How the BBC invented fake history of ‘anti-fascism’: Ridley Road reviewed

[This review of the BBC television series Ridley Road was first published in issues 107 and 108 of Heritage and Destiny.]

The scene is a grand house in Kent during 1962.  Early one morning a twenty-something blonde is playing with a small child.  Perhaps she is the child’s mother, or given this grand setting, more likely that typical British character – the nanny.  She straightens the child’s hair, making him look respectable for his father’s arrival.  When the father enters the bedroom, all three greet each other with a ‘nazi’ salute, and the two adults use the German phrase Wir kommen wieder, helpfully translated for British and American viewers by the child: “We come again”.

So opens a four-part BBC television series, Ridley Road, broadcast in October 2021.  It turns out that this opening scene belongs chronologically in part four of the drama, and we quickly flash back several months to discover that the young blonde – Ridley Road’s central heroine – is actually a disguised Jewess from Manchester, Vivian Epstein (Agnes O’Casey); while the child’s father and (as you might have guessed from the fascist salute) main villain of the tale is meant to be Colin Jordan, Britain’s leading national-socialist (Rory Kinnear). In just the second minute of the first episode, Ridley Road manages to mistake the name of his organisation as the ‘Nationalist [sic] Socialist Movement’.

By a circuitous route, Vivian has ended up infiltrating the highest echelon of Britain’s far right on behalf of a Jewish ‘anti-fascist’ organisation, the 62 Group.  Though Vivian is a fictional character (and as we shall see, so is the child), Colin Jordan certainly existed.  Many H&D readers will have met him, some knew him very well and were comrades in one or more of his political groups – the White Defence League, British National Party (1960s version), National Socialist Movement, and British Movement.  Colin Jordan died in April 2009.  His obituary by Martin Kerr appeared in H&D 37 and Mr Kerr also reviewed Jordan’s book Fraudulent Conversion in H&D 49 and a biography of Jordan (Twaz a Good Fight!) by his close colleague Stephen Frost in H&D 66; Mr Frost then reviewed a further biography of Jordan by Dr Paul Jackson in H&D 78; meanwhile in H&D 58 we reprinted one of Jordan’s most famous later essays ‘Party Time Has Ended – The Case for Politics Beyond the Party’; and across five issues of H&D (82-86) published during 2018 I examined in detail the newly released multi-volume MI5 personal file on Jordan.

Readers will not be surprised to learn that they are better off reading any (or preferably all!) of the above rather than watching the BBC’s Ridley Road if they wish to obtain accurate information about Colin Jordan and the broader British nationalist scene during the 1960s!  Though what did surprise even me, was just how astoundingly inaccurate this series is in almost every respect.  I do appreciate that historical fiction is still fiction, and that dramatic licence has to be allowed. But surely if you wish to write an ‘anti-fascist’ drama that bears little or no relation to the established historical facts, wouldn’t it be more responsible to use entirely invented characters and organisations, rather than pretend that your scenario is remotely based on real life?

The gross inaccuracies begin right from the first scene.  Though Colin Jordan was twice married, he had no children – indeed in 1962 (when this drama is set) he hadn’t yet even married his first wife, French heiress Françoise Dior (whose undoubted eccentricities are highlighted in Ridley Road by Romane Portail).  Moreover the NSM was a much smaller and less well-funded organisation than implied on screen.  Jordan never had a home or headquarters anywhere near so grand as the one portrayed.  It’s later stated that this was on loan to the party from an aristocratic supporter, but the only close link Jordan ever had with anyone of such elevated social or financial status was during his Cambridge undergraduate years in the late 1940s when he was very briefly allied to the British People’s Party run by the Duke of Bedford, who did of course live in one of England’s grandest homes, Woburn Abbey. By 1962 when Ridley Road is set, and by which time Jordan had become an open national-socialist, the Duke was dead and Jordan had long-since ceased contact with his party.

To understand the more serious inaccuracies (and perhaps their motive) we must take a step back and look at 1962 in the context of postwar British nationalist history.  When I first heard about this television series I was surprised that in making the first substantial television drama about British ‘anti-fascism’, the BBC should have chosen the early 1960s as a setting, and chosen to focus on Jordan and the NSM.  Though British fascism and national-socialism were for many reasons never of immense political/historical significance at any time in the 20th century, there were at least three periods when they were far more significant than in 1962:

– in the 1930s, when Sir Oswald Mosley built the British Union of Fascists into a genuine mass movement, holding well-attended public rallies and marches in many cities (especially London), briefly attracting support from important businessmen such as Daily Mail owner Lord Rothermere and car manufacturer William Morris (Lord Nuffield); and achieving some respectable results at the London County Council election in 1937 – the only large scale election campaign in the BUF’s brief history;

– in the 1970s, when the National Front (and briefly its offshoot the National Party) became Britain’s third political party, especially during the era when it was led by NSM veterans John Tyndall and Martin Webster. Despite an electoral system which at that time greatly favoured the main two parties, the NF was for a while arguably the strongest ‘far right’, anti-immigration party in Europe;

– and in the first decade of the 21st century, when the British National Party won dozens of local council seats across England and eventually elected two Members of the European Parliament, one of whom (H&D subscriber Andrew Brons) had most ironically as a very young man been a member of the very organisation featured in Ridley Road, Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement!

All three of the above attracted violent opposition from varying combinations of far-leftists and Jews, and were also the targets of infiltration and ‘intelligence’ operations from both state operatives and Jewish organisations, of the type portrayed in Ridley Road.  As in the early 1960s did two other organisations which though less significant than the BUF, NF, or BNP at their respective peaks, were far more substantial than the NSM:

– Mosley’s Union Movement, postwar successor to the BUF, which during 1962 was enjoying its last period of anything resembling success, building alliances with Western European nationalist allies and holding a Trafalgar Square rally;

– and the 1960s version of the British National Party (from which Jordan and his hardline national-socialist allies including John Tyndall broke away early in 1962 to form NSM).  Under the leadership of John Bean (see my obituary in H&D 106), this BNP attempted with some success to fight serious election campaigns that mobilised broadly-based opposition to non-White immigration, and completely avoided the symbols and trappings of 1930s and ’40s fascism and national-socialism.

If the BBC really wanted to talk up a British ‘far right’ threat – and one can see why such a threat might have preoccupied them at the time they commissioned this drama, most likely immediately after BBC liberal-leftists had received the shock of their lives with the 2016 referendum vote for Brexit – then they could more credibly have chosen any of the above five examples.  Instead they chose Colin Jordan and the NSM.  At the end of this review, I shall suggest what seems to me a plausible reason why they did so.

But first, and without giving too many ‘spoilers’ as to how the story ends, I should resume an overview of Ridley Road.

After the ‘shocking’ introduction, we are transported back a few months to a typical middle-class Jewish family in Manchester, where hairdresser Vivian is sitting down to dinner with her parents; her fiancé, who is the son of her father’s business associate and turns out to be in some respects (though not financially) what Jews term a nebbish; and her German cousin (who naturally turns out to be a ‘Holocaust survivor’).  Politics (especially national-socialist politics) seems to play no part in their lives.  They are very obviously observant Jews, socially conservative, and with no overt interest either in far-left or Zionist affairs, still less in militant ‘anti-fascism’. Even the ‘Holocaust’ doesn’t feature except indirectly via the obviously neurotic behaviour of the German cousin.

In a scene at her father’s shop (stereotypically a tailor’s) Vivian unexpectedly meets a former friend – Jack Morris (played by Tom Varey) – who is a very different sort of Jew from her fiancé. They were evidently once close, but for some reason Jack had suddenly disappeared from her life and had not been in contact. Viewers might at first guess he is some sort of crook, or at least some sort of ‘cad’, and that’s the impression Vivian’s father gives her: while he obviously is doing some sort of business with Jack, he doesn’t want his daughter to have anything to do with him.  Encouraged by her German cousin, and ignoring her mother’s frantic wedding plans, Vivian runs away to London in search of Jack.

She only knows a business address – a wholesale schmutter merchant’s in Ridley Road, East London.  Eventually she discovers these premises are being used by her maternal uncle, taxi driver Solly Malinovsky (played by Eddie Marsan) as a front for his group of militant anti-fascist Jews, who are plotting both political intelligence-gathering and violent attacks on British ‘neo-nazis’.  Vivian’s mother Liza (Solly’s sister) knows nothing of this, she really is the family-focused, stereotypical Jewish mother she seemed to be, but father David (Solly’s brother-in-law) is secretly running the Manchester end of the ‘anti-fascist’ group. And Vivian’s old boyfriend Jack is their main ‘undercover’ agent inside the NSM, where he is assumed to be a fellow ‘nazi’ under the pseudonym ‘Peter Fox’ and has become part of the violent inner circle around leader Colin Jordan.

After various adventures across the four episodes, Vivian herself ends up being recruited by the group to become a second undercover agent inside the NSM and – this being the feminist 2020s imposing its values and assumptions on the early 1960s – Vivian rather than any of the more experienced male intelligence operatives ends up rescuing the situation.

I’ll not explain too many more details of the plot, except to highlight yet further discrepancies between supposedly fact-based fiction and reality.

In the first episode, an NSM rally in Trafalgar Square is featured. This did genuinely take place on July 1st 1962, under a banner proclaiming “Free Britain From Jewish Control”, and it was (as shown in the series) violently attacked by 62 Group thugs. I’ve no idea whether any 62 Group spies such as ‘Peter Fox’ genuinely were among Jordan’s NSM comrades that day, but it wouldn’t be surprising: occasional infiltrators of this kind have always existed, sometimes undercover Jews or other left-wingers such as Duncan Robertson acting from what by their own lights is political principle, but more often people who started off as genuine nationalists such as Peter Marriner, Ray Hill, Tim Hepple, Matthew Collins, and Darren Wells. Whether these ex-nationalists have become disillusioned, have mental health problems, or are simply bought or blackmailed, probably varies from case to case. [The most recent and extreme case of high-level infiltration involved a Madrid lawyer, Armando Rodríguez Pérez.]

A large part of Ridley Road‘s plot then focuses on a supposed NSM campaign of arson against synagogues, yeshivas (Jewish religious schools) and other Jewish targets.  All this is again supposed to be in 1962, and is portrayed as part of a planned campaign by an NSM paramilitary wing called ‘Spearhead’.

This ‘Spearhead’ did exist.  It was the movement’s security force, led by future NF and BNP leader John Tyndall (who later named his nationalist magazine Spearhead and published it for more than forty years from 1964 until his death in 2005), and naturally it did involve elements of physical training, partly as portrayed in Ridley Road.  But it had nothing to do with synagogue or other arson attacks.  Some individuals who had been part of NSM broke away to form a small gang of unbalanced individuals led by Jordan’s estranged wife Françoise Dior, and some arson attacks of this type did take place but this was not until the spring and summer of 1965 and had nothing at all to do with Colin Jordan.

A Metropolitan Police file opened in response to parliamentary questions about alleged anti-Jewish activities is quite specific: there were five attempted arsons at London synagogues, three of which were successful, on March 13th, June 4th and July 10th 1965.  The file makes no suggestion that Colin Jordan was involved in any way.  A later police report in May 1966 commented: “It is noticeable that after November [1965], by which time seven persons had been charged, serious incidents at Synagogues, etc., almost ceased.  In fact, since then only one case of an attempt to set fire to the entrance of a Synagogue has been reported.  The officer investigating this case is of the opinion that this was the work of local hooligans rather than being fascist inspired.”

Several people were arrested and convicted for these attacks, including eventually Ms Dior herself who was jailed for 18 months in January 1968.  By this time she had long since been expelled from the NSM and divorced from Jordan.  Eventually she married a French aristocrat who was active at different times in the conservative-Gaullist RPR and in Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front.  Françoise Dior died in 1993, aged 60.

(It may be worth pointing out a single occasion when a Jew was targeted in his own home, as this was clearly a case of retaliation rather than a straightforward ‘anti-semitic attack’.  On 16th January 1965 in Chingford, Essex, someone put petrol-soaked material through the letter-box at the home of a Jewish taxi-driver, Wolfe Busell, who had earlier been fined for assaulting the then Mrs Jordan. The resulting small blaze did “slight damage to the door”.)

Nor did the NSM have anything to do with gun-running plots by George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party, as alleged in Ridley Road.  Rockwell did famously visit Britain during July-August 1962 as the NSM’s guest at its Cotswold Camp, near the Gloucestershire village of Temple Guiting, a few weeks after the Trafalgar Square rally.  This was a very successful publicity stunt by the NSM, succeeding in smuggling Rockwell into England and evading an official banning order.  In fact as recalled by the then 19-year-old Martin Webster who joined the NSM that summer having previously been in the more ‘moderate’ League of Empire Loyalists, the real focus of the movement was on publicity stunts, and it never had anything like the numbers or organisational/financial structure portrayed in Ridley Road.  Even at the Cotswold camp there were only about twenty British NSM members present, alongside a few European guests and others such as Rockwell and Savitri Devi.  While at the famous Trafalgar Square rally, Webster recalls that there would only have been about fifteen NSM members present, confronting a hostile Jewish-leftist mob.

A particularly unfortunate victim of Ridley Road’s unpleasant fantasies is Rockwell, who has now been twice defamed by television dramatists in recent years.  As pointed out by Ian Freeman in his review of The Man in the High Castle, that series without a shred of justification portrayed Rockwell as a corrupt, treacherous sadist.  And now in Ridley Road he is again portrayed as plotting against his closest comrades, supposedly working with fanatics in the Spearhead group who want to pursue a more terroristic line than Jordan, and are being armed by Rockwell for this purpose.

The truth is that Spearhead was a small security force that aimed simply to defend the NSM against violent attacks from Jews and leftists.  To this end they did equip themselves with a very modest range of very basic weapons, and were convicted and jailed for carrying out military-style drill – not for anything remotely resembling the gun-running or terrorism shown in Ridley Road.  Moreover none of this very basic physical training had anything at all to do with Rockwell, who was concentrating on work with Jordan and European comrades to build a ‘World Union of National Socialists’ – arguably a rather grandiose and unrealistic project at this stage in development of the various movements, but a noble idea and not in any way connected to terrorism.

The idea of a vast crowd of NSM thugs besieging Jews in a synagogue – Kristallnacht-style – is a very strange and extreme version of Jewish victim-fantasy: did the authors seriously imagine that such hype would do the 21st century ‘anti-fascist’ cause any good, or must we seek the explanation in psychological problems rather than political cynicism?

The true picture was the reverse, as it had been in the late 1940s when the 43 Group was formed, primarily to fight Sir Oswald Mosley’s attempted political comeback. The eponymous novel on which Ridley Road is based was originally inspired by its author Jo Bloom’s meeting with survivors of the 43 Group, which carried out numerous violent attacks on Mosley, his supporters, and some other non-Mosleyite fascist and national-socialist groups. By 1950 Mosley’s movement had begun to fade, partly as a result of violent opposition and internal subversion promoted by a strange alliance of the 43 Group, the Communist Party, more ‘respectable’ Jewish organisations, and MI5.

Mosley then refocused his attention on building alliances with fellow nationalists across Europe and to some extent in South Africa and South America.  This again attracted the attention of several security and intelligence agencies, but was no longer a matter for street-level violent opposition from the likes of the 43 Group.  Even at the end of the 1950s, when Mosley again returned to British politics following race riots in Notting Hill, there was only sporadic Jewish ‘anti-fascist’ opposition.

Yet for some reason in 1962 a violent group of this kind was revived, targeting not only Mosley but other anti-immigration and ‘far right’ groups. Solly’s gang is based on the real 62 Group, led by Cyril Paskin, who died in 2011.  A rabbi featured as part of the group’s leadership is obviously based on Leslie Hardman, who died in 2008.  Other leading figures in the real-life group were intelligence chiefs Gerry Gable (still editor of Searchlight sixty years later) and Harry Bidney (who died in 1984); and chief fundraiser Gerald Ronson, who later formed the Community Security Trust, a more ‘respectable’ Jewish anti-fascist charity.

In the final episode of Ridley Road it is implied that the 62 Group’s operations (including the real-life equivalents of Vivian and Jack/Peter) were responsible for obtaining evidence of NSM gun-running and other criminal conspiracies that led to the jailing of Jordan and co-conspirators.  In reality, though Jordan was jailed, it was for the usual ‘racial hatred’ offences rather than for any form of violent crime, and as noted above the individuals jailed for the synagogue arsons were a small group of NSM dissidents loyal to Françoise Dior rather than to Jordan.

Concerning other ‘crimes’ and ‘conspiracies’ supposedly organised by the far right against British Jews in the 1960s, the most comprehensive source I know of is a twelve-page Special Branch report compiled in April 1965 in response to parliamentary questions from the Labour MP (and first editor of Searchlight), Reg Freeson.  The ‘evidence’ that Freeson claimed to possess related to letters and other notes referring to nothing more serious than various acts of vandalism.  This ‘evidence’ seemed to have been stolen from the home of an NSM activist called Gordon Williams, and posted ‘anonymously’ through Freeson’s letter-box.  In fact it was clearly some form of 62 Group intelligence operation in which Freeson – as a close colleague of 62 Group intelligence chiefs Gable and Bidney, would have been complicit.

Williams was a 19-year-old living with his mother.  One evening while he was out of the house, a stranger pretending to be a police officer tricked Mrs Williams (who herself had no involvement in politics) into allowing him into the house, where he broke into her son’s wardrobe and stole some papers.  Special Branch noted that this was a crime and that they were seeking the arrest of this fake policeman to answer a charge of housebreaking under the Larceny Act.

Det. Insp. Thomas of Special Branch concluded:
“Although it cannot be proved – at present – there is a strong probability that the secret Jewish anti-fascist 62 Committee was responsible for obtaining the documents submitted by Mr Freeson.  A somewhat similar offence was dealt with at the County of Middlesex Sessions on 14th January 1964.  Then three young Jews were charged with breaking into the home of a writer, one David Irving, whom they suspected of being a fascist, in order, so they admitted, to steal correspondence.  They had gained entry by posing as GPO engineers (one using a stolen pass). No evidence was offered against one, and he was discharged; the second was fined £20 for housebreaking, and the third was fined £20 for housebreaking and £5 for stealing a GPO pass.”

This was of course a reference to the convictions of 62 Group operatives Gerry Gable and Manny Carpel. A later Special Branch file mentions that Carpel and another 62 Group / Searchlight operative – Mike Cohen – were arrested in July 1966 in the process of breaking into a printing firm in North London, where they intended to damage machinery because the firm had printed literature for the GBM.  Carpel was fined £20 while Cohen was let off with a conditional discharge because of his previous “good character”.

The ‘crimes’ referred to in the papers stolen from Williams included posting stickers on a Jewish estate agents window in October 1963; throwing paint at a synagogue door in April 1964; and posting stickers and daubing slogans at various locations during April-June 1964, which some of Freeson’s material indicated had been carried out by Roger Clare (then a well-known young Mosleyite whom this reviewer met a couple of times in his later years).

Special Branch also compiled a list of prosecutions of known fascists during 1964 and early 1965 – none of them bear any relation to the paramilitary fantasies of Ridley Road.  Many involve illegal leafletting or postering, such as a 40 shilling fine imposed on Union Movement’s Keith Thompson (who remains an H&D subscriber to this day).  Others were convictions for public order offences such as “insulting behaviour” – usually involving minor confrontations in the street with political opponents: the most serious was a £50 fine imposed on Gordon ‘Tom’ Callow of the NSM in July 1964, which was converted into a three-month prison sentence after Tom (who remained an active nationalist for decades and died at the start of 2021) refused to pay the fine.  A similar type of public order offence was “insulting words”, for which Martin Webster was acquitted on appeal in February 1964, but convicted alongside John Tyndall in July 1964, by which time they had split from Jordan’s NSM to create the Greater Britain Movement (GBM).  Tyndall was fined £25 and Webster given a two month jail sentence to run concurrently with an identical sentence for assaulting a policeman.

The only offences involving weapons were again very mild ones (especially by later standards).  Michael Passmore of GBM was fined £10 in September 1964 for possession of a smoke canister; while in March 1965 the NSM’s Christopher Britton (a juvenile) was fined £3 for possession of a knife, having been caught by police, outside a synagogue, with an anti-Jewish note wrapped round a brick.

By contrast Special Branch files are explicit about organised violence committed not by ‘nazis’ against the 62 Group, but by the 62 Group themselves against the NSM.  In November 1968 a very senior Special Branch officer ordered “discreet enquiries” to be made about the group, and a detailed six-page report submitted to DCI Elwyn Jones of Special Branch in March 1969 summarised its violent history:
“The 62 Committee was formed in September 1962 for the sole purpose of opposing fascism.  It was made up mostly from Jews who were formerly associated with the 43 Group which was active in the early post-war years as an anti-fascist organisation…”

Note that the 62 Group was not even officially in existence during the summer of 1962 when Ridley Road proudly chronicles its adventures!  (Although some Jews were already active as a violent fringe of broader non-Jewish anti-fascist organisations such as the Yellow Star Movement, and some of the old 43 Group veterans had evidently remained in touch with each other during the decade or more since that group had dissolved.)

A January 1964 SB report said: “This wholly Jewish Committee, which is the most militant of the anti-fascist groups, now operates as a secret society.  Details of its membership and affairs are not revealed and it does not publish literature or hold public meetings.”

Membership of the 62 Group had remained at around 200 for the past year, of whom about 70 were active in London:
“In the past year [1963] the organisation has planted informants in the National Party of Europe [Mosley’s international organisation], the National Socialist Movement and the British National Party, and has used funds at its disposal to settle fines and legal expenses of persons prosecuted in connection with various unlawful activities against fascists.”

Special Branch named leading members of the group including Baron Moss, Max Miller, Jack Garland, Leslie Jacobs and Brian Lewis.

In February 1965 SB “learned from a reliable source” that the 62 Group no longer existed.  “Since that time a hard core of young Jewish hooligans, many with criminal records, aided and abetted by older militant Jews, has continued anti-fascist activities under the leadership of two men – Harry Bidney and Issy Rondel – each of whom has his own group of supporters and his own informants in various fascist organisations.”  One SB report stated that Bidney and Rondel were “bitter enemies”, but the 1969 report concluded that “although they operate independently of each other, they occasionally unite against what they regard as the common enemy.  Bidney is closely supported by Gerry Gable, a journalist and an ardent supporter of the 62 Committee who assists with the compilation of Searchlight, an anti-fascist publication.”

An ad hoc group formed by 62 Group members including Rondel, Bidney and Manny Carpel organised a demonstration outside the famous meeting on 15th December 1966 at Caxton Hall at which members of three nationalist organisations – League of Empire Loyalists, British National Party and Racial Preservation Society – agreed to merge and form the National Front.

Eighteen months later in July 1968, with the National Front picking up activity and having fought its first parliamentary by-election in Acton (following the suicide of Bernard Floud, Labour MP, former militant anti-fascist in pre-war Oxford, and suspected Soviet agent), Special Branch reported that “members of the dormant Jewish anti-fascist organisation the 62 Committee” had recently formed a ‘National Committee Against Racialism’.  Its “expressed purpose is to take violent action against the holding of future National Front meetings”.

Jordan’s NSM was now overshadowed by moves towards formation of the NF, but when they attempted to book a meeting hall in central London on 28th January 1967, a gang of Jews led by Issy Rondel was lurking in the vicinity and Special Branch believed might have been responsible for attacking the meeting room and assaulting two NSM supporters, one of whom suffered a broken jaw:
“This is the second occasion within two months that fascist supporters have been assaulted in the vicinity of Caxton Hall, and may well presage an increase in overt activity by anti-fascist groups.”

There had also been vague reports to Special Branch in 1965 that both the Bidney and Rondel factions of the 62 Group were aiming to attack John Tyndall’s GBM, which by this time was active in East London and eventually merged into the NF.  In August 1965 there was a shooting incident at GBM headquarters, but Special Branch had been unable to determine who was behind it.

The strangest incident was in July 1967 in the midst of investigations into the much-hyped “synagogue arsons” of two years earlier.  By now Françoise Dior – the former Mrs Jordan – was living with Terry Cooper, a young NSM activist.  Cooper was kidnapped from his home by two men pretending to be police officers: they blindfolded him, threw him in the back of a van and held him captive for two days while “he was questioned regarding fascist organisations and personalities”.  While there was no positive identification of the men who had kidnapped Cooper, Special Branch were convinced that Gerry Gable had been behind surveillance of his house before the kidnapping, and they had identified several men in two cars keeping watch on the house as 62 Group members including Gable, Bidney, Paskin and Carpel.

The SB report continued: “the 62 Group are suspected of perpetrating four breakings during the period under review”. Two of these burglaries (in April 1967 and March 1969) were at the newly formed NF’s headquarters at Birkbeck Hill, South London, where numerous documents were stolen and considerable damage caused.  A third was in September 1968 at the home of Kieron Wood, deputy secretary of Jordan’s faction of the NSM, now using the name ‘National Socialist Group’ and about to reform as British Movement.  On the same night as this break-in, 62 Group thugs had attacked a meeting in Kensington being addressed by Jordan, and two months later Jordan and two colleagues were attacked in the street by a gang of fifteen Jews in Birmingham.

Special Branch concluded: “It will be seen that despite the official demise of the 62 Committee, a hard core of ex-members is still available and willing to take action against fascist organisations, and offices used by them.”

A later Special Branch report in October 1969 gave details of a 62 Group gang who attacked two NF members (one of them Martin Webster) before a meeting at Friars Hall, in Central London, but none of the gang was prosecuted – Webster and his NF colleague were left to pursue the matter in the civil courts, but Ferguson Smith (head of Special Branch) sent a secret report on the case to the Home Office.

Besides paranoia, was there anything else behind the Jewish obsession with attacking British nationalists of whatever stripe – whether Jordan’s open national socialists or the broader coalition of populists, reactionaries and radical nationalists who comprised the NF?

And why in particular was Jordan’s minuscule group considered any sort of threat to Jewish interests, bearing in mind that many H&D readers might regard the NSM’s open use of Hitlerite imagery as inevitably and inherently counterproductive, scarcely requiring any active opposition at all?

Fortunately, in her obsession with woke feminisation of her story, Ridley Road’s author has given away part of the answer, and my own specialist knowledge and research can supply the rest.  The series author (Sarah Solemani) has said that she was inspired to centre the story on Vivian Epstein after learning about female members of the 62 Group, including Monica Medicks, who “helped to strategise intelligence from enemy groups”.  Back in 2002 a Searchlight feature on the 62 Group also mentioned Medicks, but by their account she actually joined the group some three years after the events portrayed in Ridley Road.

Ignoring this, one reviewer suggested that the Vivian Epstein character was “modelled on the 62 group’s sole female member Monica Medicks”.  This is obvious nonsense.  The Vivian Epstein character is a politically naive, very young woman.  By the time she joined the 62 Group, Monica Medicks was an experienced political journalist in her forties who had for some years worked for Israeli intelligence (closer in age to a different Ridley Road character, Solly’s wife Nancy Malinovsky, played by Tracy-Ann Oberman, an actress who in real-life is a very active pro-Israel campaigner).  ‘Vivian Epstein’ is portrayed as having personally infiltrated the 62 Group.  That was never Monica Medicks’ role – she was an intelligence officer, not an undercover operative, and according to Searchlight’s account “played a oversight role, helping to avoid mad schemes and ensuring the work was strategic and well planned.”

In fact Monica Medicks was an experienced terrorist, having volunteered soon after the Second World War to join the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the group responsible for many terrorist atrocities including the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946, killing 91 people.  In making a series that purports to be about fictional ‘nazi terrorism’, the BBC has in effect glorified a real Jewish terrorist.

Her husband Stanley Medicks (1925-2013) was a commander of Mahal (‘Volunteers from Abroad’) recruiting Jews from around the world to fight for the new Zionist state in 1948. Oddly, once this state was secured, Stanley and Monica Medicks chose not to stay in Palestine, instead moving first to Kenya (where Stanley Medicks had been born) then somewhat ironically fleeing from the anti-British, anti-White terrorism of the notorious Mau Mau and settling in London, where Stanley was on the surface a used car dealer, but both he and his wife worked in various roles for Israeli intelligence.

Monica Medicks was not the “sole female member” of the 62 Group, though she was the only woman in a 62 Group offshoot called JACOB – the Jewish Aid Committee of Britain – which in the spring of 1966 circulated proposals within the Jewish community for a new, pro-active / aggressive Jewish strategy.  Metropolitan Police Special Branch monitored this new form of Jewish extremism, just as they had the 62 Group.  

JACOB’s proposals were sent to the 400 members of the Board of Deputies of British Jews under the title With a Strong Hand, based on a quotation from the Book of Exodus in the Jewish Torah / Christian Old Testament: “With a strong hand and an outstretched arm the Lord brought them forth from Egypt, out of the house of bondage.”  This biblical theme was continued in the JACOB report’s first chapter, titled “From Pharoah to Hitler”.

Special Branch discovered that there was one woman (Medicks) among JACOB’s twenty-five members.  Its chairman was Maurice Essex, whom SB knew to have “played a leading part in various communist activities since 1943”, and whose partner in ‘Portland Finance Co. Ltd’, Lionel Citroen was also part of JACOB.  Essex had been election agent for Phil Piratin, Communist MP for the East London constituency Mile End, and was himself elected to the Board of Deputies of British Jews, where he was one of the few Board members to be an active supporter of both the 43 Group and its successor the 62 Group.  Both Essex and his fellow JACOB member Baron Moss were successful businessmen as well as communists.

Other secret JACOB members included the 62 Group’s chief fundraiser Gerald Ronson, later one of Britain’s best known businessmen but jailed for his role in the Guinness share fraud.  Ronson was the man who facilitated Robert Maxwell’s open embrace of Zionism during Maxwell’s final decade (see my review of Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell in H&D 103).  Also Maj. David Spector, another 43 Group veteran and long-time anti-fascist in the Brighton area; the 62 Group rabbi Leslie Hardman; and former 62 Group chairman Howard Halperin.

One important individual whose militant anti-fascism has not previously been reported was Ivor Arbiter, one of the leading figures in the 1960s’ British pop music industry.  Arbiter was London’s leading designer, manufacturer and retailer of drums, and eventually was the man who brought karaoke to Britain.  By the mid-1960s he had secured the British franchise for Fender guitars.  Yet he also had a secret life in violent Jewish activism.  Special Branch described him as “an ex-member of the Jewish terrorist 43 Group in 1948”, and reported that the 62 Group had used his office as its headquarters.

JACOB’s central argument was that the Board of Deputies had been too passive and had failed to react effectively to the fascist and nazi menace in Britain:
“A vigorous and active opposition to the fascist and other racial elements must be created instead of the passive, ‘hole in the corner’ attitude which has been typical of the ‘official’ policy to date.”

Naturally they highlighted the ‘Holocaust’, even though in 1966 this had not even begun to acquire the mythical, debate-silencing aura that it has today: “In Germany the concessionary policy was a fatal mistake.  The Ghetto mentality led straight to the Gas Chamber.”

With a Strong Hand developed the argument that Anglo-Jewry’s official leaders had been too quiescent, merely seeking to deny publicity to “nazi and fascist meetings”. By contrast, Medicks and her JACOB colleagues argued:
“An increasing number of young Jewish citizens want a more positive anti-fascist policy, a policy of ‘direct action’ like the Maccabees and the fighter-founders of the Jewish State of Israel.”

In order to assess which tactics had proved effective, the authors went on to list (and exaggerate) those racial-nationalist groups still active in Britain in early 1966 – namely Mosley’s Union Movement, Jordan’s NSM, Tyndall’s GBM, and Bean’s BNP, claiming that between them they had almost 400 “dedicated voluntary organisers”, and a “total following of about 10,000.”

Whereas the Board of Deputies’ strategy was that the far-right depended on publicity, and could therefore defeated by denying such publicity, JACOB argued:
“The two groups which have developed most in the last two years are the British National Party and the Greater Britain Movement, the groups which have had the least publicity. Mosley’s Union Movement and Jordan’s Nazis, both of which have been under continuous attack, are very much on the down-grade.

“The British National Party was driven off the streets by active young Jewish man and women during 1962 and 1963. The BNP then concentrated quietly in Southall and ‘nobody broke up their meetings.’  Then, in 1964 they got 10% of the vote in the Greater London Council elections, and Bean’s 9% in the General Election. So the BNP grew – without publicity.

“Tyndall’s GBM worked quietly, and gained ground, whilst Jordan’s group – despite the wide publicity devoted to him – got smaller.

“Mosley has been in the news all the time since he was thrown out of Trafalgar Square in 1962. Despite plenty of publicity his Movement is sinking.”

JACOB also contended that any support for “racialism”, whether or not Jews were specifically mentioned, was a danger to the Jewish community and should be militantly opposed.

When this Special Branch report on JACOB was discussed by senior civil servants at the Home Office in June 1966, one commented:
“This undoubtedly bears out the police view that at least this Jewish organisation would not stop short of the use of violence and disorder to prevent a fascist meeting in Trafalgar Square.

“But it is, I think, somewhat disturbing to see in any organisation the knowledge that its threat to violence has the power to deny a forum to its opponents.”

The Jewish ‘anti-fascist’ strategies advocated above make interesting reading for today’s racial nationalists. Quite clearly from the enemy’s perspective, it didn’t matter whether racial nationalists avoided blatant ‘anti-semitism’ or national socialist symbols: they were in any case to be opposed implacably, by violent means if necessary. However JACOB’s analysis would suggest that (in the 1960s at any rate) the more ‘British’ style of the GBM and the BNP were considered more effective and dangerous by their enemies than either the openly confrontational national-socialism of the NSM, or the very different approach of the UM which was nevertheless irretrievably compromised in the public eye (at least in this period) by its association with Britain’s wartime opponents.

In conclusion we should ask: just why were wealthy Jewish businessmen so concerned about very small, radical nationalist movements in any case?  Partly it’s their usual paranoia about any anti-Jewish movement, however tiny.  But there was something else going on in the 1960s.

Though Jordan’s NSM was small, it had a core of ideologically committed activists and its leader was after all a Cambridge history graduate.  Readers might think that his choice of political strategy was bound to fail, but there were reasons behind that which I examined in the course of my analysis of MI5’s files on Jordan (see H&D Issues 82 to 86).  There are other forms of political threat well short of becoming a mass movement or making an electoral breakthrough: populist success is not the only form of political impact.

In one particular respect we now know that MI5 and even MI6 had a longstanding concern about Colin Jordan and NSM – their attempt to build high-level connections in the Middle East, including private meetings and fundraising discussions with Colonel Saad el-Shazly, military attaché in London of the United Arab Republic (i.e. Egypt and Syria which in this period briefly operated as a united, secular nationalist Arab state).

In November 1961 (while still in the BNP) Jordan had a meeting in Amsterdam with a UAR diplomat.  This was part of his European travels meeting numerous fellow national-socialists across the continent, and prioritising this international networking over building the movement in the UK.  Readers might think this an odd choice of priorities, and consequent tensions contributed to splits both within the BNP, leading to NSM’s creation, and within NSM itself, leading to the GBM breakaway.  But given the bigger picture, there was potentially more to this networking than merely creating a Europe-wide national-socialist talking shop.

British intelligence were concerned about this in a Cold War context, where the loyalties of hardline fascists and national-socialists in an era of superpower conflict were potentially important.  If you have a small force of seriously committed young people at such a time, they can play an important role – whether in intelligence gathering, subversion, paramilitary activity, or as a ‘stay-behind’ force trained in advance to operate behind enemy lines if parts of Europe were overrun in a Third World War.

Such notions were not a fantasy in the 1960s, they were part of everyday military and intelligence planning, notably in what’s now known as NATO’s ‘Operation Gladio’.

British intelligence knew about the Amsterdam meeting but had no clear picture of what followed.  Then in July 1962 – the very month of the Trafalgar Square rally and the Cotswold camp with Rockwell, in other words the month in which Ridley Road is set – a top secret MI5 listening device inside the UAR Embassy recorded a meeting between Colin Jordan, John Tyndall and military attaché Shazly, where they agreed procedures for “clandestine” contacts and a range of “underground activities” including propaganda, a potential offshore broadcasting station, and NSM operatives making themselves available to assist the Egyptian and Syrian intelligence services across Europe in anti-Zionist operations.

It is this area of potential activity – not the sheer fantasy of ‘terrorism’ against Anglo-Jewish targets, that concerned Israel and its proxies. (Needless to say, there is absolutely no mention in Ridley Road of alliances between British nationalists / national socialists and the Arab world: that is a dangerous topic for their enemies to discuss in the 2020s!)

And it is thus no surprise that several years later, in 1965 and 1966, Israeli intelligence operative Monica Medicks turned up in London to work alongside 62 Group thugs and their paymasters in developing a militant Jewish response targeting even tiny ‘far right’ organisations.  At this point Israeli strategists were planning their 1967 war of aggressive expansion, which created the modern Middle East.  This war was bound to create a dangerous political/diplomatic environment for Israel in the West.  The JACOB plan for a more aggressive Anglo-Jewish approach including pro-active intelligence, propaganda and street violence, was part of Israel’s plan to demonise, marginalise and physically crush all forms of opposition – a strategy that has continued for more than half a century.

This is the true story behind Ridley Road – a story the BBC remains determined to ignore. The entire Israeli aspect is ignored until the very last scene of the final episode, where two central characters are shown having been given new identities and emigrating to Israel. (As Zionists themselves would put it, “making aliyah”.) This Israeli use of fake British passports has occasionally, provably occurred in real life: notably in January 2010 when Israeli agents killed a Hamas official in Dubai, having flown into the Emirates using several fake British identities. The British authorities reacted by expelling a senior Mossad officer working at the Israeli Embassy in London.

H&D readers will not learn much about the real history of ‘anti-fascism’ from Ridley Road. In fact some younger viewers might be dangerously misled about the extent to which violent ‘revolutionary’ national socialism had genuine potential in 1960s Britain. As explained during this review, the truth is rather more complicated.