pro-Empire stance. He was also attracted to Chesterton's belief that recent history had been manipulated by a vast conspiracy.

At around the same time he took a trip to the USSR, accompanied by a band of far-left activists; the experience cemented his hatred of the left, on the grounds that it contains "the recipe for the destruction of civilisation." He also began to develop belief in a Jewish conspiracy: initially wary of people "who tended to blame the Jews for everything, even including the weather", he eventually concluded that the world was home to "a definite Jewish network wielding immense influence and power — through money, through politics and through... the mass media".

Tyndall's reading eventually led him to Mein Kampf, which he described as "not the words of a madman or psychopath but those of a seer or prophet". He approved in particular of "the descriptions of the workings of certain Jewish forces in Germany, which seemed uncannily similar to what I had observed of the same kinds of forces in Britain." He concluded that Britain's decision to go to war against Nazi Germany was ultimately the result of a conspiracy headed primarily by Jews, a conspiracy which also masterminded non-white immigration into Britain after the war.

Tyndall was an active member of the LEL alongside such luminaries of the British far right as John Bean and Martin Webster. Tyndall and Bean felt that a nationalist political party would be better than a mere pressure group like the LEL; when Chesterton caught wind of his plans to help set up a rival organisation, Tyndall expelled him from the League. After this, he helped Bean to set up the National Labour Party in 1958.

The sixties

In 1960 the National Labour Party merged with Colin Jordan's White Defence League to form a new group called the British National Party, of which Tyndall was a founding member. This BNP should not be confused with the currently existing party of the same name, which was established years after the original BNP died.

Despite his active role in the far-right, Tyndall was a controversial figure amongst this end of the political spectrum. "He was well-known and unpopular within Nationalist circles because of his arrogance, his overbearing personal manner and the way he brought the authoritarianism of his politics into his personal life", notes writer Martin Walker. Tyndall had a fondness for wearing jackboots during this period; Colin Jordon has related how, on the way to a nationalist meeting in Germany, Tyndall made his entourage look for a shoeshop as soon as they crossed the border so that he could buy himself a pair of genuine German jackboots.

Tyndall outlined his views in a 1961 pamphlet entitled Authoritarian State: Its Meaning and Function:

As Democracy tamely allows droves of dark-skinned sub-racials into our country, the Jew cleverly takes advantage of their presence to propogate the lie of racial equality, thus gradually encouraging their acceptance into European society, with the ultimate results of inter-marriage and race-degeneration that he knows will follow... Liberalism or Bolshevism: whichever the people follow — there is only one master — Judah, the all-powerful!

Arguing that "the Jew... has corrupted every nation that had opened his doors to him" the pamphlet backed its position partly with quotations from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Following violent protests from anti-fascists, Jordan decided to establish a self-defence group within the BNP, with Tyndall amongst its number. Certain BNP members — including John Bean and party president Andrew Fountaine — opposed this group's existence, and this disagreement eventually led them to oust Jordan and Tyndall from the party in 1962. Jordan then founded the National Socialist Movement.

In July 1962 Jordan and his supporters held a rally in Trafalgar Square, during which Jordan argued that Britain should have sided with Hitler against "world Jewry", while Tyndall proclaimed that "in our democratic society, the Jew is like a poisonous maggot feeding off a body in an advanced state of decay." The meeting was attacked by Jewish protestors and ended in a riot; both Jordan and Tyndall were convicted of expressing views likely to cause a breach of the peace.

The next month, the National Socialist Movement's headquarters were raided by police. Found on the premises were pistols, knives, various items of Nazi paraphernalia, and five cans of weedkiller — one with a label amended to read "Jewkiller". Tyndall, Jordan and others were charged with involvement in paramilitary activities. Jordan was sentenced to nine months in prison, Tyndall to six.

Upon release Tyndall became engaged to Françoise Dior, a French heiress who had previously been romantically involved with Jordan, still in prison at this time. When Jordan was released Dior married him instead, breaking her engagement with Tyndall. This love triangle drove a wedge between the two men, with Jordan also citing ideological differences — he dismissed Tyndall for being focused only on national affairs, "unwilling to recognize the call of race beyond British frontiers." The National Socialist Movement split, a large portion leaving with Tyndall to form the Greater Britain Movement in August 1964. Amongst other things, this organisation called for a ban on interracial marriage and for the sterilisation of people with "racial defects", and got off to a good start when member Martin Webster assaulted Jomo Kenyatta, the Kenyan head of state, who was staying in London at the time.

While running the GBM, Tyndall started publishing a journal entitled Spearhead. In the mid-sixties Tyndall began making an effort to unite the various factions of British far-right politics, although he remained controversial. In 1966 he and seven other members of the Great Britain Movement were fined for illegal possession of weapons, and he was later sentenced to six months in prison for possessing a gun without a permit; none of this exactly improved the image of the nationalist cause. As the numerous far-right organisations began to cohere to form the National Front, Tyndall was expressly blacklisted from the new organisation by prominent figures such as the leader A.K. Chesterton for his neo-Nazi sympathies — as late as 1966 he was celebrating Hitler's memory with birthday parties. Tyndall's comrade Martin Webster, however, was more popular with the NF, and it is largely for this reason that the Great Britain Movement was finally allowed into the new party, Tyndall and all.

National Front

Following the resignation of A.K. Chesterton, John O'Brien became chairman of the National Front and Tyndall was named director of policy. By this time Tyndall appears to have dropped any overt neo-Nazi activity: in the January 1972 edition of his journal Spearhead, he stated that the pro-Nazi views of his younger days were mistaken, but that there was nothing dishonorable about them. However, O'Brien caught wind that both Tyndall and his comrade Martin Webster, then director of activities, had connections to German neo-Nazis, and so decided to set about kicking them out of the party. This scuffle eventually ended in a split, O'Brien and his supporters leaving to form the National Independence Party; Tyndall taking control of the National Front in July 1972.

Political opponents brought up Tyndall's neo-Nazi history; a 1974 television programme grilled him on his racialist policies, and also featured former leader O'Brien accusing Tyndall and Webster of maintaining links to neo-Nazis in Germany. Party members, particularly newer ones, lost faith in Tyndall and he was voted out as chairman within a month of the documentary's airing. Kingsley Read, a former Tory, took over the NF. The conflict between the party's modernisers (dubbed the "Populists") and Tyndall's supporters carried on, with Tyndall using his journal Spearhead to attack the Populists, but he was eventually given a vote of no confidence — one so unanimous that not even his frequent collaborator Martn Webster opposed it.

Kingsley Read made an attempt to expel Tyndall from the party altogether, but failed; the conflict between the two men turned into a small-scale legal dispute. Eventually, Read decided to simply abandon his party and set up a new one, the National Party, with his supporters. Tyndall (who was heavily critical of this new party, claiming that its members included "people who can be seen to belong to a thoroughly unprepossessing racial type... there is a moronic set of the jaw and a sullen and shifty look in the eyes") once again took over the NF.

In the late seventies, judging by his later account, Tyndall appears to have developed a bizarre paranoia about gay people within the Front:

Of the many unwholesome habits opposed by the vast majority of the party, homosexuality was one that featured prominently on the list. It is therefore with considerable alarm that I had in the last year or so become aware that the National Front was itself by no means immune ot this sickening cult... there existed within the party a framework of homosexuals... In October of 1979 some information came into my possession which constituted about as solid evidence as we were ever likely to obtain of homosexual activities within the party, and it involved not an ordinary member but an extremely highly placed party officer and member of the Directorate. I placed this evidence before the Directorate and demanded action. By an overwhelming majority, action was rejected.

The individual he refers to is likely to have been Martin Webster, a prominent NF member who is openly gay, and claims to have been ousted from the party because of his sexual orientation.

Tyndall made an effort to cleanse the National Front of infiltrators and "bad blood", although he was initially reluctant to leave the party and set up another splinter group. In January 1980 he resigned as leader, but continued to support the party. The following June he and his supporters left the NF altogether and set up a group called the New National Front; Tyndall hoped that this would be a temporary measure and that the two parties would later be reunited. Eventually, however, he gave up on this notion, and in April 1982 the New National Front was renamed the British National Party.

The Eleventh Hour

He describes his crime as having "dared to publish an honest and frank opinion on the relative merits of Whites and Negroes." While in prison, Tyndall put together a book entitled The Eleventh Hour: A Call for British Rebirth.

In this book Tyndall argues repeatedly that non-whites are "unassimilable", and that not only should they be barred from settling in the country, all non-whites currently living in the UK should also be repatriated; he even suggests that their presence in the country is the result of a sinister conspiracy. Tyndall spoke favourably of Polish, Hungarian and Baltic immigrants regarding them as being racially similar and sharing the "same basic culture" to the British and were thus able easily to assimilate "within a generation or two". He also remarked that: "The Arab world is our friend... if we decide to remove the cancer of Israel from the middle eastern region." He objected strongly to miscegenation: "I feel deeply sorry for the child of a mixed marriage, but I can have no sympathy whatever for the parents... They produced an offspring that will never wholly fit, and will undoubtedly face a life much harder than the normal person born of pure race."

Expounding his views on the British Empire, Tyndall argues that its primary goal should have been to ensure that white Britons spread out to cover as much land as possible, with a secondary aim of securing resources; bettering the imperial subjects is a waste of time, particularly educating them, as educated subjects may cause trouble down the line.

He argues that the cold war was an illusion and the two factions actually both sides of the same coin; he even writes of "the masters who control both systems". "Why... would the two systems have combined in World War II against Hitler?", he asks. He expresses his hatred of contemporary culture, particularly modern art. "Our present civilisation, unlike that of the ancient Greeks, puts a very low priority on body health", he writes. "Perhaps in the hideous creations of our modern avant garde sculptors we see the idealisation of universal, raceless 'liberal' man, which it seems the determination of this age to breed" He later goes on to condemn "the herd-like disposition of our 'intellectuals' to drool over the diseased creations of a Picasso or a Henry Moore". Tyndall also makes regular attacks on modern pop music, some of which are quite idiosyncratic: commenting on discos, he notes that "the alternate switching on and off of prison-cell lights is one of the standard methods used against prisoners of the Soviet regime".

Tyndall sings the praises of Senator McCarthy, along with General Dyer, the man responsible for the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. His support for Dyer should not come as a surprise, considering Tyndall's statement that "I was disgusted by the tendency of so many of our 'intelligentsia' to drool over shamans like Gandhi."

He also shows strong views on education. "It must be firmly inculcated into the young that we British belong to the European family of races and cultures, and that for them, when they come of age, marriage and the procreation of children outside that family is harmful and wrong", he writes. "Next in importance... is to build the foundations of a healthier and fitter British Race, and this aim must be linked with that of establishing a firm polarity between the sexes". He adds that school teachers "must use all the influence within their power to combat any sign of effeminate tendencies in young boys". His dislike of homosexuality is a recurring theme: in the book he argues that it should be outlawed, and makes the strange claim that "The literary and artistic products of the homosexual mind can only flourish in a society where heterosexual values have been gravely weakened" shortly after bringing up the gay novelist E.M. Forster.

Another common thread involves broad caricatures of Tyndall's opponents:

Assemble any group of liberals together on one side of the room and then assemble on the other a group of equal number and sexual composition but of outlook fundamentally opposed to liberalism. Most of us then entering the room would be able to tell which group was which after the most cursory glance. Liberals, generally speaking, constitute the least impressive specimens of the white race...

Intrinsic in liberals and liberalism is a flabbiness of person and outlook. Liberals simply cannot bear the world of nature that is all around them, the world in which the strong prevail over the weak...

This last sentence becomes somewhat ironic when we consider that Tyndall wrote the book from a prison cell. Similarly amusing is his description of left-wing activists:

[T]he type of human material recruited by this hogwash... includes a lot of people brim-full of resentments and with plenty of time on their hands: that section of the unemployed that is unemployable, the socially and sexually frustrated, all ideal material for mobilisation of disruptive activity.

Is he describing the far left or far right here?

Perhaps the most striking aspect of The Eleventh Hour, however, is its evidence that Tyndall never truly forsook his Nazi sympathies. He acknowledges that the overt Nazism of his National Socialist Movement days was a mistake — not because the Nazis were morally reprehensible, however, but because they were foreign. "Having made a thorough study of the forces dedicated to destroying my own country, and knowing that Hitler faced very similar forces in his, I have come to believe that many of his intentions were good ones and many of his achievements admirable", writes Tyndall. "But that does not mean that it is right for a British movement belonging to an entirely different phase of history to model itself on the movement of Hitler... We are a different country, with our own proud past and traditions, and these — not the traditions of foreigners — should be our source of inspiration". Tyndall's book argues that Britain should never have fought Hitler and mentions the Holocaust only twice, in passing; each time he places quotation marks around the term and speaks approvingly of denialists such as David Irving.

Towards the end of the book, after acknowledging that the National Front was a failure, Tyndall shows great faith in his new BNP: "No power on earth will now stop the force that we have created", he writes. This is an ironic statement, as Tyndall had used almost those exact words at a 1977 National Front meeting.

Last years

During his time running the BNP, Tyndall moved away from his longstanding call for all non-whites to be removed from the country, and instead adopted a policy of voluntary repatriation, where non-whites would merely be encouraged to leave the country. Reportedly, this was originally meant as a temporary measure.

Tyndall did not have the chance to reverse this policy. In 1999 the BNP had its first leadership election, which was won by Tyndall's second-in-command Nick Griffin; Tyndall himself received fewer than half as many votes.

Although he remained in the party, and represented in for one seat in the 2001 General Election, Tyndall was reduced to grumbling in his Spearhead journal — Griffin's leadership being a frequent target. When Griffin publicly stated that an all-white Britain was no longer possible, Spearhead declared this position to be "a betrayal of BNP activists and a repudiation of everything they have fought for over the past 19 years", adding that "a whites-only Britain is indeed possible — through a BNP victory. And without such a victory not even any limited relief from the present multi racial horror will ever be possible."

In August 2003, Tyndall was the subject of a disciplinary tribunal; his charges included inciting others to cause disruption within the party and slandering Nick Griffin. As a result, he was expelled from the BNP, and began campaigning to be reinstated.

He managed to get back into the BNP — only to be expelled again following a second tribunal on December 2004. The same month, he was arrested for delivering a racially charged speech about the Jewish ancestry of Tory leader Michael Howard at a private BNP meeting; the speech had been recorded by an undercover journalist and shown as part of the BBC documentary Secret Agent.

On April 6 2005 Tyndall was once again charged on grounds of racial hatred. On July 19, two days before his trial was to have taken place, he was found dead at the age of 71.