The members of Column 88 undertook military training under the supervision of a former Royal Marine Commando, and also held regular gatherings attended by neo-Nazis from all over Europe.
[2] The founders of this more organised group had been followers of Colin Jordan, who had become disillusioned with their former leader after he began to moderate his public utterances in the wake of the 1965 and 1968 Race Relations Acts.
[7] The group's military commander was Major Ian Souter Clarence,[2][8] who had served in the Black Watch during the Second World War before becoming active as a supporter of Arnold Leese.
[10] One such camp, held in November 1975 in conjunction with the League of St George, was reported in the well known UK anti-fascist Searchlight magazine where those in attendance included Brian Baldwin, a prison officer from Manchester, and Peter Marriner, the head of the British Movement in Birmingham.
[12] Indeed, following a World in Action report in 1981 detailing British Democratic Party attempts at gun-running, Vaughan and Column 88 temporarily went into abeyance for fear of becoming implicated.
Chesterton, who had established the National Front, wrote in one of his final letters to John Tyndall expressing his concerns that NF members were becoming involved in Column 88.
[25] In 1983 Column 88 hit the headlines again when the press reported that Clarence had been "safe-housing" three German neo-Nazis terrorists Odfried Hepp, Ulrich Tillmann and Walter Kexel, who were wanted for bomb attacks on US Army bases in Germany.