The wife of an American army colonel lost her temper yesterday over remarks of a speaker at a meeting organized by the fascist Union Movement at Tunbridge Wells, Kent, and pushed the speaker off the platform.
Mrs. Daphne Rankin, whose brother was killed at Dunkirk during World War II, said “I felt so angry I just could not let him go on talking. ” Police stopped the meeting after Mrs. Rankin’s action, which was preceded by sustained heckling of the speaker and a shower of tomatoes and eggs. One man was arrested.
Meanwhile a spokesman for the Spearhead organization, the “elite corps” of the British National Socialist movement, said the organization was still operating and that a meeting of its members had been held last week “to boost morale. ” This was disclosed by Martin Webster, one of a committee of four of the neo-Nazis named to run the movement while leader Colin Jordan and three top lieutenants are in Jail on conviction of having violated the British Public Order Act by organizing Spearhead.
Webster said “certain actions have been called illegal, but Spearhead, as an organization is not illegal. We have not heard from the police that Spearhead must be dissolved.” Mrs. May Leese, 78-year-old widow of the notoriously anti-Semitic Arnold Leese, leader of the Imperial Fascist League, is one of the committee of four.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
