Colin Jordan - Biography

Biography

The son of a postman, Jordan was educated at Warwick School from 1934 to 1942. After service in the Royal Army Educational Corps he went on to study at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, graduating in 1949 with 2nd class honours in history. He then became a mathematics teacher at Stoke Secondary Modern Boys School, Coventry where he had earned the nickname of 'Jumbo' amongst the pupils on account of his heavy build. He joined the League of Empire Loyalists and became their Midlands organiser.

At Cambridge Jordan had formed a "Nationalist Club", 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. Jordan soon became associated with Arnold Leese and was left a house in Leese's will, which became the Notting Hill base of operations when Jordan launched the White Defence League in 1956. Jordan would later merge this party with the National Labour Party to form the British National Party in 1960, although he would split from this after a quarrel with John Bean, who felt that Jordan's open National Socialism was a bar to progress.

Jordan then founded the National Socialist Movement in 1962 (later this became the British Movement in 1968) with John Tyndall. A meeting in Trafalgar Square on 1 July 1962 of supporters was disrupted by opponents Jordan described as "Jews and Communists" leading to a riot. At around this time he was dismissed by the board of governors from the Coventry school where he taught.

In August 1962, Jordan hosted an international conference of National Socialists at Guiting Power in Gloucestershire. This resulted in the formation of the World Union of National Socialists, of which Jordan was the commander of its European section throughout the 1960s, and at which he was elected "World Führer" with George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party as his deputy. 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 attempts to set up a paramilitary force called Spearhead, based on the SA of Nazi Germany. Undercover police had observed Jordan leading the group in military manoeuvres. He was sentenced to nine months imprisonment.

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. In 1967 Jordan was again prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned for 18 months under the Public Order Act 1936 for distributing a leaflet "The Coloured Invasion", "a vituperative attack on black and Asian people".

In the Leyton byelection of 1965, Jordan led a group of about 100 fascist demonstrators at a Labour Party public meeting, and after taking to the stage to berate the audience, was punched by Denis Healey, then Secretary of State for Defence. The fracas came about because the far right were using the by-election to stir up inter-racial hatred to defeat the Labour candidate (and Foreign Secretary) Patrick Gordon-Walker. He had been defeated in the October 1964 general election in the Smethwick constituency after racist campaigning tactics were employed by the successful Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths.

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

Jordan maintained ties to groups led by Kevin Watmough, such as the White Nationalist Party and the British Peoples 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. He once declared there was "no reliable evidence whatsoever" that six million Jews died in the Holocaust. Jesus Christ in 1989, he saw as "counterfeit", Hitler was the real "messiah" and "saviour", whose eventual "resurrection" would make him "the spiritual conqueror of the future". Democracy, he thought, was really a form of dictatorship because it prevented the defence of the Aryan people.

Colin Jordan was in court again in 2001, charged with publishing racist literature, but the judge ruled that his serious heart condition made him unfit to stand trial.

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