‘Back to Front’: John Tyndall and the Origins of the British National Party

Abstract

In the mid-1950s, after two years of national service, John Hutchyns Tyndall was ready to answer the call of politics. Yet there was little shaping his early radicalism at that time other than hard-nosed patriotism, an impassioned devotion to the cause of the British Empire and growing hostility to the permissiveness of liberal society where the ‘smell everywhere was one of decadence’.¹ Even so, these beliefs were sufficiently potent to induce Tyndall towards the right-extremist political fringe. But what Tyndall was to discover there was of somewhat limited appeal. The most prominent figure on Britain’s far right in the 1950s remained Oswald Mosley (1896–1980), but he was now a political veteran who had lost much of his legendary messianic zeal. The postwar political resurrection of Mosley and his Union Movement had already been thwarted by 1950 and what is more, as Tyndall recalls, he was ‘immediately put off by the Union Movement’s policy of union with Europe.²