62 Group

History

“Gerry Gable was a YCL member at the time, although I don’t think he was in it for very long, and he told us that there were car-loads of youths going around picking on young Jews in Stamford Hill. He was involved with some Jewish blokes in the Stoke Newington area, who had got together like us to do something about the problem. We had a number of meetings together, men, women, immigrants, Jews, communists and other left-wingers. We decided that we would organise in the best way we could but we wouldn’t have an open, anybody can join as long as they had a party card CP type organisation. Everyone was pissed off with the CP by this time anyway. A few youngsters had gone around the area painting anti-fascist slogans on walls but they had been ordered to scrub them off because it lowered the tone of the struggle or something. We decided that we would organise amongst ourselves to kick the shit out of these local fascists. We weren’t going to have endless arguments and discussions. We would just do our best to find them, jump up and down on them and then go home. We didn’t bother with a name for the group at this stage, but it was at these meetings that the 62 Group was born.”

“There were all sorts of people involved in the 62 Group. The background of many of the people involved was CP, people associated with the CP, some people from the left of the Labour Party and a group of young Jews from Stamford Hill. There was I suppose, even at this time, a distinction between what you might call the Marxist faction and the Zionist faction but this only became apparent as time went on. Most of the Jews couldn’t really be described as Zionists at this time but some of them turned into Zionists later. Of course there were a few, even then, who were already Zionists and who had served in the Israeli army. They were, again, very handy hard nuts, who were useful to have around when you were kicking shit out of the fascists. ”

“We also found an address over by Ball’s Pond Road, which was a light engineering business. The truck that they used for the business was also used to drag around Mosley’s supporters and paraphernalia, all the flags and banners and PA stuff. We emptied the oil sump, took the oil away and cut the oil pressure switch on the night before a meeting, so that it went down the road half a mile and seized up. The information had come from Gerry Gable and his lot, who had got somebody inside the organisation who was passing out information on addresses and meetings and so forth.”

“By 1963, the effects of organised anti-fascism were beginning to show. The UM no longer even bothered to pretend that they could operate publicly and withdrew completely from the street level political activity. After the retreat of the UM, the Yellow Star Movement (YSM) was rather directionless and began to fall apart. Its secretary, Olga Levertoff, died in the later part of the year. The Movement ran into financial difficulties. The 62 Group remained active, continued to oppose the smaller fascist groups, although their activities took on a more clandestine nature as the number of street confrontations dwindled. Tony Hall was still involved but was beginning to have doubts about some of his allies:

The Zionists always seemed to have a lot of money. They were getting money from somewhere, probably from sympathisers in Jewish industry. This was useful to us because they could provide things like transport, which we didn’t have or had very little of. Gerry Gable and his crowd also did a lot of the intelligence work, putting spies inside the Union Movement and so forth. It was off the back of this that the Searchlight newspaper was first set up. We felt that where we could still co-operate together on actions we would because we had a common enemy but, as things moved on in time and Israel increasingly became more of a client state of the United States, it became harder and harder. When I was young, Israel was all Kibbutzim and farmland and socialism but that didn’t last very long, and pretty soon it was in the hands of American imperialists and could best be described as the bastion of American imperialism in the Middle East. The final nail in the coffin came when we raided the headquarters of a bloke called Eddie Martell, who ran the Freedom Group. “This was a group of newspapers and political groups, which were all very anti-socialist. They ran a fleet of buses during the London bus strike and took part in a lot of anti-Trade Union activity. Someone found out that he had an office over a pub in Soho and a plan was devised to break in one night. The Zionists provided the transport again and we provided the muscle. Someone managed to get themselves locked into the building when it was shut up for the evening and came downstairs and unlocked it for us. We went in at about one o’clock in the morning and removed all the files. We had an agreement that we would remove them to a safe-house, where we would all get together after the dust had settled and go through it and see what information would be good for us all. We humped all this stuff over to a rented basement in West London and dumped it there with an agreement that we would all get together a couple of weeks later and go through it. One of our blokes smelt a rat. I’m not quite sure why but we went “back to this place about five days later and it had all gone. The Zionists had taken it all and we never saw it again. I don’t know if it was given to Special Branch or added to their own intelligence files but we were excluded. From then on, the relationship more or less broke down completely.”

“While the Marxist wing of the 62 Group faded from existence, what Tony Hall refers to as the ‘Zionist wing’ remained operative well into the early 1970s. The Intelligence Department of this wing of the 62 Group that had recruited informers and placed moles inside all the far-right groups from the very start formalised this role in 1963 by creating the Searchlight Association. The Searchlight Association had the twin aim of gathering intelligence and disseminating the information through its various contacts in the media. A Searchlight newspaper was published sporadically from 1965 to 1967, edited by two Labour MPs, first Reginald Freeson, then Joan Lestor.”

“The underground nature of 62 Group activities in the period after 1963 or thereabouts means that we’ll probably never know the full details of their escapades but John Tyndall accused the 62 Group of numerous alleged incidents in the April 1965 edition of Spearhead. These allegations include the raid on the Union Movement’s headquarters described by Tony Hall but also the breaking and entering of revisionist historian David Irving’s flat as well as continuing attacks on the BNP, the NSM, and Tyndall’s breakaway Greater Britain Movement (GBM).”

People

• Cyril Paskin – founder of the 62 Group
• Monty Goldman (also 43 Group)
• Harry Bidney (also 43 Group)
• Jules Konopinski (also 43 Group)
• Monty Pincus (also 43 Group)
• Maurice Essex
• Wally Levy
• Baron Moss –
• Maurice Ludmer editor of Searchlight.
• Philip Green – 62 Group leader
• Gerry Gable - Intelligence officer, later Searchlight
• Gerald Ronson - Fundraiser
• Mike Whine - Later Community Security Trust