Carl Harley: 70+ years in British nationalism!

Carl Harley (1930-2020)

We greatly regret to inform readers that H&D‘s second-eldest subscriber Carl Harley died on Saturday 22nd February, aged 89.

Carl Harley, who lived in Highgate, North London, was a long-standing H&D subscriber. He was not afraid to put his hand in his pocket, and sent H&D a donation a couple of times to help us keep going.

Cattle die, and kinsmen die,
And so one dies oneself;
One thing I know that never dies:
The fame of a dead man’s deeds.

We are grateful to Bill Baillie of the Nation Revisited and European Outlook blogs for this memory of Carl Harley’s lifelong commitment to our cause, first published in 2016.

Carl Harley – the man who recruited John Bean

I first encountered Carl Harley and John Bean at a National Labour Party meeting in Trafalgar Square in 1959. I was there as a schoolboy, on a bicycle, with my mate Paul Barnes. But I didn’t get to know them properly until the BNP camp held in Norfolk in 1962.

Carl Harley was born in Greenwich on 26 June 1930. He was a member of the Mosley Book Club in 1947 and joined Union Movement on its foundation in 1948. He did his National Service in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps from 1948 to 1950. When he came out of the army he was appointed organiser of the Lewisham branch of Union Movement, where he signed up a young man called John Bean before going to Manchester to help Jeffrey Hamm.

He fondly remembers his old comrades; Alexander Raven Thomson, Victor Burgess, Peter Lesley-Jones and Pat Dunigan; but he disliked Alf Flockhart. In 1958 he joined John Bean’s National Labour Party which merged with Colin Jordan’s White Defence League in 1960 to form the British National Party. In 1962 Colin Jordan broke away to form the National Socialist Movement. Carl tried to persuade John Tyndall to stay with the BNP but he decided to join Colin Jordan. Thirty-five years later, whilst writing to thank Carl for a donation, JT acknowledged his mistake.

Carl was a founder member of the National Front in 1967. He followed Andrew Fountaine into the NF Constitutional Movement in 1979. The NFCM was absorbed into John Tyndall’s British National Party in 1984. Carl stayed with the BNP until John Tyndall was ousted as leader in 1999.

Today he subscribes to Heritage and Destiny and keeps in touch with old friends all over the world. When I interviewed him for this article he was reading Jewish Supremacism by David Duke.

Carl Harley was not an armchair patriot. He was an organiser of branches, a public speaker, a builder of platforms and scenery, a painter of banners, a printer and distributor of leaflets, a campfire cook, a writer of letters, a security guard, a receptionist and a willing helper. I am glad to call him my friend.

As BNP members pose outside their Princedale Rd headquarters, Carl Harley is busy upstairs cleaning the windows.

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