Obituary: Tony Hancock, rightwing "practical idealist"

Tony Hancock died Monday, June 11, 2012 in Sussex, England. He had been in the hospital for three weeks following a stroke. He was 65 and is survived by his children Robert and Lucy and his life companion Corinne.

Most American activists will probably not have known Tony but regardless of whether you knew him or not, all of us have lost a true friend.

I first met Tony in 1974 when he came to Atlanta on business. We "clicked" at once. He was a close and faithful friend for almost four decades.

Tony followed in the footsteps of his father Alan Hancock.

Alan was a follower of Sir Oswald Mosley. When Britain declared war on Germany, Alan volunteered for the service and thereby avoided joining some 14,000 other British patriots who were arrested and jailed without charges during the war by orders of Winston Churchill.

After the "victory", Alan married a German woman from Heidelberg - ironically a Quaker and a pacifist - and returned to Britain.

He was one of the defendants in the first "hate" prosecutions in the 1950s in which he was acquitted . . . which led the System to begin its series of improvements to its "hate" laws to make it ever more difficult for an accused person to be acquitted.

In the wake of World War II it was extremely difficult for movement activists and organizations to print their materials in "free" Great Britain. Most printers would not accept such customers. The rare printer who did would soon be exposed by minority racists and the media and visited by security police. Such attentions would bring a quick halt to printing jobs for thought-criminal customers.

Alan Hancock started a regular, commercial printing business and solicited work from movement sources. His rule was that the company would print material for any movement figure without regard to movement quarrels and would do so at standard rates.

The Hancocks' printing company became the principal printer not only for Britons but for many other countries in the "free" world.

As Alan aged Tony took over the business and ran it until his death.

It was Tony who produced the pioneer work on Holocaust revisionism "Did Six Million Really Die?"

The Historical Review Press became a prime source of books on all manner of subjects including Holocaust revisionism, Jewish supremacy, racial differences, alternative monetary systems and others.

These activities did not go unnoticed and led to many assaults upon the Hancocks, the print shop and their hotel . . . both literal assaults and legal assaults.

A group of Jewish thugs attacked Tony's mother when she was alone staffing their hotel and left her lying unconscious in a pool of blood.

The print shop itself was burned down by a Jewish arsonist in 1980 to the glee of the marxist Jew Gerry Gable of Searchlight ill-fame.

Tony was repeatedly prosecuted for "hate" but was successful in defeating all prosecutions.

Tony described himself as a "practical idealist" when I first met him in 1974. The wisdom of this conception was immediately apparent and I have strived in my own lifetime to be a practical idealist.

Tony loved England and he loved his particular part of England - Sussex. He was a great guide in driving friends around Sussex and nearby areas of England to show them obscure but fascinating ancient markers or to take them to sample obscure and almost extinct examples of Sussex cuisine.

He had a mordant sense of humor as exemplified in his glee in taking me to the pyramid gravemarker of John Fuller, a Member of Parliament from Sussex who had ridden hard through a driving rain to get to London in order to cast his vote against abolition of African slavery.

Tony was not an easy man . . . not a back-slapping get-along-go-along fraternity boy type. He could be very difficult. He held to his beliefs with the tenacity of the classic British bulldog. He could be wearisome in his lectures about the glories of Gold.

But he was good as Gold.

Every time I have flown into Great Britain - with the exception of when I flew into Shannon and was met by my distant cousins from Ulster - Tony was waiting at the airport to meet me.

I just can't believe he is dead.

Our people do not understand yet what they owe to people like Tony Hancock. But we know. And we remember.

Tony was profoundly anti-Christian and his death is appropriately marked by his pagan beliefs: "Whither takest thou me, Warrior Maiden? To Walhalla, to the War-Father."

S.G.D.