John Hutchyns Tyndall (14 July 193419 July 2005) was a British neo-fascist political activist. A leading member of various small neo-Nazi groups during the late 1950s and 1960s, he was chairman of the National Front (NF) from 1972 to 1974 and again from 1975 to 1980, and then chairman of the British National Party (BNP) from 1982 to 1999. He unsuccessfully stood for election to the House of Commons and European Parliament on several occasions.

Born in Devon and educated in Kent, Tyndall undertook national service prior to embracing the extreme right. In the mid-1950s, he joined the League of Empire Loyalists (LEL) and came under the influence of its leader, Arthur Chesterton. Finding the LEL too moderate, in 1957 he and John Bean founded the National Labour Party (NLP), an explicitly Nazi group. In 1960, the NLP merged with Colin Jordan's White Defence League to found the first British National Party (BNP). Within the BNP, Tyndall and Jordan established a paramilitary wing called Spearhead, which angered Bean and other party members. They expelled Tyndall and Jordan, who went on to establish the National Socialist Movement and then the international World Union of National Socialists. In 1962, they were convicted and briefly imprisoned for their paramilitary activities. After a split with Jordan, Tyndall formed his Greater Britain Movement (GBM) in 1964. Although never changing his basic beliefs, by the mid-1960s, Tyndall was replacing his overt references to Nazism with appeals to British nationalism.

In 1967, Tyndall joined Chesterton's newly founded National Front (NF) and became its leader in 1972, overseeing growing membership and electoral growth. His leadership was threatened by various factions within the party which eventually led to his losing his position as leader in 1974. He resumed this position in 1975, although the latter part of the 1970s saw the party's prospects decline. Following an argument with long-term comrade Martin Webster, Tyndall resigned from the party in 1980 and formed his short-lived New National Front (NNF). In 1982, he merged the NNF into his own newly formed British National Party (BNP). Under Tyndall, the BNP established itself as the UK's most prominent extreme-right group during the 1980s, although electoral success eluded it. Tyndall's refusal to moderate the BNP's policies or image caused anger among a growing array of "modernisers" in the party, who ousted him in favour of Nick Griffin in 1999. In 2005, Tyndall was charged with incitement to racial hatred for comments made at a BNP meeting. He died two days before his trial was due to take place.

Tyndall promoted a racial nationalist belief in a distinct white "British race", arguing that this race was threatened by a Jewish conspiracy to encourage non-white migration into Britain. He called for the establishment of an authoritarian state which would deport all non-whites from the country, engage in a eugenics project, and re-establish the British Empire through the military conquest of parts of Africa. He never gained any mainstream political respectability in the United Kingdom although he proved popular among sectors of the British far-right.

Early life

1934–1958: Youth John Tyndall was born in Stork Nest, Topsham Road in Exeter, Devon, on 14 July 1934, the son of Nellie Tyndall, née Parker and George Francis Tyndall. Through the Tyndall family line, he was related to the early English translator of the Bible, William Tyndale and the physicist John Tyndall. His paternal family were Irish Unionists from County Waterford, who had a long history of service in the Royal Irish Constabulary. His grandfather had been a district inspector in the Constabulary and he had also fought against the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence. His father had moved to England, working as a Metropolitan Police officer, and then he worked as a warden at YMCA hostels, including at St George's House on Stockwell Road in Southwark. Tyndall later stated that despite the fact that his father had been raised in a Unionist family, he eventually adopted internationalist views. He claimed that his mother exhibited "a kind of basic British patriotism" and he also claimed that it was she who shaped his early political views. His upbringing was emotionally stable and materially secure. Tyndall studied at the Beckenham and Penge Grammar School in west Kent, where he attained three O-levels, a "moderate" result. At the school, his achievements had been sporting rather than academic, because he enjoyed playing cricket and association football and he also developed a passion for fitness.

Tyndall completed his national service in West Germany from 1952 to 1954. A member of the Royal Horse Artillery, he achieved the rank of lance-bombardier. On completion, he returned to Britain and turned his attention to political issues. Initially interested in socialism, he attended the 6th World Festival of Youth and Students which was held in Moscow, the capital city of the Soviet Union, in 1957. Nevertheless, he began to believe that left-wing politics was being infused with "anti-British attitudes", moving swiftly to the political right. He was devoted to the preservation of the British Empire and he was hostile to what he believed was the growing permissiveness of British society, stating that "the smell everywhere was one of decadence". During that decade he read Mein Kampf, the autobiography and political manifesto of the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, growing sympathetic to Hitler's political beliefs and Nazism. In particular, Tyndall approved of "the descriptions of the workings of certain Jewish forces in Germany, which seemed uncannily similar to what I had observed of the same kinds of forces in Britain." He concluded that Britain's decision to go to war against Nazi Germany was ultimately the result of a conspiracy which was primarily headed by Jews, a conspiracy which he thought had also masterminded non-white immigration to Britain after the war.

Around 1957–58, Tyndall decided to commit himself to his political cause full-time, which he was able to do because his job as a salesman allowed him to keep flexible working hours. He decided against joining the Union Movement which was led by the prominent British fascist Oswald Mosley, disagreeing with its promotion of the political union of Britain with continental Europe. Instead, he was attracted to the League of Empire Loyalists (LEL)a right-wing group founded by Arthur Chestertonafter seeing coverage of one of their demonstrations on television. He visited their basement office in Westminster, where he was given some of their literature. He enjoyed Chesterton's writings and concurred with his conspiracy theory that Jewish people had been plotting to bring down the British Empire. Tyndall began associating with other young men who had joined the LEL. At a February 1957 by-election in Lewisham North, Tyndall aided the LEL campaign, during which he met another party member, John Bean, an industrial chemist. Both Tyndall and Bean were frustrated by the LEL's attempts to exert pressure on the mainstream Conservative Party. They wanted to be involved in a more radical party, one that would combine "nationalism" with "popular socialism" and which would reach out to the white working class through appeals against immigration from the Caribbean.

1958–1962: National Labour Party and the first British National Party

In April 1958, Tyndall and Bean founded their own extreme-right group, the National Labour Party (NLP). The group was based at Thornton Heath, Croydon and attracted its early membership from former LEL members living in south and east London. According to the historian Richard Thurlow, the NLP promoted an "English" variant of Nazism and was more pronounced in its "explicit racism" than the LEL had been, focusing less on bemoaning the decline of the British Empire and more on criticising the arrival of non-white immigrants from former British colonies.

The NLP began co-operating with another extreme-right group, the White Defence League, which had been established by Colin Jordan, a secondary school teacher. Together the two groups embarked on a project of stirring up racial tensions among white Britons and black Caribbean immigrants in Notting Hill. Tyndall briefly left the NLP and in his absence Bean and Jordan merged their respective groups into the British National Party (BNP) in 1960. The BNP were racial nationalists, calling for the preservation of a "Nordic race"—of which the "British race" was considered a branch—by removing both immigrants and Jewish influences from Britain. Tyndall soon joined this new BNP, and became a close confidante of Jordan, who helped Tyndall to further embrace neo-Nazism. Tyndall also developed a friendship with Martin Webster, who became a long-term comrade after watching Tyndall speak at a Trafalgar Square rally in 1962.

In April 1961, Tyndall self-published his pamphlet, The Authoritarian State: Its Meaning and Function, which helped to cement his reputation within the British far-right. In the pamphlet, he attacked democratic systems of government as part of a conspiracy orchestrated by Jews, quoting from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It called for the replacement of the United Kingdom's liberal democratic system with an authoritarian one in which a "Leader" is given absolute power.

Within the BNP, Tyndall established an elite group known as Spearhead, members of which wore military-style uniforms inspired by those of the Nazis and underwent paramilitary and ideological training. Tyndall had a great liking for wearing jackboots – Jordan related that on the way to a far-right meeting in Germany, Tyndall made his entourage look for a shoe shop so that he could purchase a pair of genuine German jackboots. It is likely that there were no more than 60 members of Spearhead. The group campaigned on behalf of imprisoned Nazi war criminals Rudolf Hess and Adolf Eichmann. According to the anti-fascist activist Gerry Gable, Spearhead represented the first "terrorist group" founded by neo-Nazis in Britain. Both Bean and another senior BNP member, Andrew Fountaine, were concerned about the overt neo-Nazism embraced by Tyndall and Jordan, instead thinking that the BNP should articulate a more British-oriented form of racial nationalism. In 1962, Bean held a meeting at which Tyndall and Jordan were expelled from the party.

1962–1967: National Socialist Movement and Greater Britain Movement Tyndall and Jordan then regrouped around twenty members of Spearhead and formed the National Socialist Movement (NSM) on 20 April 1962, a date symbolically chosen as Hitler's birthday. They celebrated the event with a cake decorated with a Nazi swastika. According to the historian Richard Thurlow, the NSM was "the most blatant Nazi" group active in Britain during the mid-20th century. The NSM gained few members; an estimate in August 1962 suggested that it had only thirty to fifty. The NSM gained the attention of the media as well as Special Branch. In July 1962, Tyndall was arrested for breaching the peace at a Trafalgar Square rally in which he had been attacked by Jewish military veterans and other anti-fascists after calling the Jewish community a "poisonous maggot feeding on a body in an advanced state of decay". His comments resulted in him being convicted of inciting racial hatred and he was sentenced to six weeks imprisonment, reduced to a fine on appeal. The police then raided the group's London headquarters, after which its leading members were brought to trial at the Old Bailey, where they were found guilty of establishing a paramilitary group in contravention of Section Two of the Public Order Act 1936. Tyndall received a six-month prison sentence, while Jordan received nine months.