At a time when gun ownership was far more lax than today, a group of fascists set about stockpiling a vast arms cache. However, with a little help from a British Movement insider, the police operation into their activities led to arrests and convictions. Martyn Lester looks back on the events

Forty-five years ago this autumn, police bomb squad officers investigating an incendiary attack in Birmingham carried out – with help from other units and forces – a number of raids in the West Midlands and West Mercia, in which they discovered not only evidence related to the firebombing but a cache of dozens of guns.

Seven individuals were arrested and charged with a variety of offences.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the media ignored the case, but it did not cause quite the stir it would today. Younger readers will perhaps not be fully aware that the possession of handguns was legal back in 1979, albeit under a licensing regime, so stories headlined “Man has collection of guns” were not quite the red flag they would be now.

What this does not really excuse, though, is the media’s lack of follow-through, at the time of the arrests, in questioning the “who” rather than the “what” of the alleged offences. As far as we know, Searchlight was the only publication in the country to report to its readers that four of the seven men arrested were known neo-nazis – British Movement (BM) and National Front (NF) activists – a mainstream media oversight that still seems extraordinary to this day.

The conspiracy did not come to trial for more than a year, but when it did Birmingham Crown Court heard some hair-raising details.

The case began, ostensibly, as an investigation into an attack on a Job Centre in Birmingham, where a lighted smoke cartridge was pushed through the letterbox and “Jobs for Whites” was spray-painted on the door. In saying “ostensibly”, we do not mean that the attack was not properly investigated, but that behind the bomb squad raids lay an intelligence operation by Birmingham Special Branch, who had (if only after forceful prompting by a worried informant) accepted that local fascist Rod Roberts (top right) was stockpiling weapons.

Nazi host

Roberts, a technician at the Birmingham University Medical School, was sufficiently highly regarded by the BM to have been entrusted with providing lodgings (in his own flat) for David Duke when the Ku Klux Klan leader visited the UK in March 1978. The same flat was used, on 20 April 1979, to host a joint BM and NF celebration of Adolf Hitler’s birthday.

Police arrived at the party after a neighbour reported that men wearing uniforms and armbands were waving a gun on the flat’s balcony (it turned out to be a replica).

That August Roberts was again entrusted with babysitting duties, this time for German neo-nazi Manfred Roeder, who had fled his homeland after being given a prison sentence and was in the UK illegally. Birmingham Special Branch were aware of this, but by this time they were running an observation operation on Roberts over possible firearms offences, and opted to ignore Roeder rather than show their hand and give Roberts a chance to cover his tracks over the more serious crimes.

Police arrests

The police finally made their move at the end of October, acting on intelligence that Roberts and fellow BM member Harvey Stock (bottom right) were the men behind the Birmingham Job Centre attack. (Hilariously, it later emerged that the two had set out to attack the city’s Race Relations offices but failed to find them, and hit the Job Centre rather than go home totally thwarted – thus giving the impression of being two men who couldn’t locate their own arses using both hands and a set of wing mirrors.)

Raids on the two men’s homes unearthed thousands of racist stickers and, in Roberts’ flat, an illegally held Mauser pistol. Encouraged by the latter find, the police engaged the help of their West Mercia counterparts, who raided the farm of Roberts’ parents near Worcester. Buried in a pigsty they found a large cache of weapons, including a Sten-style submachine gun, 10 rifles of various types, well over a dozen pistols and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

The bulk of the charges – and later the punishment – fell on Roberts. He pleaded guilty to 10 charges of weapons possession and one of arson. At two further trials, he pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to acquire the Mauser and conspiracy to incite racial hatred. Both juries found him guilty. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.

Three of the seven men convicted in the case do not seem to have been politically motivated, merely opportunist criminals lured by money.

Like Roberts, two of them were imprisoned. Jon Stokes was sentenced to two years after pleading guilty to five charges of theft from his employers, local gun makers Webley and Scott. And Reginald Cox, who was the manager of a firearms dealer, went down for three years for a mixture of firearms crimes and sexual offences against minors. Part-time firearms dealer Ian Gilmore got off more lightly, with a suspended sentence.

Lenient sentences

From the perspective of 2024, what readers will probably find difficult to swallow is how leniently Roberts’ three fellow fascists were treated.

Like Roberts, Stock pleaded guilty to the Job Centre incendiary attack. And, like Roberts, he was found to be in possession of thousands of stickers, described as “mostly of the ‘Pull a trigger on a n****r’, ‘Death to n****er loving white slags’ and ‘Asian shit get out of Britain or die’ variety”. In his home, police found copies of the US nazi paper Stormer, with paperwork naming him as an approved UK distributor of the paper.

As well as being a BM member, Stock was a former NF press officer who had lost his post following a Searchlight exposé about him selling KKK and nazi material. On top of his uncontested arson charge, the jury found Stock guilty of conspiracy to incite racial hatred. The judge gave him a suspended sentence.

Another of the politically motivated conspirators, fanatical nazi Robert Giles, who was a member both of BM and the National Socialist Party UK, pleaded guilty to carrying an offensive weapon (a flick-knife). He was found guilty by the jury of conspiring with Roberts to obtain the Mauser pistol. In a statement to the police, he referred to “my führer, Adolf Hitler” and allegedly denounced the police operation as a “typically Jewish-inspired plot”. He, too, received a suspended sentence.

The fourth politically motivated defendant, NF member Harold Simcox, was found guilty of two charges of illegally possessing firearms, and again received a suspended sentence.

Searchlight intel

In the light of the robust, no‑nonsense sentences being handed out in the wake of Southport-related riots, the fact that four of the defendants in this case did not serve so much as a day behind bars, despite pleading or being found guilty, probably seems astonishing. But what we are looking at, through the telescope of time, is not two-tier but two‑era policing.

It was a time when neo-nazis could (and definitely did) join perfectly legal pistol and rifle shooting clubs, and when the new Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was under pressure to repeal the Race Relations Act. It was a time when it did not, sadly, feel all that surprising that judges would hand out suspended sentences to gun‑toting fascists.

As a final thought, what we did not, for obvious reasons, report at the time was that the police operation pivoted on intelligence supplied by (yes, you can tick it off on your bingo card) a fearless Searchlight mole in the BM. But his story must wait for another day …