Colin Jordan

The son of a lecturer, Percy Jordan and a teacher, Bertha Jordan,[2] Jordan was educated at the Warwick School from 1934 to 1942. During the Second World War, he attempted to enlist in the Fleet Air Arm and the RAF, but after failing the tests for membership in both, he enlisted in the Royal Army Educational Corps.[3] Demobilised in 1946, he went on to study at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, graduating in 1949 with second class honours in history (B.A. (Hist. Hons)).[1][4] During the same year, he became a teacher at the Stoke Secondary Modern Boys School, Coventry,[4] where he taught mathematics. In 1953 he received his M.A. He joined the League of Empire Loyalists and became its Midlands organiser.[5]

At Cambridge Jordan formed a Nationalist Club,[6] from which he was invited to join the short-lived British Peoples Party, a group of former British Union of Fascists members led by Lord Tavistock, heir to the Duke of Bedford.[7] After World War Two Jordan joined the British League of Ex-Servicemen and Women a pro-fascist group led by Sir Oswald Mosley's secretary Jeffrey Hamm[8] but Jordan soon became associated with Arnold Leese and was left with a house in Leese's will, which became the Notting Hill[6] base of operations when Jordan launched the White Defence League in 1956.[9] Jordan later merged this party with the National Labour Party to form the British National Party in 1960,[10] although he split from this party after a quarrel with John Bean, who was opposed to Jordan's advocacy of National Socialism.

Jordan then founded the National Socialist Movement in 1962 (this group was later renamed the British Movement in 1968) with John Tyndall as its leader. A meeting in Trafalgar Square on 2 July 1962[11] of supporters was disrupted by opponents who Jordan described as being "Jews and Communists",[12] leading to a riot. He was dismissed by the board of governors from the Coventry school where he taught[6] in August 1962, after a period of suspension[13] which had begun after the events in Trafalgar Square.[11]

In August 1962, Jordan hosted an international conference of Nazis at Guiting Power in Gloucestershire. This resulted in the formation of the World Union of National Socialists, and Jordan was the commander of its European section throughout the 1960s, and he was also elected "World Führer" with George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party as his deputy.[14] On 16 August, Jordan and Tyndall, together with Martin Webster, Denis Pirie and Roland Kerr-Ritchie were charged under the Public Order Act 1936 with attempting to set up a paramilitary force[15] called the Spearhead, which was modeled on the SA of Nazi Germany. Undercover police observed Jordan leading the group in military manoeuvres.[16] He was sentenced to nine months imprisonment in October 1962.[6][17]

In October 1963, while John Tyndall was still in prison, Jordan, who had just been released, married Tyndall's fiancée, Françoise Dior, the former wife of a French nobleman and the niece of the French fashion designer Christian Dior. This hasty marriage, on 5 October 1963, was ostensibly to prevent her deportation as an undesirable alien. When Tyndall was eventually released, the marriage caused friction, and he split with Jordan in 1964 to form the Greater Britain Movement. Jordan's marriage to Dior proved short-lived though, and she announced the couple's separation in January 1964. Jordan, she claimed, had become "bourgeois".[18]

During the Leyton by-election of 1965, Jordan led a group of about 100 fascist demonstrators at a public Labour Party meeting, and after taking to the stage to berate the audience, he was punched by Denis Healey, the-then Secretary of State for Defence.[19] The fracas came about because the far-right was using the by-election to stir up interracial hatred in order to defeat the Labour candidate (and Foreign Secretary) Patrick Gordon-Walker. He had previously been defeated in the 1964 general election in the Smethwick constituency after racist campaigning tactics[20] were employed by Colin Jordan and his followers.[21] Specifically, Jordan claimed that his group produced the much publicised "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour" slogan and launched the campaign to circulate the posters and stickers which the slogan was written on; in the past Jordan's group had also written and circulated other campaign slogans, such as: "Don't vote – a vote for Tory, Labour or Liberal is a vote for more Blacks!".[22] The successful Conservative candidate was Peter Griffiths, who did little to condemn the campaign. On 25 January 1967, Jordan was sentenced to eighteen months in prison at Devon Assizes in Exeter for breaking the Race Relations Act 1965 by circulating material that was likely to cause racial hatred.[23] At the same time, Jordan was prosecuted and convicted under the Public Order Act 1936 for distributing a leaflet titled "The Coloured Invasion", "a vituperative attack on black and Asian people".[6][23]

In September 1972, Jordan was fined for disorderly behaviour at Heathrow airport when, after protesting against the arrival of Ugandan Asians into Britain, he addressed airport staff through a loudspeaker, urging them to strike in protest against mass immigration from Uganda.[24]

Jordan reorganised the National Socialist Movement as the British Movement in 1968, but in 1974 he was obliged to step down from its leadership in favour of Michael McLaughlin. His demise was further accelerated by his arrest and subsequent conviction for shoplifting three pairs of women's red knickers from Tesco's Leamington Spa[19] branch in June 1975. Magistrates fined him £50 for the offence.[1][25]

Jordan maintained ties to groups led by Eddy Morrison and Kevin Watmough, such as the White Nationalist Party and the British People's Party as well as the American National Socialist Workers Party. In 2000, he expressed scepticism over the efforts of the British National Party to soften its hard right stance.

In the 1980s, Jordan revived Gothic Ripples, originally Leese's publication, as his personal political project.[26] He once declared that there was "no reliable evidence whatsoever" that six million Jews died in the Holocaust.[25] In 1989, he stated his belief that Jesus was "counterfeit", and Adolf Hitler was the real "messiah" and "saviour", whose eventual "resurrection" would make him "the spiritual conqueror of the future".[25] Democracy, he thought, was really a form of dictatorship because it prevented the defence of the Aryan people.[27]

Jordan was back in court in 2001, after being charged with publishing racist literature, but the judge ruled that his serious heart condition made him unfit to stand trial.[25]

Colin Jordan died at his Pateley Bridge home on 9 April 2009.[25]

• Gothic Ripples Newsletter
• Fraudulent Conversion: The Myth of Moscow’s Change (1955)
• The Coloured Invasion (1967)
• Merrie England— 2,000 (1993)
• National Socialism: Vanguard of the Future, Selected Writings of Colin Jordan (1993, ISBN 87-87063-40-9)
• The Uprising 2004

• Coogan, Kevin (1998). Dreamer of the Day: Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International. Autonomedia. ISBN 1-57027-039-2.
• Jackson, Paul (2016). Colin Jordan and Britain's Neo-Nazi Movement: Hitler's Echo. Bloomsbury Academic. ISBN 978-1-4725-1459-2.
• Goodrick-Clarke, Nicholas (2001). Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity. New York University Press. ISBN 0-8147-3155-4.
• Griffin, Roger (ed.) (1995). Fascism. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-289249-5.CS1 maint: extra text: authors list (link)
• Schmaltz, William H. (2000). Hate: George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party. Potomac Books. ISBN 1-57488-262-7.
• Terry Cooper (2013). Death by Dior. Dynasty Press. ISBN 978-0-9568038-6-3.
• Stephen L. Frost (2014). Twaz a Good Fight: The Life of Colin Jordan. NS Press UK.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Colin Jordan

• Guardian obituary
• Colin Jordan - Daily Telegraph obituary
• - BBC Panorama documentary about the White Defence League featuring an interview with Colin Jordan
• - British Pathe film footage of the wedding of Colin Jordan and Francoise Dior
• - BBC Panorama report on the Leyton By-Election featuring Colin Jordan