Making a Fascist Family: Spearhead and the Attempt to Build a Nationalist Community Through Magazine Print Culture

Abstract

This article examines the role played by magazines in the sustaining, recruiting, defining, and defending of a nationalist community within the British far right. In particular, it focuses on John Tyndall’s Spearhead magazine during its period of support for the National Front, perhaps the most prominent and broad-based nationalist movement of the post-war period in Britain. By examining how Spearhead spoke about several key issues – women, homosexuality and faith – the article shows the way magazines bind together a disparate movement that is often small and spread over a geographical distance into a community. Further, the article contends that due to the ostracization from the mainstream that such extreme communities foster, that such communities move beyond surface connections and into para-familial bonds. In making this argument, the article considers the ways that the community is framed around threat and a conspiratorial world war to encourage prioritisation of the nationalist identity and its community, and how the bonds to the nationalist community are deepened through the development of a cultic milieu through the offer of a hidden or sacred truth.

Keywords:

• magazines
• print culture
• far right
• homophobia
• women
• fascism

Introduction

The far right is often dispersed in geographic terms – with only small groups, or even individuals, in any one area. This geographical dispersal is a challenge when considering the need for these movements to create a community, and identity, which drives action. Recent studies, such as by Tanner and Campana, have explored how the far right have made use of social media – such as Facebook – to overcome this.¹ However, many periods considered the most successful for the far right in Britain and Europe predate these social media spaces where they can curate their own enclave within a wider culture. In those cases, with a centrally controlled media landscape of publishers rather than platforms and a nation that had adopted what Dan Stone describes as a culturally antifascist position, how did the post-war far right develop, curate and instil an identity-driven community that encouraged individual action?² The answer, in part, was through self-publication of magazines.

This use of print cultures to promote political animation and cultural transmission has a long history in British society, with elements traced back to the English Civil War.³ It is also present in other anglophone nations, with Haveman having examined their role in unifying the disparate colonial cultures of the Thirteen Colonies into an American identity.⁴ It is therefore unsurprising that the launch of the most prominent immediate post-war far right group – Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement – also saw the return of pro-Mosley publications including the eventual return of the pre-war Action.⁵ These national print culture were supported by local productions, such as Awake, which sought to reframe and refactor the national message into one relevant to the local area.⁶

Magazines remained important within nationalism throughout the post-war period, and key leaders often maintained their own personal magazines and newsletters to help control the message and mood their movement. John Bean, a prominent far right activist for many decades, ran Combat from his leadership of the British National Part at the start of the 1960s until Combat merged with Spearhead in October 1968. Spearhead itself had been established by John Tyndall as he began the work of establishing the Greater British Movement in 1964, moving away from his previous National Socialist Movement affiliation as Tyndall sought to develop what he felt was a more authentically British form of nationalism.⁷ It became one of the most prominent and long running nationalist print cultures, staying in constant publication from 1964 until Tyndall’s death in 2005. During this time, it served as an official organ of the Greater British Movement, the National Front, and the British National Party, all of which Tyndall would lead. These print cultures continued to be important even into the internet age, for example where the National Socialist Movement in America continued well into the 2010s to promulgate its calls for a nationalist reordering of society through PDF-distributed magazines on its website.⁸

This article will focus on Spearhead, and primarily on its role within the National Front, running from 1967 through to 1979. Priced at one shilling in 1967, rising to thirty new pence by 1980, Spearhead was a magazine-style publication that grew from twelve to twenty pages during this period. With a two-colour front cover, Spearhead framed itself as a journal of nationalist thought with contributions from Tyndall and others from the National Front, as well as occasional broader pieces from national and international contributors. Though Tyndall himself was an avowed National Socialist and fascist, this is something by 1964 he was seeking to move away from publicly in pursuit of British nationalism.⁹ This is further complicated by the National Front, which was aimed at a broader sector of the radical right and sought to be a serious electoral force in Britain. Spearhead, as a magazine of nationalist thought, sought to speak to a broad nationalist audience but its editorial position was one steeped in fascism with a conspiratorial world view. The combination of one of the most prominent and enduring print cultures of post-war nationalism, Spearhead, with the most prominent pre-Internet nationalist movement offers an opportunity to explore how print cultures were used to overcome the barriers to nationalism that existed in post-war British society, and how a movement was forged that had branches across the country and came close to electoral upsets in cities like Leicester. The article will suggest there were many reasons for why this construction of a community identity was important for Tyndall and Spearhead, and for movements like them.

As well as circumventing a wider public hostility, the development of these magazines also allowed for the connection of these disparate groups through a shared media. This community building is important beyond the difficulties of physical interaction over distance, however. Hales and Williams identify that involvement in these extreme cultures and groups brings with it a social ostracization from wider society.¹⁰ Knapton has also examined how those who become radicalised, in particular towards terrorism, experience friction with and ostracization from their social contacts, including their family. In particular it highlights that the breakdown of these social and familial relationships leads individuals to develop a need to join or belong once again to a social group, and at times one that is positioned to harm the original community.¹¹ As Siedler argues, families and their socio-economic backgrounds may well be important reasons why people are more vulnerable to radicalisation.¹² Yet it can be the breakdown of these same familial ties which expose individuals to further risk, and leave them open for those bonds to be replaced.

The communities these magazines seek to generate can then be seen as attempting to replace those broken social and familial links and provide to their members a sense of belonging. A small part of this can be seen in the way these magazines seek to involve the reader in the personal lives of key figures, such as the birth of John Tyndall’s child announced in Spearhead.¹³ Family was always important to these groups, with a 1977 caption in Spearhead stating ‘The Family – Basis of a Strong Race and Nation’.¹⁴ Failure to provide this community to members movement meant a risk that the movement would be unable to retain its recruits. Hamm and Spaaij identify that for radicalised individuals whose relationships with their movement and political community breakdown there is a risk of them moving into terrorism.¹⁵ For groups like the National Front, who presented themselves as a viable political alternative, links with terrorism would be a barrier to their own success.

The article will also examine the ways in which these magazines contributed to recruitment to the movement and methods by which this community was reinforced and formed. In arguing for a historically-informed discourse analysis, Richardson points out how far right texts possess both internal and external qualities – with items for more public consumption containing more subtle and coded language that could be mistaken by a casual reader for something more benign.¹⁶ This, Richardson suggests, presents a masking function that has stymied even academics in seeking to categorise and understand seemingly disparate far right thought, therefore this dynamic must be understood in order to engage with the true intentions of the text. In his examination of the National Socialist Movement, the group from which Tyndall split before forming Spearhead, Jackson identified that these movements made an offer to potential members of secret or sacred knowledge. As Jackson observes, this offer of insider knowledge was used in combination with an attractive outwards-facing surface rhetoric to pull people into these groups.¹⁷ This concept, that of the cultic milieu, was developed by Colin Campbell and describes how a movement can imbue their followers with a sense of mission that also binds them tightly to a movement.¹⁸ As Kaplan and Lööw have described, the cultic milieu is an important concept in understanding how marginalised communities such as British nationalists used print cultures to promulgate and reinforce a world view that was at odds with a mainstream understanding.¹⁹ Working with the ostracization, this cocooning of community members away from the mainstream acted to help deepen community bonds and – this article contends – promote a deeper and more holistic relationship that can be considered para-familial.

Part of this cultic milieu is the development of a parallel language, where terms that have ordinary meanings to wider society come to have particular understandings within the community or link into relatively dense concepts. In this way the attractive outer language as well as the offer of insider knowledge can be combined. This adaptability is important when we consider that the nationalist identity key to the community Spearhead sought to construct was not the only one people would hold. People entering the community would already have identities, based on socio-economic status, gender, affiliation to pre-existing groups or societies. As Paul Ward identifies, these identities would seek to mutually inform one another in a person’s understanding of their identity and so nationalism would look slightly different for each person – and the flexibility in language therefore becomes key.²⁰ This concept is also used by Stryker, who suggests that those identities that form connections to more parts of an individual’s overall identity and life will be those more likely to trigger activism within an individual.²¹

This idea of layered identity can also be a barrier for print cultures that seek to push community into direct action in pursuit of shared goals – such as Spearhead’s goal of political control of the United Kingdom. It is here that one element of the secret knowledge offered as part of the ‘sacred offer’ of the cultic milieu played its part – namely the construction of a threat. These threats, whether real or imagined, were often presented as existential and also as ones that were often ignored, not understood or promoted, by wider society. As Flade and others explored, the presentation of a threat against a community that an individual identifies with can help unify a group and break down some of these barriers.²² A similar argument is put forward by Burke and Stets, who built upon the notion of layered identities to suggest that these identities were hierarchical in nature, with some being primary identities and others secondary.²³ Burke and Stets argued that people could suppress or even act against a pre-existing primary identity if another identity the person affiliated with – even if it was a secondary identity – was placed under a state of threat.²⁴ In her examination of an ethnographic understanding of the far right, Blee identifies that any understanding of the far right’s place in society requires an understanding of how they drive an emotionally-based cultural dynamic which includes within it a sense of threat from the outside.²⁵ Print cultures were a perfect medium for this.

Magazines therefore can present opportunities to nationalist movements to both expand and define their movements. It also allows them to curate that community, defining ‘out’ groups and identifying threats to the community as part of a call to action from its members. To show this, the following examination of Spearhead during the period of activity of the National Front will examine how the community was expanded through the discussion of women’s role within the movement, how it was defined against LGBT + identities, and finally how Spearhead evoked a sense of threat to call its members to action.

Expanding the Community: Women’s role in the People’s Community

Dan Stone speaks of fascist communities possessing a sense of the hypermasculine, developed as racial politics evolved through transnational discussion before the Second World War and demonstrates how these eugenics and racial science-fuelled ideas were brought back to Britain through internationally linked fascist movements like the British Union of Fascists (BUF).²⁶ This focus on the masculine can certainly be seen in how Spearhead talks about any deviation from understood gender norms. Spearhead ridiculed long haired soldiers as degenerate and weak, unable to defend the west, and spoke positively of street violence committed by movement members.²⁷ Michael Billig also points out how the National Front in particular had a dominant culture that was male dominated and which encouraged this extreme masculinity as a reaction against the status quo.²⁸ Despite all of this however, Spearhead did have a clear view on women and sought to offer a narrative that it felt would absorb female members into the broader community of nationalists.

This was not something unique to Spearhead but drew on a long history of seeking to cover what were seen as women’s issues within fascist or far right publications in Britain, even among male-dominated spaces such as the interwar British Union of Fascists. Julie Gottlieb considers this in her study of the BUF periodicals, and highlights how women who were brought into the nationalist community – or even led sections of it – could take important roles in funding, writing and distributing these publications.²⁹ Martin Durham also highlights that women were often involved in far right and fascist communities, pointing to their engagement with D’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume in 1919 through combining traditional female roles of caring for children of the city with front line roles in the fighting.³⁰ Considering the ostracising impact of far right activity as well, the inclusion of women also has an important part in transforming this very male, and very hyper-heterosexual, community of nationalists into something that could truly be an ersatz-family.

In their study of neo-Nazis in Sweden, Mattsson and Johansson showed how one of the routes that drew people out of these extreme and nationalist communities were interventions from significant others.³¹ These figures, often non-judgemental in their approach to the individual within the community, were able to help draw people out of these extreme communities and reconnect them with the wider community over time. This is backed up by the accounts of former British nationalists such as Ray Hill who cites his wife as one reason for leaving the country, and the British nationalist community in which he was deeply embedded as a senior street fighter and leader of Colin Jordan’s British Movement.³²

Given this, ensuring that women had a clear place within the movement was essential even if we consider the movement to be hypermasculine in its basis. It is important to note that Spearhead in many ways reflected the leadership of the National Front, whose directorate and leaders were overwhelmingly if not exclusively male. Spearhead’s editorship remained male throughout its publication, though some women did write articles or feature within the magazine. It is also important to remember that the 1960s had been a time of widening freedoms and participation for women, Claire Debenham highlights the symbolism of the contraceptive pill within women’s liberation – being permitted for all women from 1967 onwards.³³

As well as challenging existing societal norms, the push for liberalisation of gender roles also caused a disconnect between women and traditional arbiters of societal morals and guidelines, with Lynn Abrams noting this accelerated towards the 1970s particularly in disconnect with the Church.³⁴ These spaces, as Evan Smith and Brodie Nugent observe, were filled by a resurgence in women’s political activism in the left wing that challenged traditional politics and was able to engage with communities in ways that traditional political parties could not.³⁵ Women also still faced systemic prejudices within society – when considering Higher Education, women’s entry rate into higher education had matched men since 1964 but by 1970 they still only represented 11% of the students at Cambridge, one of the two top Universities.³⁶

So, as well as being a way for relationships to be formed within the movement – and thus avoiding the shedding of community members due to friction between non-nationalist significant others and nationalists – women also represented a large part of society that was broadly politically engaged at this time, and within that often in conflict with existing power structures as the nationalists often were. Providing a route to engagement for women that differed from the leftist politics that Smith and Nugent discussed could therefore was a way for Spearhead to set out a new offer that it claimed would be attractive to women. As Gottlieb cautions, it is important not to simply see these appeals as simplistic anti-progressive and anti-feminist thoughts but instead offer a carefully constructed path for women to take part in the community.³⁷

Spearhead sought to create this sense of nuance, of offering women something new and different but at the same time rejecting mainstream feminism. It framed itself in opposition to mainstream women’s liberation, especially on the issue of traditional gender roles and on the contraceptive pill. This would be framed, through the re-printing of a piece by Alain de Benoist in 1978, as not necessarily anti-feminist but against what it termed neo-feminists.³⁸ In 1973, in its editorial ‘What We Think’ section, Spearhead stated that its support of women’s liberation was not a simple yes or no question and that liberation had good and bad parts, that each issue must be considered on its merits.³⁹ When considering how it handled these issues, one that came up repeatedly was that of the contraceptive pill. As mentioned, the pill had become a totemic issue of women’s liberation – even being adopted by the socially conservative Women’s Institute in its AGM of 1972.⁴⁰ To Spearhead however it presented a very real threat – being described as the ‘Self-Extinction of Western Man’.⁴¹

In its opposition to the contraceptive pill, Spearhead once again infused the term with its own complex conspiratorial beliefs. As Richard Verrall explained, Spearhead did not have an issue with the pill itself, but rather the impact that it had on western birth rates and the threat it therefore posed to what it considered its ethnic community.⁴² The introduction of the contraceptive pill was compared to the decline of Babylon, Buddhist India, Rome and other historical examples – this was presented as a fulcrum point around which western civilisation’s fate was hanging.⁴³ This theme of the fall of Rome was one repeated several times within Spearhead in relation to the pill, reprinting similar thoughts from Nathaniel Weyl of the racial science journal The Mankind Quarterly.⁴⁴

For Spearhead the offer for women revolved around a preservation of gender-based societal boundaries. They opposed removing gender from job applications and defended the right of people to discriminate, with removal of gender identity from applications being deemed the ‘crackpot thinking of the Totalitarian Left’.⁴⁵ So strong was their belief in gender roles that Spearhead went so far with a piece written by then-editor Richard Verrall as to suggest that gender roles were dictated by genetics and biology, and that any assertion to the opposite by feminists was ‘puerile Marxist rubbish’.⁴⁶

This offer was however for something more than a return to pre-women’s liberation or pre-suffrage arrangements and Spearhead was not willing to reject fully concepts of some liberation for women, even when considering the threat of low birth rates among white British groups. In reviewing W. G. Simpson’s Which Way, Western Man? at the very end of the 1970s, Tyndall condemned the reduction of women purely to breeders that Simpson proposed – suggesting that the idea of polygamy and other solutions to boost birth rate was to reduce women to something un-British or un-Western.⁴⁷ Tyndall described Simpson’s take on women as being one that would ‘enrage all but the most extreme male chauvinists’,⁴⁸ and he directly compared the proposed arrangements as being ones that were far more at home in the Muslim world than the Western one. What it does clearly show however is that Spearhead and Tyndall did not see themselves arguing for the retention of an earlier system, but rather a new role for women that was a greater role than they had but not the one envisioned by what they saw as a Marxist left type of women’s liberation, nor that proposed by extreme voices like Simpson. Showing this, Tyndall states in partial agreement to Simpson ‘the role of Woman must be changed if the races of the West are not to die out through sheer lack of reproduction’.⁴⁹

This appeal to women as mothers to Britain’s future heroes and soldiers, which places women in mastery of the home life but subordinates them to the male sphere of war and struggle due to the time of crisis, again echoes those earlier messages of the interwar fascists that Gottlieb identified.⁵⁰ This particular community role was also one emphasised in other nationalist print medias of the post-war period, with Martin Durham pointing to party newspaper of the German Deutsche Reichspartei (DRP) in 1955, which represented women as the moral guardians of the community, and contrasted this position with the liberalisation of women’s role as sexualisation and denigration of their important place in society.⁵¹

In framing women in this way, as mothers and moral guardians, Spearhead was not simply providing a hollow reaction to a changing world they did not understand. They were seeking to represent an alternative path to the women’s liberation movement they increasingly saw as left led and against the interests, as they saw it, of the nation and their community. The importance of women to the nationalist community was long understood, with Mosley having admitted during post-internment interrogations that his achievements would not have been possible without his female members, who as Thurlow notes made up 20% of the active membership of the BUF.⁵²

There is also little doubt that there was a significant female contribution within the nationalist community. As Durham observes, there were many women active within the local branches of the National Front and who stood as candidates – some drawn in from the wider right wing that had filtered into the National Front through mergers with conservative pressure groups like the League of Empire Loyalists.⁵³ What Spearhead offered, the nationalist community it described and the role for women within it, was clearly something which held some attraction. Spearhead’s views also gained traction within its wider nationalist community with Tyndall’s view being echoed back in the letters section. For example, a letter in 1972 condemned attempts by liberalism to reduce women to ‘repulsive imitation of man’,⁵⁴ and agreed with Tyndall that strong mothers and wives can halt the decline of societal health. In trying to reject more extreme views like Simpson, Spearhead can be seen as having sought to move past the notion that was used to critique the far right and discouraging women from engaging with them, which was that women were seen purely as ‘Breeders for Race and Nation’ – a characterisation of far right gender views that had become common in the post-war period.⁵⁵

With the emphasis on traditional women’s liberation as actually tearing down women’s place in society, and being driven by hard left forces, Spearhead strove to provide women who agreed with both traditional gender roles and more moderated change a place within the nationalist community. It fused women’s liberation with its own ideas of the existential threat against ‘White Britain’ and sought to find a path that did not veer into reducing women to a subservient role, while also still emphasising a woman’s role as mother and wife. In creating this space for women, Spearhead sought to reduce the risk of out of community partnerships being formed, and so reduce the ideological friction that can occur in such relationships and pull members from the community. It also made use of women, as Durham highlights, as candidates and as local activists – this was not a tokenistic role or offer, but one that offered a true sense of belonging and family for the nationalist woman of the 1970s. Perhaps no better example of the celebration of these inter-community familial relations is when Tyndall’s marriage to Valerie Parker, a so-called ‘NF girl’, was announced in Spearhead.⁵⁶

Defining the community: anti-homosexuality narratives

As well as seeking to curate their community via expansion, it is also worth considering how Spearhead curated it by defining groups not to be included or welcomed. These groups, often labelled as undesirable or threatening, were seen to have no redeemable value for the nationalist community or were framed as active threats. This rejection went beyond Spearhead’s focus on racial or left-wing political enemies and included the LGBTQ + community – in particular gay men.

A particular hatred of what were seen as more effeminate versions of masculinity had been in Spearhead from its first issue, suggesting that what it termed the ‘beat cult’ of the Rolling Stones and The Beatles was producing more effeminate men who were being drawn into these cultures that led them to ‘act in the manner of the pansy’.⁵⁷ These long-haired young men, which Spearhead felt were ‘pansified half-men’,⁵⁸ were not just representative of the outcome of liberal democracy, they were a threat to the West in that they could not defend against Soviet Russia. Homosexuality here was being framed as a degeneration of society, and especially of youth – what George Mosse identified as part of the general nature of fascism.⁵⁹ To facilitate this targeting of gay men, Spearhead made use of dehumanising language – describing a gay fiction author as simply a ‘creature … a love-sick baboon’.⁶⁰

Homosexuality’s place outside of the community was made clear in 1971, where Spearhead went as far as to suggest that homosexuality was itself a European issue, and one that the Common Market was causing to be spread to Britain at that time.⁶¹ For Spearhead the legalisation of homosexuality in Britain had been driven as part of the effort to integrate Britain with the European project. This foreign or unwelcome nature that Spearhead used to describe homosexuality was a theme that was repeated – in November of 1969, it had compared gay rights activists with early Christian proselytisers, spreading a foreign faith within a land already rich with its own traditions and faith.⁶²

This hostility towards gay men was not something Spearhead was alone is displaying, and it also supported and celebrated other far right print cultures of the time in their attacks on gay man. In March of 1971 they quoted a Candour article from Avril Walters in their ‘Pick of the Month’ article celebrating what they felt were the best letters and articles from that month’s magazines and journals. Describing a march, the article said:

Hot on the heels of the bra-less bouncing biddies of the Women’s Liberation Front and its UK offshoots come mincing the prettyboys of the Gay Liberation Front. Among the demands of these pathetic creatures are that discrimination against their ilk by employers be made illegal and that school children be taught that homosexual relations are normal.⁶³

The messaging from this article was very clear – gay men should not be heard from, nor should any good person support what they saw as a self-destructive lifestyle. It linked homosexuality to rising cases of sexually transmitted diseases and argued that in opposing gay lifestyles the nationalist cause was standing up for the silent majority against an unwanted liberalisation.

The positioning of homosexuality as a threat to the nationalist community was also highlighted in how Spearhead connected it to other political enemies. Just as Walters had emphasised the Gay Liberation Front’s position alongside what Spearhead viewed as the far-left extreme elements of Women’s Liberation, so Spearhead repeated similar framing in its own content. In February of 1977 it accused the left of crudely politicising the issue of gay rights, highlighting in particular a group who had protested a recent National Front meeting – Fairies Against Fascism.⁶⁴ Spearhead was overt in claims that homosexuality was, along with the reduced birth rate of white British people, an elaborate plot by Marxist forces.⁶⁵ Spearhead also reprinted similar articles from America, describing this same conspiracy and framing homosexuality as unnatural and undesirable.⁶⁶

There are some important things to bear in mind when considering how Spearhead framed gay men as an unwelcome threat to their community, and a phenomenon that could never be part of it. The first is the wider societal context at which these events were occurring. Gay rights had been increasingly on the agenda, with parliamentary debates in 1960 and 1962, but as Lesley Hall identifies while this period is often characterised as one of sexual liberation, in truth what Hall calls the Long Victorian era in terms of attitudes continued well into the 1960s and what is seen is, like in many other parts of history, a slow and gradual debate and change in societal attitudes.⁶⁷ Academic studies of homosexuality were only just feeling free to publish studies in the 1960s, and legalisation was spoken about in these debates not as a liberation, but in terms of containing a problem.⁶⁸

It is also important to consider how some of the comments of Spearhead surrounding gay men, in particular regarding the military, were not necessarily controversial or removed from mainstream positions for their time. For example, the armed forces were exempted from the Sexual Offences Act 1967, and until 1990 the armed forces continued to prosecute homosexuality as a criminal matter prejudicial to military discipline, before finally lifting all restrictions as late as 2000.⁶⁹ Equally, Spearhead was not fabricating the links between gay rights advancement and the left, even if it then built upon that a conspiracist understanding. As Stephen Brooke points out, gay rights campaigning and legalisation comes as part of a wider push for rights, which he identifies firmly with left wing traditions.⁷⁰ Gay rights was also a topic of increasing public debate, with 1969 and 1970 in particular seeing the emergence and proliferation of gay rights networks, as described by Lucy Robinson, and so Spearhead may have felt it important to have an active position on homosexuality to show its readers it was engaged on the topic.⁷¹ Spearhead had however been condemning homosexuality previous to its legalisation and this period of activity, going so far as to describe National Socialism – which at that time it identified with – as at war with homosexuality and that this was a positive thing.⁷²

This attempt to exclude gay men from the nationalist community also received some resistance from within the readership and community of Spearhead, showing the nationalist community was not immune to the debates that were ongoing in wider society. In January of 1970 a letter came from a National Front-supporting student, Stephen Coniam, that suggested opposition to Homosexuality was simply a regressive reactionary stance.⁷³ Coniam certainly was not advocating homosexually – describing it as ‘sexually abnormal behaviour’ for which the ‘sufferer bears little responsibility’.⁷⁴ It is also clear that even in seeking to moderate the total rejection of homosexuality that Spearhead advocated, Coniam still had taken on board the framing of gay rights activism as a left wing threat – framing himself in his contribution as ‘not a homosexual or a leftist infiltrator’.⁷⁵

In response, Tyndall was willing to accept homosexuality was for some an innate characteristic – something he would later repeat such as in 1977, suggesting genuine acceptance of this point. ⁷⁶ However, Tyndall emphasised that no matter one’s personal feelings, homosexuality was something that had to kept out of the desired community because it was a corruption that, by infecting one member of the community, could then move on to infect society at large. Homosexuality was, for Tyndall, an infectious social disease whose existence within the community would act as a barrier to, and suppress, ‘the values of real manhood and womanhood that we should be instilling into the young’.⁷⁷

When Coniam sent in a reply two months later, Tyndall brisky dismissed it. The failure of nationalists within universities was not, to Tyndall, due to the policy on homosexuality – which he felt was virtuous – but instead due to weak leadership. He framed the Spearhead anti-homosexuality line as a popular and attractive one, and again restated opposition as being driven by left-wing infiltration and the desire of the left to degenerate the youth.⁷⁸ The nationalist community then was – according to Tyndall – threatened with infiltration, and with social disease and degeneration from homosexuality, driven by the left and aided by institutions such as universities.

This line, of infiltration and corruption, repeats that populism discussed previously – the delegitimising of authority and supplanting it with the nationalist community’s own narrative. The way in which curation of ‘outside’ groups to be rejected or targeted by the community allowed this is quite stark in the case of homosexuality. Just as Spearhead was seeking to present itself as providing a genuine alternative to progressive women’s liberation, which they described as driven by the left and anti-British forces, they had presented their opposition to homosexuality being in the face of a large-scale conspiracy against themselves.

Certainly, to Spearhead, the political establishment was arrayed against them – they describe a gay-controlled parliament as being behind relaxation of decency laws. The Liberal Party in particular is picked out for being pro-homosexuality and anti-British by this nature, and this was linked to support for the Race Relations Act and other legislation that was seen as in favour of a multiracial Britain.⁷⁹ To Spearhead this put Parliament in direct opposition to, and seeking to attack, a strengthened national community and seeking to disintegrate its bonds through obscenity. The Conservative were also raised as a party that had been subjected to infiltration by ‘Gay Power’, where Spearhead again contrasted the pro-gay attitude of the leading political parties against its own opposition to homosexuality which it felt represented the view of the common man, or as Spearhead put it the ‘peasant view’.⁸⁰ This built upon previous claims Spearhead had made in 1967 of a secret gay lobby within parliament who were seeking to influence the law.⁸¹

Again, through this positioning by Spearhead, which may seem more extreme in hindsight, was not – on its surface – too far removed from the general concerns at the time. As Stephen Brooke points out, there was a large social concern at the time due to a perceived threat from homosexuality against families, and that was a wider concern than just the nationalist fringe.⁸² The MP for Selly Oak, Harold Gurden, had even suggested in 1967 something similar to Spearhead when he asked what personal interests certain MPs had in securing passage of the bill legalising gay sex – in essence asking about, and alleging, a secret gay lobby.⁸³ It was not until people were absorbed into the nationalist community, which was in essence advertising itself as free of those elements, that the ways in which Spearhead built their own conspiratorial world view around race and antisemitism onto that threat would become clear.

Defending the community: Dealing with the clergy

One recurring theme in the framing and rhetoric of Spearhead that has been shown so far is that of threat, as they sought to use it to both motivate members and to drive a unified community identity. Primarily this was framed as threat towards the notion of the British nation that Spearhead developed but also towards the community of nationalists. This threat, often existential, urged action that was extreme or was used to urge the rejection of whole groups of people. One example of this being one of the many frequently claims that homosexuals were a threat towards children, and therefore to the future of the British people, made in February of 1977.⁸⁴ Equally, as discussed previously, the contraceptive pill was presented along similar lines of a demographic threat to the future of the community and the nation.

In discussing the contraceptive pill Richard Verrall framed women’s choice around the pill and Spearhead’s opposition to that freedom, in contrast to the threat against the white civilisation of the west, a threat framed as genocide. Verrall argued that, facing such a genocide, the freedom of women to choose must be curtailed – women had a duty first to the white race and its continuance.⁸⁵ These areas were already under active debate in society and so in seeking to claim leadership in this area Spearhead faced a challenge from existing societal guardians – namely the state and the Church of England. Though initially welcoming of some modernising efforts of the permissive society, by the late 1960s and 1970s the Church had moved into being a voice of opposition on these matters, much as Spearhead was.⁸⁶

As shown above, Spearhead argued that the existing political structure were corrupt and on the side of this threatening degeneration – that they had enabled this either through ignorance or complicit allyship with the Bolshevik enemy. It also extended this to the Church of England – though Spearhead was careful to differentiate between the Church as an institution and Christianity more broadly. Given the broadly Christian identity of many of its target community, this both established a position where belonging to the Nationalist community did not place them in conflict with their Christian identity and also where the authority for that Christian identity was delegitimised and so the nationalist leadership could speak for that identity.

Some of this was related to the accusations of infiltration from the gay community, with an article in 1969 having suggested that the Church was being used as a vehicle for gay activists to spread propaganda.⁸⁷ This hostility to the Church beyond its leadership shows that dividing line in the nationalist community around Christianity. Spearhead was keen to draw on Christian identity but found itself at that time facing a hostile leadership. While earlier forms of British fascism such as the BUF had managed to draw in clerical support with an anti-communist line, the National Front lacked any overt clerical support.⁸⁸ Christian identity however had long been part of British national identity, and as Crockett and Voas observe it has long had a resonance beyond the institutional church and things like weekly attendance.⁸⁹ This is supported by Morris, who identifies Christian identity as a strong part of British identify well into the second half of the Twentieth Century.⁹⁰

Despite this strong identity there was an underlying crisis in institutional Christianity in Britain at this time. Hugh MacLeod identifies the long 1960s, from 1958 to 1975, as the height of this crisis which saw a break in the West with traditional Christian cultures.⁹¹ While Callum Brown questions to what extent this was simply a readjustment after high attendances post-Second World War, he does observe that the sense of a Christianity under threat was a very real feeling in society at this particular time.⁹² Spearhead was clearly responding to this wider crisis, in particular by framing the Anglican church as out of touch with the ordinary Christian British person and betraying their duty to represent them.

When in 1977 the Archbishop of York and other bishops warned against the National Front, Tyndall responded by attacking the church. He accused the Council of Churches of funnelling £500,000 towards arms purchases to fight white rule in Africa, framing the Church as anti-white.⁹³ This echoed earlier claims in Spearhead that had accused the Church of England of spreading Bolshevism in Africa, and therefore was to blame for events like the Mau Mau uprising, with the claim that the Church was involved in ‘pink Churchianity’.⁹⁴ Spearhead contrasted themselves against this claimed Church support for communism with language that referred to their movement as a Crusade and praised St George as a ‘champion of European civilisation against the teeming millions of the East’.⁹⁵ This theme of a crusade was also picked up in other articles in Spearhead, identifying the liberal-democratic system as being one that leads to corruption and that it was a literal evil that must be destroyed to preserve Britain.⁹⁶

In his later attack Tyndall accused the Church of abandoning their congregations by ignoring the threat of what he termed degenerations, including homosexuality. He stated they had allowed a ‘moral sickness which the country has a right to look to you for some sort of deliverance’.⁹⁷ This contrasted with Tyndall’s framing of the National Front as striving for an ideal man who embodied Christian virtues, as he put it:

We should be compassionate to the very old. We should be compassionate to those who are disabled. But beyond that we could do with a great deal less compassion and a good deal more toughness.⁹⁸

Spearhead was, therefore, seeking to simultaneously offer a route for those who believed in traditional Christian values into their community while also further establishing the mainstream as a threat, binding people into their community in a way that goes beyond surface affiliations and further towards the para-family.

Conclusion

Magazines form a vital communication method to help connect disparate parts of fringe and extreme communities, but more than this they can – as has been shown – be an important part in expanding and defining that community as well. By offering an outwards-facing print culture, new members are encouraged to think of themselves as part of a community rather than simply affiliation to a movement or idea. Spearhead presented itself and the nationalist community as the only group willing to talk about the secret threats and conspiracies faced by wider society and by the community itself. The offer of community, of entrance into its cultic milieu, was one that promised a sense of togetherness as they fought their enemies – indeed, that only by joining the community could they be part of that fight. The mainstream was, in Spearhead’s conspiratorial world, only willing to subvert people’s views and use them to harm the people. As members descend into deeper community involvement, greater ‘truths’ will be revealed from the movement, and so separate people within the community from those outside. By cultivating these cultic understandings, so magazines could exist in this liminal state where a surface reading of their content could mean one thing to the wider public, they sought to attract readers and take on deeper, purposeful calls to action for those who were ordained into their community.

It is this aspect of fringe and extreme communities which interacts with wider society’s ostracization of them to push those communities such as Spearhead’s to transform into para-familial relationships. That is, they replace the close bonds that are developed in mainstream society but may be severed by involvement in extremism, instead redirecting that primary affiliation to that of the movement around which the community forms. This is done through both the offer of that sacred truth and the development of a cultic milieu, combined with the development of a sense of threat from a defined ‘out’ group. This is done through the framing of a holistic world view, and an all-encompassing purpose – held together by the construction of a persistent and existential threat. The community was to have the answers to all things, and a place for everyone who was a true member. It was to be more than a simple political society; it was to be a home.

Spearhead sought to do this throughout the period of the National Front, replicating an idea from the interwar period of the People’s Community. They carefully crafted the idea of a desired social order, placed alongside racial purity and strength, and which eschewed traditional guardians of social order as corrupt or malevolent. This people’s community idea, which Dan Stone identifies as being developed in Britain around groups like the British People’s Party, fused together aspects of traditional British society such as aristocracy, Christian identity and other broader aspects of mainstream British identity with far-right ideals on race and exclusion to create a ‘perfect’ community.⁹⁹

Data Statement

Physical data supporting this publication is stored at the Searchlight Archive that is managed by the University of Northampton, and details on how to access this can be found here: https://www.northampton.ac.uk/about-us/services-and-facilities/the-searchlight-archives/. List of archive boxes consulted from this collection are: SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/001; SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/002; SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/003; SCH/01/Res/BRI/01/004; SCH/01/Res/BRI/13/008; AFOH/01/Res/LEE/13/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Jones

Dr Daniel Jones is Researcher in Far Right Studies Post 1945, an associate lecturer in history and the Searchlight Collections Officer in the Department of Culture, University of Northampton (United Kingdom), and an associate fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Daniel completed his PhD in 2021 under Prof. Paul Jackson, studying the British far right and antifascism’s construction of identity within Spearhead and Searchlight, and has also published on contemporary international far right media as well as the ethics of researching and archiving extreme material. Email: [email protected]

Notes

1 Samuel Tanner and Aurélie Campana, ‘“Watchful Citizens” and Digital Vigilantism: A Case Study of the Far Right in Quebec’, Global Crime, 21 no. 3-4 (2020), 262–282.

2 Dan Stone, Holocaust, Fascism and Memory: Essays in the History of Ideas (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2013), 79.

3 Jason Peacey, Print and Public Politics in the English Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 331–334.

4 Heather A. Haveman, Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community and Print Culture, 1741 – 1860 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015).

5 Graham Macklin, Failed Führers: A History of Britain’s Extreme Right (London: Routledge, 2020), 116.

6 For examples of Awake, please see: Union Movement Publications, Searchlight Collection, Searchlight Archive, University of Northampton, Northampton, SCH/01/Res/BRI/13/008.

7 John Tyndall, ‘Editorial’, Spearhead, no. 1, (1964), 2.

8 Daniel Jones, ‘The National Socialist Movement of the United States and the turn to environmentalism: Greenfingers or Brownshirts?’, in, Forchtner, Bernhard (ed.), Visualising Far-Right Environments (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2023), 63–82.

9 John Tyndall, ‘Editorial’, Spearhead, no. 1 (1964), 2.

10 Andrew H. Hales and Kipling D. Williams, ‘Extremism Leads to Ostracism’, Social Psychology, 51, no. 3 (2020), 149–156.

11 Holly Mellisa Knapton, ‘The Recruitment and Radicalisation of Western Citizens: Does Ostracism have a Role in Homegrown Terrorism?’, Journal of European Psychology Students, 5, no. 1 (2014), 38–48.

12 Thomas Siedler, ‘Parental Unemployment and Young People’s Extreme Right-Wing Party Affinity: Evidence from Panel Data’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 174 (2011), 737–758.

13 ‘A Daughter for J.T.’, Spearhead, no. 129 (1979), 19.

14 Picture caption, Spearhead, no. 101 (1977), 7.

15 Mark S. Hamm and Ramón Spaaij, The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2017), 59, 74–77.

16 John Richardson, British Fascism: A Discourse-Historical Analysis (Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2017), 21–26.

17 Paul Jackson, Colin Jordan and Britain’s Neo-Nazi Movement: Hitler’s Echo (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 15 and 29.

18 Colin Campbell, ‘The Cult, the Cultic Milieu and Secularization’, The Cultic Milieu, 14–15.

19 Jeffrey Kaplan and Heléne Lööw (eds.), The Cultic Milieu: Oppositional Subcultures in an Age of Globalization (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2002).

20 Paul Ward, Britishness Since 1870 (London: Routledge, 2004), 166–167.

21 Sheldon Stryker, ‘Identity Competition: Key to Differential Social Movement Participation?’, in Sheldon Stryker et al (eds.), Self, Identity and Social Movements (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 33–36.

22 Felicitas Flade, Yechiel Klar and Roland Imhoff, ‘Unite Against: A Common Threat Invokes Spontaneous Decategorization Between Social Categories’, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 85 (2019), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2019.103890 (accessed January 14, 2024).

23 Peter J. Burke and Jan E. Stets, Identity Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 132.

24 Ibid, 132–137.

25 Kathleen Blee, ‘Ethnographies of the Far Right’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 36, no. 2 (2007), 119–128.

26 Dan Stone, Breeding Superman: Nietzsche, Race and Eugenics in Edwardian and Interwar Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2002), 42–52.

27 ‘Fighters or Fairies?’, Spearhead, no. 10, Apr./May 1966, p. 3.

28 Michael Billig, Fascists: A Social Psychological View of the National Front (London: Academic Press, 1978), 255.

29 Julie Gottlieb, ‘Women’s Print Media, Fascism, and the Far Right in Britain Between the Wars’, in, Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, Barbara Green and Fionda Hackney (eds.), Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 450-462.

30 Martin Durham, Women and Fascism (London: Routledge, 1998), 8–9.

31 Crister Mattsson and Thomas Johansson, ‘Leaving Hate Behind – Neo-Nazis, significant Others and Disengagement’, Journal for Deradicalization, 18 (Spring 2019), 185–216.

32 Ray Hill interviewed by Benjamin Lee on far right and antifascist activism (2015, Anti-Fascist Oral History Collection, Searchlight Archive, University of Northampton, Northampton, AFOH/01/Res/LEE/13/1.

33 Claire Debenham, Birth Control and the Rights of Women: Post-Suffrage Feminism in the Twentieth Century (London: IB Tauris, 2013), 265.

34 Lynn Abrams, ‘Mothers and Daughters: Negotiating the Discourse on the “Good Woman” in 1950s and 1960s Britain’, in, Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau (eds.), The Sixties and Beyond: Dechristianization in North America and Western Europe 1945-2000 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 60–65.

35 Brodie Nugent and Evan Smith, ‘Intersectional Solidarity? The Armagh Women, the British Left and Women’s Liberation’, Contemporary British History, 31, no. 4 (2017), 611–635.

36 Barbara Bagilhole, Women in Non-Traditional Occupations: Challenging Men (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 64

37 Julie Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 262–263.

38 Alain de Benoist, ‘The Feminine Condition’, Spearhead, no. 113, (1978), 8–9.

39 ‘What We Think: Crackpot Thinking’, Spearhead, no. 69 (1973), 3.

40 Claire Debenham, Birth Control and the Rights of Women, 265.

41 ‘Self Extinction of Western Man’, Spearhead, no. 75 (1974), 13.

42 Richard Verrall, ‘Policies to Meet the Rising Tide of Colour’, Spearhead, no. 101 (1977), 6–7, 10.

43 ‘Self Extinction of Western Man’, 13.

44 Nataniel Weyl, ‘The Threat of Genetic Decay’, Spearhead, no. 99 (1976), 20.

45 ‘What We Think: Crackpot Thinking’, 3.

46 Richard Verrall, ‘Sociobiology: The Instincts in our Genes’, 10.

47 John Tyndall, ‘Iconoclasm and Prophecy: A Book for the Next Century’, Spearhead, no. 135 (1980), 6–7.

48 Ibid, 6.

49 Ibid, 6.

50 Julie Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism, 100–101.

51 Martin Durham, Women and Fascism, 86.

52 Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts to the National Front (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 140, and, Martin Durham, Women and Fascism, 36.

53 Martin Durham, Women and Fascism, 73-75.

54 Barry Bidwell, ‘Letters’, Spearhead, no. 59 (1972), 16.

55 Natalie Thomlinson, Race, Ethnicity and the Women’s Movement in England, 1968-1993 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 143

56 ‘John Tyndall Weds NF Girl’, Spearhead, no. 111 (1977), 19.

57 ‘Beat Cult Marches On’, Spearhead, no. 1 (1964), 3.

58 ‘Fighters or Fairies?’, Spearhead, no. 10 (1966), 3.

59 George Mosse, ‘Towards a General Theory of Fascism’, in, Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman (eds.), Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science – Volume 1: The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 2004), 159–160.

60 ‘News in Brief’, Spearhead, no. 5 (1965), 3.

61 ‘Common Market Myths Exploded’, Spearhead, no. 42 (1971), 11.

62 Michael Lobb, ‘From Bishop to Queen’s Pawn’, Spearhead, no. 27 (1969), 10.

63 Avril Walters, quoted in ‘Pick of the Month’, Spearhead, no. 41 (1971), 4.

64 ‘What We Think’, Spearhead, no. 102 (1977), 3.

65 Peter McMenemie, ‘Front Facts: Leo Abse on Virility’, Spearhead, no. 33 (1970), 4.

66 Root E. Merrill, ‘In Praise of Heroism’, Spearhead, no. 41 (1971), 14–16.

67 Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880, 148.

68 Ibid, 148–149.

69 Stefanie L. Bishop, ‘U.S. & Great Britain: Restrictions on Homosexuality in the Military as a Barricade to Effectiveness’, Dickinson Journal of International Law, 14, no. 3 (1996), 613–645, especially 624–625.

70 Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 117–118.

71 Lucy Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-war Britain, 65–68.

72 John Tyndall, ‘Wanted – A Return to Manhood!’, Spearhead, no. 6 (1965), 4.

73 Stephen Coniam, ‘Homosexuality: Tolerant Attitude? – The Case For’, Spearhead, no. 29 (1970), 7.

74 Ibid.

75 Ibid.

76 John Tyndall, ‘Homosexuality: Tolerant Attitude? – The Case Against’, Spearhead, no. 29, Jan. 1970, p. 7, and, ‘What We Think’, Spearhead, no. 102 (1977), 3.

77 John Tyndall, ‘Homosexuality: Tolerant Attitude? – The Case Against’, 7.

78 John Tyndall, ‘Advice from – and to – Students’, Spearhead, no. 31 (1970), 15.

79 ‘What We Think: The “Porn” Debate’, Spearhead, no. 57 (1972), 3.

80 ‘What We Think: Gay Tories’, Spearhead, no. 57 (1972), 3.

81 ‘What We Think’, Spearhead, no. 16 (1967), 3.

82 Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics, 118–119.

83 House of Commons, Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates: The Official Report (3 Jul 1967, vol 749, cols. 1477-1478).

84 ‘What We Think’, Spearhead, no. 102 (1977), 3.

85 Richard Verrall, ‘Policies to Meet the Rising Tide of Colour’, Spearhead, no. 101 (1977), 6–7, 10.

86 Laura Ramsay, ‘The Church of England, Homosexual Law Reform and the Shaping of the Permissive Society, 1957-1979’, Journal of British Studies, 57, no. 1 (2018), 108–137.

87 Michael Lobb, ‘From Bishop to Queen’s Pawn’, p. 10.

88 Thomas Linehan, ‘“On the Side of Christ”: Fascist Clerics in 1930s Britain’, in Matthew Feldman, Marius Turda and Tudor Georgescu (eds.), Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe (London: Routledge, 2013), 75–78.

89 Alasdair Crockett and David Voas, ‘Religion in Britain: Neither Believing not Belonging’, Sociology, 39, no. 1 (2005), 18.

90 Jeremy Morris, ‘The Strange Death of Christian Britain: Another Look at the Secularization Debate’, The Historical Journal, 46, no. 4 (2003), 963–976.

91 Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1, 141-160, 265.

92 Callum G. Brown, ‘What was the Religious Crisis of the 1960s?’, Journal of Religious History, 34, no. 4 (2010), 468–479.

93 John Tyndall, ‘A Reply to the Clerics’, Spearhead, no. 112 (1977), 6.

94 Denis Pirie, ‘White Traitors Cause African Bloodbath’, Spearhead, no. 3 (1965), 6.

95 Robert Corfe, ‘St. George and the Vatican’, Spearhead, no. 29 (1970), 6.

96 Robert Gregory, ‘“Opposition”: The Shadow and the Substance’, Spearhead, no. 132 (1979), 13.

97 John Tyndall, ‘A Reply to the Clerics’, 6.

98 John Tyndall, ‘Thought for the Month’, Spearhead, no. 87 (1975), 9.

99 Dan Stone, Breeding Superman, 33–61.