andy bell

The anti-fascist magazine, Searchlight, is celebrating its 50th anniversary and to mark the occasion has produced a final, bumper, 72-page issue before it migrates completely online. It’s a fabulous read, and I urge everyone to buy it. Each of its surviving editors down through the years have written about how, and why, they became involved, and their outstanding memories. This is my contribution:

It was a September evening in 1976 that I knocked on the front door of Maurice Ludmer’s house in Moseley, Birmingham, and offered my services to Searchlight.

I already knew Maurice; at the time I was a member of the Oxford Anti-Fascist Committee and had been delegated to liaise with Maurice, who earlier that year had launched Searchlight magazine, and brief the committee on the activities of the far right.

After a particularly lively encounter with the NF’s ‘Honour Guard’ outside Oxford Town Hall in May of that year I had travelled to Birmingham to share with Maurice a thick collection of photos we had taken of the NF thugs who attacked our demonstration.

Maurice met me at New St station with a couple of handy-looking chaps who were obviously there to make sure everything was above board. As we drove to his office one of them – I found out later a former 62 Group member – carefully thumbed through the photos. When he got to the end, he handed them back. ‘Second eleven’ was all he said. ‘Wow’ I thought. ‘These guys are serious’.

When I turned up at his house, having moved to Birmingham in 1976, he ushered me into the ridiculously cluttered back room which served as an office, navigable only be him, and for the next three years I worked closely alongside him.

I accompanied him to Labour Party and TUC conferences, and on his monthly trips to the magazine’s printers in Nottingham.

When I became the editor of the Aston University student union newspaper, the Birmingham Sun in 1978, I suggested to him that the team of volunteer journalists producing the Sun could probably do a better – and cheaper – job with the design and layout of the magazine.

So, for the next year or more, Maurice would bring the typeset ‘galleys’ and piles of pictures into the Sun production office once a month where a group of irreverent, politically-motivated, ANL-supporting student journalists put it all lovingly together.

In 1979 I moved to London for work and met, for the first time, the anti-fascist legend that is Gerry Gable. Other members of the Sun production team had also moved south and we carried on the production arrangement, meeting up every month at the Searchlight office and assembling the magazine.

The only reward was dinner – usually at a Turkish restaurant nearby – at the end of the evening. When Maurice died, tragically young in 1981, Vron Ware took over as editor and when she left in 1983, Gerry Gable asked me to take on the job. There was no way I was going to say no, and I did it in my spare time for the next six years.

But the intervening years had been, well, interesting. The highlight was undoubtedly working alongside Ray Hill, as he wrought havoc in the far right between 1979 and 1984.

I was in the Searchlight office in 1981 – before I became editor – on the day Ray phoned in with the deranged nazi Tony Malski’s travel plans to go to France to pick up detonators for a bomb attack on the Notting Hill Carnival.

Gerry and I just looked at each other and (contrary to the belief of some idiots) not having a hotline to MI5, we knew we had to work out a way of getting the information to the authorities.

In the end it went via a journalist we trusted who had a connection to the MI5 liaison officer at HM Customs and Excise. Shortly afterwards a posh, bearded chap in a Barbour jacket turned up, ‘from the Home Office’ to collect a memo we had prepared.

Then I worked on the film about Ray, which was broadcast by Channel 4 in March1984, travelling with him and Gerry to Paris where, wired for sound, he did the rounds of his far-right contacts – including some highly dangerous terrorists – gathering evidence about their activities.

And I was in the West London pub, playing pool with Gerry, when Ray later met Malski and got him to confess on tape to his involvement in the Notting Hill plot.

The fascists both in the UK and Europe were utterly shell shocked when they found out what he had been up to, and it was years before they recovered from the sense of betrayal and mistrust which plagued them as a result. 

The ultimate privilege was being asked to co-write Ray’s biography. We stayed firm friends till his death in 2022, and I was with him only days before he left us.

My tour of duty as editor came to an end in 1989, when I joined ITV’s investigative programme, World In Action, and doing both jobs was simply unsustainable.

#But the connection wasn’t broken and with Gerry and others from Searchlight I helped produce, over the next decade or so, several major television documentaries about the far right, including the WIA investigations into Combat 18.

The magazine took up an awful lot of my time in those earlier years – but it was worth every single second.

You can buy the 50th anniversary issue from the Searchlight website: https://www.searchlightmagazine.com/