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Author: Matthews Collins | Date: September 1998
How an ordinary young man turned to fascism … and back Matthews Collins became involved with the the poison of racism and fascism while still in his early teens, growing up in what is rapidly becoming known as London’s “Deep South”. Though bright, he had a self destructive streak in those formative years; this made fascism attractive to him and many of his peer group.
He made his way from the National Front, where he had been a full-time office manager, into the British National Party and finally into Combat 18, when it was first formed. The C18 connection brought him to the politics of the gun and sectarian loyalist paramilitaries.
Yet he contained within himself a spark of decency, and as he left his teens for adulthood this flared into a blazing sense of wrongness and disgust at his earlier activities and ideas. His participation in an organised very violent nazi attack on a peaceful meeting held at Welling Library, which had been called to protest against the opening of the BNP headquarters in Welling, was the final straw.
Shortly afterwards he approached Searchlight. His first contacts were anonymous, telephoning us with up-to-date early warnings of planned nazi actions. Then came face-to-face meetings and from them developed a comradeship and friendship that we hope will sustain him for the rest of his life. His motivation was never money, but a desire to do the right thing.
When he heard about the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry he offered to return to Britain from abroad to give evidence on oath about some of the violence he had seen, taken part in and become disgusted with during his active days with the far right. It is an experience that cannot be divorced from the murders of Rolan Adams, Rohit Duggal and Stephen Lawrence, victims of youngsters inspired and motivated by groups such as the BNP and NF.
When I was in my teens, the black American rap group Public Enemy released an album titled Fear of a Black Planet. That summed it up for me, fear of a black Britain. There I was, sitting snidely in the back of the classroom, underachieving and making racist comments.
Out of favour at home and at school, by the time I was 16 I was underachieving on street corners with the newspapers of hate under my arm, a mouth full of obscenity and a pocket full of lint. How I wished my mother would not iron my jeans with a crease down the middle, my father was not Irish, that the world was still flat. The pace of modern life was too fast and I couldn’t keep up. How I yearned for the times I never had. The times I never knew and the life I never had; a life no one ever had. “Empty vessels make the most noise", my old schoolteacher used to say. Someone filled mine up like a balloon and pricked it.
Greenwich council provided me with the standard comprehensive education, though my school prided itself on being an achiever with its limited resources. Perhaps it was The Milkman of Human Kindness kind of schooling, but I wasted any talent I may have had on the football field for a life on the terraces, ejected from my first football match at 15. Society and me had become bosom companions in making me a very suitable recruit for Britain’s far right.
It was always going to be a race war, the race war that the National Front or the British National Party would start that would save Britain. One more racial murder would tip the scales; one murder would break the camel’s back. One more death would divide a community and split a nation, be the victim black or white. Those who murdered Stephen Lawrence may not have been paid-up members, but south London was where the jackboot tramped. We tramped from Welling, marching into Eltham, up and down the very streets of southeast London where I lived for 21 years. Onto the estates, into the pubs, and schools, we marched and graffitied and stickered for three solid years after the BNP opened their office in Welling, next door but for a strip of road, to Greenwich.
I joined the NF instead of the BNP but had Wagnerian afternoons in the BNP headquarters in Upper Wickham Lane, Welling, with my hero, Richard Edmonds. Edmonds promised me that the spirit of Adolf Hitler, once reborn, would clothe and feed me. The BNP headquarters served as his office and home. His kitchen-cum-bathroom, was filled with the filth the NF could not afford to stock or give away. The BNP gave me a flea in the ear every time I said I would not join until my NF membership ran out, and then I’d rejoin the NF again. Those days seem heady now, when I sat so full of expectation about the coming white revolution, just waiting, waiting for it all to happen.
We believed that when Parliament inevitably failed we would be there with the solution, with Her Majesty on the line. It’s always around the corner and always has been, could we not try a little harder? “Arbeit Macht Frei”, the BNP always used to say to themselves, it was “Work Makes you Free”. It was only a year ago I realised that was what they put above the Nazi death camps during the war.
My introduction to Nazi violence came not long after my introduction to the movement. With great foresight, Greenwich Action Committee Against Racist Attacks predicted that the presence of the BNP office in Welling would lead to an increase of violent and racist attacks in the area. Both the BNP and NF had stood in Greenwich during the 1987 general election using high profile candidates and holding volatile and violent election meetings. Two years later, the BNP used the presence of what must be considered an incompetent council in Bexley to break planning by-laws and open a headquarters there within a stone’s throw from Eltham, and begin its assault on the local communities there.
We let the opposition know what to expect when a group of 40 BNP and NF members attacked a public meeting in Welling library. Some attackers protected their faces with motorcycle helmets, while they waded into a frail audience with hammers and pieces of wood. One of the most violent attackers was Derek Beackon, who then went on to be the BNP’s national hero after winning the Millwall seat during the Isle of Dogs council election three years later. The ferocity of the attack on the library drew widespread condemnation from all community groups, but to the BNP it became a focus for celebration and elevation. The BNP were able to attack a meeting in broad daylight, inflict injuries on its occupants to the point where one person dived through a window, leave the library and head to a local pub to celebrate its result.
The feeling was that their presence in Welling was allowing the BNP to make cross border raids into the places it really wanted to go, Eltham, Thamesmead and Woolwich. These places comprised large working class communities housed in council estates and an already violent youth culture. The Battle of Welling Library became BNP folklore and the press cuttings reporting the carnage, 12 innocent people taken to hospital, took pride of place on the wall of the BNP headquarters next to those pictures of Le Pen, Hitler and our own publications’ reports of “Nationalists Thrashing Labourites”. How we would chuckle about our violent intrusion into the meeting being held in “our” Welling, while Tony Lecomber bragged about stamping on the face of the Greenwich Labour councillor Geoff Dixon, who threw his body in our path to protect the occupants of the hall, mainly women and the elderly.
South London was almost a distraction for the BNP throughout the late eighties and the start of the nineties. It was the dessert, while the East End of London was its main course. In March 1990 a white teenager called John Stoner was stabbed by an Asian fellow pupil in the melting pot of Bethnal Green, where the BNP and NF held ritual paper sales every Sunday. The local press made great play of the problems in the area, and the BNP launched a near national campaign, continually swamping the place at weekends for huge and violent drinking binges from Friday through to Sunday.
After Stoner was stabbed, the BNP’s national organiser slammed the local paper from the East End down on his desk and swore revenge against those “Pakis” that lived in fear in the area. The BNP started up a “Rights for Whites” campaign. This meant flooding the area seven days a week with its members and literature in groups up to 20 strong trawling the tower blocks and estates with leaflets and stickers, mostly crude and handwritten, attempting to make Stoner a martyr. There were stories that after the BNP had gone home, gangs of white youths fuelled by alcohol and cheap literature roamed the area attacking Asians.
Every time I would sit down with Edmonds for tea with powdered milk, the cuttings were thrust before me for my approval. On a Rights for Whites march on the Stoner issue (which Stoner himself refused to attend, although his foster grandfather and a family member, Conrad Happe, did and Happe went on to become active with both the BNP and Combat 18) Edmonds turned to a small crowd of people and excitedly yelled, “The East End is turning Nazi”. Later in a pub just off Bethnal Green, whose staff had attended the march, a black man walked in and asked for directions to Whitechapel. He was grabbed and thrown against a fruit machine by Bob Jarvis and kicked repeatedly until he left the pub. The crowd of drinkers gave rapturous applause for his actions. Jarvis was typical of the law-abiding BNP members; he normally preferred to kick policemen when they were down and injured.
Rights for Whites had a strong East End focus, but in Welling and south London the BNP could not fail to make headlines by its mere existence. Not a day went past without some publicity somewhere, about the BNP office-cum-bunker. It was almost as if 154 Upper Wick-ham Lane was a local institution, like a sordid old brothel people would rather not talk about.
When Rolan Adams was murdered in Thamesmead in 1991 just up the road from the BNP HQ, the BNP marched in the area in the face of stiff local opposition, bringing with them large numbers from the East End, shipped in to cleanse the surrounding area of opposition. In the run-up to the march Edmonds showered in his kitchen then showed me the local press. “We’re not causing a race war here. It was already here, we’re just defending the local whites, he [Adams] was just another nigger with a pen knife.” No laughs, no smiles. To the BNP it was a fact. The Thamesmead march was more aggressive and better attended than the BNP had hoped it would be.
In 1991 I gave an interview at the Blue Market in Bermondsey to a Canadian TV crew. Edmonds went first, for the BNP, and I went second for the NF. I told the camera: “This is all I will ever have,” the director shouted “cut” and I consigned my life to the dust-bin of history. The National Black Caucus marched that afternoon between lines of flats, protesting about racism in the borough. (There had been an increase in racist attacks since the BNP and NF had started to campaign in the area in anticipation of a general election.) The BNP had 40 people to counter-demonstrate and the NF a dozen.
The week before the BNP had taken 20 people onto the estates near where the march was to pass, and distributed leaflets calling on white people to defend their community. This near all-white neighbourhood, so white, that the head of C18 chose to live there, was ripe for racist propaganda. I don’t remember how many people were at the counter demonstration, but it was not 52; it was several hundred angry white faces. This was the first time I had ever seen white people angry about something, so angry they missed Millwall playing Sunderland that day to tell the National Black Caucus to go home. It was almost as if the locals did not like the BNP telling them blacks were calling them racists, so they joined the BNP-led protest.
The angry mob broke through police lines and chased the marchers into a park where they considerably outnumbered them. The huge army attacked people in the park, black and white, and threw bananas at the marchers. As we swelled against police lines, the police looked us in the eye and begged us not to attack. “Please stand back, come on fellas give us room,” they pleaded, but it was useless. There was a Mexican stand-off for a while before the marchers were shepherded out of the area and the racists began to pelt them and the police with pieces of wood and stones. When the press came to photograph the crowd, it was the 52 fascists that stood in front of the cameras, almost as if to protect the racists behind them and definitely to claim responsibility.
Marchers burnt the union flag that day in a act of incredible stupidity while the racists howled and chased the march and fought with the police. For over two hours after the march, hundreds of young men, some in their thirties, fought running battles with the police, overturning cars and smashing windows. For an hour, the police and the protesters were almost face to face, with the BNP leaders standing at the front screaming “Hang Winston Silcott”. When the rocks flew over their heads and into the police ranks the BNP decamped, having created lawlessness for an afternoon, the ramifications of which would be felt for months to come. The main victims of the BNP-NF-led mob had been local black people taking the air in the park or trying to drive through the battlefield their streets had become. Asian shopkeepers found their properties looted and smashed.
The BNP rubbed their hands and chuckled, waiting for the news to make them more infamous. It never came, only in the Independent on Sunday, which showed a large photograph with a small story about local people attacking a black motorist who was helpless to defend himself. The BNP cut it out and pasted it to their office wall proclaiming “We need more of that let’s get these people really pissed off” and headed all over south London, in the knowledge that their work was already done in the East End, where their popularity was high and they were polling around the 5% mark in parliamentary elections, and up to nearly 30% in council elections. The same photograph, taken in Germany perhaps, would have been front-page news on any other day. The police refused to accept the area had a problem
In 1992 the BNP staged what they thought was their biggest coup yet. They held their annual rally on council property in Bethnal Green, bringing hundreds of race haters into one of London’s most multicultural areas on Saturday afternoon. “Welcome to the Nuremberg Rally Bethnal Green style”, Edmonds exclaimed to me on entering York Hall. The BNP had sealed off one of the exits from Bethnal Green tube station that led to the building and were only allowing known fascists to pass through their security team, resplendent in BNP armbands, similar to those of the German SA. It was no coincidence and was mildly amusing. One very young devout Catholic and antisemite had the real McCoy, removing it under protest with the promise he could wear it again once inside the hall.
The size of membership of the BNP should never be overestimated; it was only around 1,000 paid-up members, even back then in its pre-C18 prime. It was strange then that the leader of the BNP, John Tyndall, should act so detached from the membership as if he was the head of a mass movement. In fact, he gave the same air of detachment as his mentor Hitler had in his prime. Tyndall sat alone and silent in his thoughts, not entering into conversations or small talk throughout the lazy proceedings. The bar was full of rowdy drinkers all afternoon, while in the hall a few faithful listened to those who struggled through their regional reports to howls of derision from those in the bar, whose talent was for violence not debate.
The whole annual rally idea was just playing politics, without the voting or dissent seen at conferences of the major political parties. Skinheads sold t-shirts emblazoned with swastikas and the names of nazi rock bands, and gave away illegal stickers from the US that broke every race relations law in the UK. When Tyndall rose to speak at the end of the proceedings, the bar emptied out onto the floor, and the audience was whipped into a frenzy by chants of “Leader, Leader! Leader!” which turned into foot-stomping in time to “Führer, Führer, Führer”. Not once did Tyndall, or anyone, wince with embarrassment. We were amongst friends, and the armbands were back on as Tyndall’s voice rose then crashed down like a wave on the throng still chanting and stomping. Nobody remembered what Tyndall had said or cared. No one told anyone leaving the hall to behave, or stay out of trouble. The batteries were charged, plans redrawn. We were moving south. After we left the meeting and the cold air hit my face, the steward at the tube station told me “The East End is turning nazi”.
For these three and a half crucial years between 1989 and 1993 I had been working under cover for Searchlight. At first I was an anonymous caller giving times and places of forthcoming nazi events or naming the really violent hard men in the fascist camp.
Soon I was meeting members of the Searchlight team on a regular basis for debriefings and briefings. They appeared impressed by the fact that like other youngsters who had cut their political teeth on the far right, I had become sickened by the hate, violence and the bunch of losers I was mixing with. I was not coming back into the real world for money or through any major political change but probably I had just grown up.
These years were good, with many coups scored against the nazis and their friends, including a leading Fleet Street journalist. More important than anything else was my presence when Combat 18 was in its embryonic state and my shift into the very dangerous waters of loyalist paramilitary politics on the mainland.
From late 1989 to 1993 I was able to pass on information on the core hard men and was responsible for the first World in Action programme exposing C18. I was an eyewitness to one of C18’s most vicious early attacks in Tower Hamlets, in which they were ably assisted by leading BNP officers such as Richard Edmonds and many of the party’s key activists.
In April 1993 three men from Special Branch turned up at my place of work. As a result of pressure from them and the growing chance that the UDA might soon have a bullet with my name on it, I decided, in conjunction with Searchlight, to move on and set up abroad. Time, of course, has revealed that C18 was in fact a honey trap creation of the Secret Services and it is clear in retrospect that my work with Searchlight was getting in their way, so I had to go one way or another.
Shortly before this, some BNP/C18 members had gone to Catford to attack a pub full of people who had witnessed one of their own members stabbing another near to death in order to scare them off from testifying. I did not hide because I could not, everybody knew me, and I knew them. It all seemed pointless. Had they driven past Stephen Lawrence they might have wound down their windows and shouted an obscenity. They would never have stopped to get out of the car and physically harm him, when all the leaflets and stickers they had put up could have given an impetus to somebody else to do it for them.
From the actions I had witnessed, carried out by the organised racists in the BNP and NF along with their racist youthful supporters in southeast London, I knew that youngsters like Rolan Adams, Rohit Duggal and Stephen Lawrence would be the victims of organised yet mindless violence in London’s Deep South.
© Searchlight Magazine 1998