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Colin Jordan

John Colin Campbell Jordan (19 June 1923 – 9 April 2009) was a leading figure in post-war neo-Nazism in the UK. In the far-right circles of the 1960s, Jordan represented the most explicitly Nazi inclination in his open use of the styles and symbols of Nazi Germany.

Biography[]

The son of a lecturer, Percy Jordan, and a teacher, Bertha Jordan, Jordan was educated at Warwick School from 1934 to 1942. During the Second World War he attempted to enlist in the Fleet Air Arm and the RAF, but, after failing the tests for both, he enlisted in the Royal Army Educational Corps. After being demobilised in 1946 he studied at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, graduating in 1949 with second class honours in history. The same year he became a teacher at Stoke Secondary Modern Boys School, Coventry, where he taught mathematics. In 1953, he received his M.A. He joined the League of Empire Loyalists and became its Midlands organiser. In 1962, Jordan founded the National Socialist Movement (renamed the British Movement in 1968) with John Tyndall as its leader. A meeting in Trafalgar Square on 2 July 1962 of supporters was disrupted by opponents, whom Jordan described as being "Jews and Communists", leading to a riot. He was dismissed by the board of governors of the Coventry school where he taught in August 1962 after a period of suspension that had begun after the events in Trafalgar Square. On 16 August Jordan and Tyndall, together with Martin Webster, Denis Pirie and Roland Kerr-Ritchie, were charged under the Public Order Act 1936 with attempting to set up a paramilitary force called the Spearhead, which was modelled on the SA of Nazi Germany. Undercover police observed Jordan leading the group in military manoeuvres. He was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment in October 1962. On 5 October 1963, while John Tyndall was still in prison, Jordan, who had just been released, married Tyndall's fiancée, Françoise Dior, the former wife of a French nobleman and the niece of the French fashion designer Christian Dior. This hasty marriage was ostensibly to prevent her deportation as an undesirable alien. When Tyndall was eventually released, the marriage caused friction, and he split with Jordan in 1964 to form the Greater Britain Movement. Jordan's marriage to Dior proved short-lived, though, and she announced the couple's separation in January 1964. She claimed that Jordan had become "bourgeois". In September 1972, Jordan was fined for disorderly behaviour at Heathrow Airport when, after protesting against the arrival of Ugandan Asians into Britain, he addressed airport staff through a loudspeaker, urging them to strike in protest against mass immigration from Uganda. Jordan reorganised the National Socialist Movement as the British Movement in 1968, but in 1974 he was obliged to step down from its leadership in favour of Michael McLaughlin. Jordan maintained ties to groups led by Eddy Morrison and Kevin Watmough, such as the White Nationalist Party and the British People's Party as well as the American National Socialist Workers Party. In 2000, he expressed scepticism over the efforts of the British National Party to soften its hard right stance. Jordan was back in court in 2001, after being charged with publishing racist literature, but the judge ruled that his serious heart condition made him unfit to stand trial. He dedicated his 2004 book The Uprising to the jailed white supremacists Richard Scutari and David Lane. Jordan and Julianne Safrany became life partners at some point after his divorce from Dior. The two were still together when Jordan died at his Pateley Bridge home on 9 April 2009.

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