How and why the National Front began its march to the Cenotaph

Posted by admin978 on November 13, 2022 · Leave a Comment

Today military veterans, politicians, religious leaders and other VIPs will lay wreaths at the Cenotaph in Whitehall, and at other war memorials throughout the United Kingdom, in memory of the men and women from Britain and her Empire who gave their lives during the wars of the 20th and 21st centuries.

More than half a century ago, in the early days of the National Front, the NF began a tradition of holding a separate march to the Cenotaph, followed by a wreath-laying ceremony. Ill-informed observers might think that this was in poor taste – an attempt by the NF to politicise an event that ought to be above politics.

In fact the opposite is the case.

***A.K. Chesterton, who later became founding Chairman of the National Front***

The NF under its founding chairman A.K. Chesterton (who had himself been awarded the Military Cross for his actions during the Battle of Épehy in September 1918) began this tradition not in order to exploit it for partisan purposes, but as a response to the late 1960s’ Labour government’s politicisation of Remembrance Sunday.

Ever since Remembrance commemorations began in 1919, they had always been a memorial not only to servicemen and women from the British Isles, but from the whole of the British Empire.

After the Rhodesian government of Prime Minister Ian Smith declared independence in 1965, Harold Wilson’s Labour government in London employed a range of vindictive policies (including economic sanctions) aiming to force the Rhodesians into submission.

This Rhodesian postcard was recently unearthed by propagandopolis.com who suggested it was issued soon after UDI, but H&D suspects it dates from the summer of 1967 when Rhodesians and British patriots began to organise defiance of the British government’s ban on their presence at the Cenotaph.

Eventually this included banning Rhodesian veterans from Remembrance Sunday events at the Cenotaph. (There had already for more than twenty years been a calculated decision to shun veterans of Britain’s 1945-48 war against Jewish terrorists. British Palestine veterans were not banned from the Cenotaph, but until very recent years they were given no official recognition and had to organise their own memorial events.)

Not only Rhodesians themselves, but their comrades from across the Empire (including the British Isles) were outraged by this insult.

Future Rhodesian Prime Minister Ian Smith, seen here in 1943 as a young RAF officer, suffered serious injuries during the Second World War. Yet in the late 1960s Britain’s left-wing government banned Smith and other Rhodesians from the Cenotaph ceremony.

H&D‘s assistant editor Peter Rushton has recently discovered letters from the 1960s which explain how pro-Rhodesian Britons (including several very well known war heroes) planned their response in defiance of the Labour Party – a response which eventually led to the NF beginning its tradition of marching to the Cenotaph.

The full story will be told in the January edition of Heritage and Destiny.

Today H&D readers will join British and Commonwealth citizens around the world in remembering the dead of 20th and 21st century wars – regardless of their political views and regardless of which part of the Empire they came from, we will remember them.