After some hefty persuasion by both Searchlight and Ian Anderson, I agreed to join a national turnout for the next big weekend of campaigning in Bermondsey. A dozen leading Anderson loyalists, including two from Birmingham, were also in town. After four hours I realised I was on a pub crawl. We ended the evening near the Elephant and Castle. Looking out of the window, I stared at my favourite Indian eatery with a watery mouth and commented to John Hill, the national organiser of the NF and a parliamentary candidate for law and order, that they did the finest Vindaloo in London. ‘Really? I fucking love a good curry, me. Who’s up for a curry then?’ he asked, rubbing his large hands together.
Well, obviously I was. But something did not bode right about the situation. We’d spent the whole day coming to terms with the BNP saturation of Bermondsey, and our own unease about having to face them again, plus Terry was very drunk which normally meant agitated. Hill was already on licence over a fight in a pub in Birmingham where he had led a small group of NF activists into an attack on a group of Socialists. So I refused, thank God. Most of the others would not eat curry because ‘Pakis cooked it’ but John, a stocky street fighter, managed to persuade five of them to go get a curry, including, strangely, Terry Blackham, who I didn’t think had ever eaten something so daring as a prawn cracker before in his life. I waited in the pub with Anderson for his taxi to turn up.
‘We need you back on the team for good Matthew,’ he said, putting another pint in front of me. ‘The party’s going through some transitions at the moment but we have to stick to our guns.’
I was so pissed that I actually thought for a moment about telling him it was me who had fucked the party over. I was absolutely terrified of getting caught, but also immensely proud that I had got away with it and wanted to rub his nose in it. The words were even on my tongue as he got up for his taxi, but I knew that would ruin everything. He’d have to find out later, from somebody else.
Five large and aggressive fascists walked into the Indian restaurant, already the worse for wear, and demanded five pints and some popadoms. The fascists sat down for their meals and began their usual charming witty banter about ‘Pakis, poofs and coons’ when an incredulous customer asked them to tone down the language, in particular the racist remarks. It took them less than two minutes to destroy the restaurant and its magnificent fish tank. I watched the police piling out of the station and into the restaurant as the riot spilled out onto the pavement. The street filled with passersby stopping to stare as horrified diners fled into the traffic. The NF was taking the restaurant to bits.
As my taxi passed the restaurant I could see Hill through the broken window face down on the table, with two coppers holding him down. The fighting was continuing and the police were struggling to contain these well-rehearsed vandals and hooligans.
‘Not a smart place to start a fight is it?’ said the driver. Was there ever?
Still without a number for Searchlight’s Gerry Gable and with it being the weekend and the office being closed, I took it upon myself to make inquiries the next morning. Blackham’s mother confirmed he was still in the cells and also let slip that Terry had not been ‘coping too well’ with the break-up of his relationship with his long-term girlfriend. ‘Go and see if he’s alright won’t you?’ she asked.
A local member drove me to the police station so that I could make my inquiries. The desk officer smiled broadly. ‘We’ve got five of them here helping us with our inquiries and we’re not letting them out together.’
Later, in Eddie Whicker’s living room, we laughed long and hard about the curry house incident. It was good to see him again, it had been a while. It was tempting to feed his ego and tell him what the left thought of his hard-man heroics, after all there was nothing wrong with confirming what he already assumed. Whicker had been notable by his recent public absence and Searchlight had touched on it with me briefly. But Eddie Whicker was my friend, a good friend. I’d fumbled and skirted around the issue when Searchlight had asked but now, having to think clearly, it was obvious that he was dangerous, like having a pit-bull around young children; no matter how friendly it is, you know that deep down inside it wouldn’t mind ripping into their necks. You didn’t get tattoos or vernacular like his by just looking hard and menacing. For so long, that had been his attraction as some kind of pocket monster at my disposal but now that I had crossed over to the other side, those hands of his would strangle me without thinking twice.
Out of the blue, he pulled a video camera from behind his couch.
He’d been doing some more filming, this time of what looked like an ordinary suburban house with ordinary-looking suburban people coming and going. He grinned so widely, his tiny pencil moustache creased under his nose. ‘This is the home of a fucking red who does stuff for the IRA,’ he spat, his facial expression turning to revulsion. The videotape had already recorded a dozen or so Republican sympathisers, none of whom were known to us, going into a house that he would not tell me anything else about. On Hitler’s birthday, 20 April, the UDA were going to film people attending a Republican meeting at Islington Town Hall. He brought up the possibility of putting UDA activists unknown to the left on the coaches or buses coming into town. The plan was to use the lists of names I had given him via the Postman. Or, he said, ‘Just plant a fucking bomb on them.’
Was he serious? ‘You watch the TV, Maff. You know the score. There’s blood on the streets in Belfast almost every day. The fight is on. I’ve told Frank I want you on the team ’cause I trust you. You’ve got principals.’ Yes I did. And a lot of Irish relatives too.
Rolan Adams was murdered in 1991, almost exactly two years after the BNP shop opened to the public. It was not entirely a surprise. While the BNP had been concentrating its main efforts on the East End, where it had traditions, overt racism in the borough of Greenwich, which had never been a secret, seemed to be exploding from the confidence the huge white population gained from having the BNP in close proximity. Edmonds had stood in his office in April of that year, telling the BBC’s Panorama program that the hate sheet Holocaust News for which he was so proudly responsible, ‘was a wonderful statement of truth.’
I always thought of racism as acts done without the knowledge of the victim: silent, snide comments, refusal by a cab to pick up, turned down for a job in favour of someone better ‘suited’. But it was not just politicised Nazis who went out and attacked people because of their colour. The youth culture of knives and violence that remained, for the most part, outside the school gates when I was there, was finding its way in through a hole in the fence. The youth centres were closed, the community vanishing. During my entire life on a council estate, I never once encountered a youth worker. The estates were already ghettos. The things said behind closed doors were now repeated openly on street corners, and mobs of youths roamed around in gangs and cliques, identified by a street or their colour. The BNP was the only service offering free literature and counselling from their minibus, passing in the dead of night, putting out stickers and leaflets and free newspapers.
The Woolwich, Eltham and Thamesmead area used to have a fairly small but violent British Movement and skin following. The Nazi band Squadron lived and practised quite openly and drunkenly from a flat in a tower block on the Ferrier estate with a Union Jack across the window. Most grew up knowing an informal gang called the Nutty Turn-Out that made its name in the 1980s for being drawn from Charlton’s tiny B-Mob hooligan firm, and Millwall’s infamous Bushwackers. Nutty Turn-Out was just a name for young white guys, including NF members from across the river, who liked a ruck, would smell the trouble brewing and head for it. One night the Nutty Turn-Out was in the area looking for trouble, looking for a victim. They found one: a young black boy by the name of Rolan Adams. And stabbed him to death.
The television cameras arrived in Thamesmead quicker than a council plumber on overtime, pointing at the grey buildings built in the 1960s, when Thamesmead was a model environment for nice white families, with a large recreational boating pond in the middle, where I had gone canoeing while at school. Slowly a new picture began to emerge, of a community under attack from within. A community fuelled by the presence of an openly Nazi organisation on its doorstep, preaching hatred, offering sporadic solutions to random problems. Not all the boarded houses there were empty. Some had tenants inside, living in terror. What an insightful decision the BNP had made to open its office so close by. The BNP protested it was merely a gang fight. The murder resulted in swift condemnation, but what stuck most was the description: racist murder.
Thamesmead became a cause célèbre for the local news bulletins. It produced soundbites, ten seconds of people claiming Thamesmead was being marked by racist activity, and ten seconds in the BNP shop with Richard Edmonds, denying all guilt and all responsibility. Tensions were delicate, to say the least.
A group of local anti-racist activists made contact with The Reverend Al Sharpton, a firebrand black preacher from the United States. He heard what nobody else wanted to. Away from New York, blacks were still being downtrodden, this time in England. Blacks not stolen from Africa, but settled by invitation. He got on a plane and surrounded himself with young black men wearing sunglasses. Edmonds was delighted by Sharpton’s arrival. It was going to stir the pot, and get up the noses of more Thamesmead residents. The stuttering old Teddy Boy who stood for the BNP in Greenwich, Ian Dell, not long out of the nick for killing an old couple in a road accident, organised a welcoming party for him.
Sharpton was to address a meeting at Friends House in Euston. I never thought for a minute anyone, even Dell, would dare walk into a meeting packed full of angry blacks and let off a smoke bomb. But that is just what he did. Two seconds later, the meeting was in uproar and Dell was hit by a car as he made his escape. The BNP minibus deserted him, leaving him bleeding and in the hands of the police. During the search of his house, Dell played the officers Nazi marching tunes and showed them his impressive collection of Nazi regalia and newspapers, swastikas and CS gas canisters. While tapping his foot along in time, the search officer is alleged to have said, ‘Get rid of these [CS gas canisters]. After us, it’s the [Special] Branch that comes calling.’ How friendly were the Metropolitan Police in those days, eh?
More publicity followed the meeting, and again the BNP were elevated in the minds of the people unaffected by racism in their homes, who had watched an American black man accuse them of racism. Even I admired Dell’s guts, and joined in the warm applause for him and his actions the next time he made it to Brick Lane.
‘It’s this easy,’ said Edmonds. ‘Matthew, the people are angry and we will fight back.’ What were they fighting back against? I’m not sure anyone was clear about it.
And so I continued, more dedicated than ever before, to be the centre of attention. Blackham had begun to warm to me again, particularly as the NF was shrinking so dramatically. Searchlight was encouraged by the amount of information coming out of the far right. It was at this time I met another Searchlight mole, Tim Hepple, answering the phones at BNP HQ. Neither of us knew then what the other was up to.
‘They say there is a race war going on around here,’ said Edmonds, having showered in the kitchen. He mopped his bald head with the same towel he used to dry the special BNP coffee mugs, ‘But that’s not true. He [Adams] was just another nigger with a penknife. We did not create this, this has always been here.’ But BNP activists were sure going to exacerbate the problem. ‘They’re calling the white people of Thamesmead racists, like it’s a crime, like it is the worst thing you could ever be. A black kid lies dead, what about all the white kids, or the pensioners? We’re going to march in Thamesmead, tell these coons and cops that we don’t accept their prejudices. Join us and march, march with the BNP, Matthew, join a winning side. The spirit of National Socialism will provide for everyone.’ Edmonds had that mad twinkle in his eye, like it was the most important thing in his life. Poor trash, he and I, but my life had to start looking rosier soon or I’d be as mad as Edmonds, with nothing to cling to.
Leaving behind those thoughts of race-hate and very slowly approaching light was like leaving a prison. It was only ever a day release though, because I now had to live a lie. I could tell no one about my new choice of direction. The level of excitement in my life had grown, but it was now fraught with danger. Even now I shudder when I think about the close shaves I was having, barely able to do anything a normal person would do in my situation. I felt like a cheating husband while my poor colleagues were like my wife at the kitchen sink. Meanwhile my new lover, Searchlight, wanted me to keep fucking my wife, keep bending her over the dishwasher. And that was all fine, all fun and rewarding, but if I met the girl of my dreams, what should I tell her? So I continued having tea with Edmonds, then meetings with the man from Searchlight, who I apparently infuriate with my miserable tales of woe.
Leaving London one Saturday, Anderson drove the new NF minibus up to Hemel Hempstead for an election meeting in support of our perennial losing candidate John McAuley. Begged and persuaded to join us, Eddie came along with the same camera he’d been using to capture the proposed future victims of a burgeoning mainland UDA.
Everyone is hoping we’ll find some reds to slap, and we don’t have a bad little team out for this one. Sheffield, Birmingham, Luton and London have sent their finest remaining young men to campaign for John. Eddie finally gives the order to head to the pub, where we find McAuley holed up in a corner, with Anderson attempting to dissuade him from his planned assault on the local reds. Eddie filmed us drinking, smoking, farting and clowning around, while outside the police gathered to escort us to the meeting hall which is, again, a local school.
As I left the pub there was a cool breeze making me feel unsteady on my feet. The air was filled with chants of ‘Nazi scum off our streets,’ and a few of the plump Brummies tried to veer off to confront the couple of dozen protesters outside the school gate. One punch, though, and Searchlight would drop me like a bag of shit. ‘No reds are to be slapped, in fact nobody. Not by you or anyone if you can help it. Stay out of trouble, keep your eyes and ears open.’
‘I don’t do that fighting thing. I’m a lover, not a fighter,’ I told him, and again he raised his eyebrows, but this time he laughed: ‘Don’t tell me so many fucking lies, either.’
A hundred metres separated the school building from the school gates. There were no more than two dozen protestors, a mixed bag of old ladies and gobby hippies with black flags and underperforming facial growth. There was an almost carnival atmosphere as NF members milled inside and outside the school hall shouting, ‘Let them in, we’ll fucking hammer them.’
The protesters were demanding that they be escorted into the meeting. Anderson brushed past us and out to have a chat with the head plod. Eddie and I decided to accompany him to eavesdrop on his conversation with the plod. Inside the school hall the members had been in Ian’s ear, demanding that the reds be allowed inside and Ian was sent out to make sure it happened. Behind us we could hear the growing bravado of the lads getting ready, picking and choosing for themselves whomever it was at the school gates that they wanted to fight, while Eddie and I were trying to find someone with half-decent breasts to focus the camera on. Ian was halfway between us and them, chatting away calmly, when through the gates came thirty or so rather large men, pushing their way through the protesters.
‘Ooh Eddie,’ I say rather grimly. ‘We’ve got a bit of bother at hand here.’ The large men are waving at Ian and getting closer, walking in almost slow motion. ‘Hello Ian, how the fuck are you?’
The panic went up behind us as the plod were closing the school doors, trapping the NF members inside as Ian took his first blow from the group. ‘It’s fucking Red Action,’ gasped Eddie, dropping the camera to his side and turning to me with horror on his face. Ian had rolled himself into a ball while the rest of the mob made for us. Eddie and I stared blankly at each other.
‘Run?’ I asked, as Eddie hid the camera inside his overcoat. We ran to the school, banging on the doors to be let in, while a couple of NF members climbed through the windows to get outside at the reds.
‘Why are you running, Maff?’ asks Eddie as I pass a flustered Blackham trying to get past us and protect the fallen Führer.
There was what could be called carnage in the school grounds, bloody lips and bloody fascists, while inside the school, men who came to fight could only push against police officers. Those who climbed through windows to get out and fight gave a good account of themselves but they were well outnumbered. One red even pulled an NF member out through the window where he was having second thoughts about joining the fray and stamped on his head when he hit the ground.
The reds departed the scene as quickly as they had arrived, seemingly brushing the police aside as they went. We all stood in astonished silence. We had been battered, our leader humbled and humiliated. The police had locked the majority of the NF in the school and watched the fighting from the sidelines.
In the school reception area, national organiser John Hill held an inquest with those assembled. He laid the blame fairly and squarely at Blackham’s feet. ‘Why wasn’t he with Ian when Ian went out to talk to the Old Bill? What fucking use is he politically? He’s supposed to mind Ian against red attack, not prance around the fucking area acting tough and then being unavailable when it goes off!’
People sat in corners with their heads in their hands, blood was smeared over the walls. Eddie and I went back outside where the police were examining the broken windows and the school caretaker was measuring up for replacements. Eddie found the whole thing very amusing. Others came outside to show off their battle scars.
‘Why do they do it?’ asked one young lad. ‘Why do they want to kill us all the time, don’t they know about the niggers and the Pakis and the IRA? We’re supposed to be fighting them, not other whites.’ He had a rather impressive boot mark down the side of his face and his eye was all closed up.
Eddie just brushed him off, uninterested. ‘If you don’t know reds, it’s pointless even discussing it with you,’ he sniffed. ‘Go and clean yourself the fuck up and don’t talk to me.’ Then he laughed. ‘It’s the only way these kids are gonna learn Maff. There needs to be a lot more of this before they wake the fuck up.’
John Hill presented me with a squeezy lemon full of ammonia and some dye that he had added for maximum effect. ‘When we get out of here squeeze that into some fucker’s face,’ he said solemnly. It became known as the Goldfish Incident when I poured the contents into the school fish tank instead.