A nostalgic post on Facebook yesterday, from Mark Cottrell (above, right), editor-in-chief of the self-styled nazi ‘intellectual’ rag, Heritage and Destiny:
“I was in Uckfield in East Sussex yesterday” he writes, “so it would have been rude not to pop by and have a look at the old Tony Hancock Print Shop, which was used by generations of nationalists for over 50 years, to print their magazines, newspapers, posters, stickers, leaflets and booklets. As you can see it’s now a Tyre and Exhaust fitting unit. Tony had many faults, but he was a staunch nationalist till the end (as his late father was too).”
Oh, please, let’s not stop there. Let’s do Mr Hancock’s ‘faults’ rather more justice than that.
Anthony Sandford Hancock (pictured, top left) was a lifelong neo-Nazi, antisemite, racist and holocaust revisionist. He and his father, Alan Hancock, ran a printing press in Uckfield, Sussex, which acted as printer to the fascist and neo-Nazi movement worldwide. It flooded the globe with some of the most vile nazi propaganda imaginable. Most notably, the notorious ‘Did 6 Million Really Die’ by ‘Richard Harwood?’ (aka Richard Verrall of the National Front) poured off Hancock’s presses in print runs of tens of thousands and in many languages to be distributed worldwide.
After an international Northern league meeting in Brighton in 1971 was broken up by the anti-fascist 62 Group it was Hancock who arranged for a local Jewish Chronicle journalist to be savagely beaten and left unconscious in the street in revenge.
Hancock’s international connections put him at the heart of some of the most evil nazi organisations operating at the time. He was the main UK contact for the neo-Nazi terrorists and fascists who plagued Europe with bomb attacks and other violent outrages in the early 1980s. It was at his Heidelburg Hotel in Brighton that Ray Hill, there as Hancock’s guest, was originally introduced to the French neo-Nazi terrorist who would in turn introduce him to the French nazis behind the plot to bomb the Notting Hill Carnival in 1981.
He was also the first point of contact for the fugitive Italian terrorists led by Roberto Fiore who arrived in the UK after the Bologna bombing of 1980. It was Hancock who first received them in Brighton and shipped them on to League of St George contacts in London who looked after them.
In 1989, he inherited the printing business and various properties worth over £1 million from his father, Alan Hancock, a pre-war Blackshirt who remained a lifelong Mosleyite and was one of the defendants in the notorious Lewes race relations trial in 1968. He apparently committed suicide in 1989 but, for years afterwards, son Anthony had to put up with persistent rumours on the far right that it was he who had hooked Hancock senior up to the mains supply at the print shop and despatched him to Valhalla.
An expensive libel action brought by his solicitor, and marriage to a woman who hated his politics but loved his riches, not to mention a gambling habit and some crazy investments in non-existent goldmines, meant that his fortune was soon wiped out. A successful legal action from former NF luminary Tom Acton, chasing considerable debts, did nothing to help and he died, skint, in 2012.
There was however, one bright moment early in this dark life. On 5th November 1980, outraged by what Hancock was up to in his printworks, a former member of the 62 Group, acting on his own initiative, drove down to Uckfield and burnt the place to the ground.
This is Searchlight’s full 2012 obituary for Hancock:
