Gerry Gable obituary
Gerry Gable, who has died aged 88, was one of the most formidable and persistent figures in the postwar fight against fascism and the extreme right in the UK. He combined activism, investigative journalism and clandestine intelligence-gathering in a way that reshaped how anti-fascism was practised in Britain and far beyond. As the founder of Searchlight, the investigative anti-fascist magazine, he played a central role in exposing, disrupting and ultimately weakening generations of fascist and neo-Nazi organisations. Under Gerry’s stewardship, Searchlight became the most authoritative source of intelligence on the far right in the UK. It infiltrated extremist groups, exposed their funding, documented their international connections and repeatedly revealed the criminality and violence at their core. Searchlight first appeared as a short-lived tabloid newspaper in 1965, edited by the Labour MP Reg Freeson, with Gerry in charge of research, but folded after only four issues. Then, in 1975, in response to the dramatic rise in support for the National Front (NF), it was relaunched in magazine format, produced by Gerry and the Birmingham-based journalist and anti-racist campaigner Maurice Ludmer. When Maurice died in 1981, Gerry was left at the helm. I began volunteering with Searchlight in the 1970s and edited the magazine in the 80s. The magazine quickly became indispensable to local anti-fascist committees that had formed in response to the NF’s growth, and when the Anti-Nazi League (ANL) was founded in 1977, Gerry and Maurice were among its original sponsors, with Searchlight effectively its research wing. The intelligence it supplied – including photographs of NF leaders in Nazi uniform or on paramilitary exercises – helped the ANL brand the party a Nazi organisation and contributed significantly to the collapse of its electoral fortunes in the general election of 1979. Searchlight’s intelligence-led investigative model was adopted by anti-fascists across Europe and the US. In Scandinavia, the young Stieg Larsson, later to author the Millennium trilogy of Lisbeth Salander novels, was inspired by it to launch the Swedish anti-fascist magazine Expo and was Searchlight’s own Swedish correspondent for many years. In the early 2000s, HOPE Not Hate, then operating as Searchlight’s campaigning arm, played a prominent role in hugely successful grassroots campaigns in areas such as Barking and Dagenham, in London, and Oldham, Greater Manchester, where a burgeoning British National party, under the leadership of Nick Griffin, was threatening a major electoral breakthrough. These campaigns devastated the BNP’s prospects, and it never recovered. In 2011, however, differences about future approaches led to a split between Gerry and HOPE Not Hate. Gerry retained control of Searchlight, but it was a bitter parting of the ways and feelings ran high for a number of years. The hatchet was buried in 2023 when Gerry and Nick Lowles, the chief executive of HOPE Not Hate, publicly greeted each other and shook hands warmly at an anti-fascist event in London. Gerry said at the time: “We’ve got enough problems fighting the other lot at the moment, without fighting amongst ourselves.” Searchlight’s life as a printed magazine drew to a close last year, when it moved to an entirely online operation. Gerry was at first sceptical but came to see the potential for much greater reach, and more effective use of resources. For many years, Gerry was the target of allegations that he secretly worked for the security services. This arose from a memo he wrote in 1977 while working as a researcher on the investigative ITV show The London Programme. He was a novice at mainstream journalism and felt he had to impress. In the memo, which three years later was leaked by someone on the programme, he laid claim to high level secret service contacts in various agencies. In fact, he was, as he later explained ruefully to me, “just flamming it up for an editor … I wasn’t the first to do it, but I paid a heavier price than most”. The fact he had no such contacts was clear to me in 1981, when Searchlight obtained evidence of a planned neo-Nazi bomb attack on the Notting Hill carnival in London, and Gerry and I had to use a convoluted route through a friendly journalist to get the information to the security services. As well as his anti-fascist work, Gerry was a member of the Metropolitan police’s Hate Crime Independent Advisory Group and of the London board of Tell Mama, an organisation combating anti-Muslim hatred. In 2011 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Northampton, which since 2013 has housed the Searchlight archive.
Gerry was born in London, the son of Walter Gable, a furniture maker, and his wife, Rebecca (nee Levy). His mother was of Jewish heritage and his father an Irish protestant who served in Bomber Command ground crews during the second world war. After school, Gerry worked in construction before training as an electrician. There, as a member of the Young Communist League and later the Communist party, he established a reputation as a highly effective trade union organiser on building sites across the capital. Gerry’s involvement in anti-fascist activism began in his mid-20s as a Communist party activist helping to organise opposition to groups such as the openly Hitlerite National Socialist Movement (NSM) led by Colin Jordan, and Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement, which was attempting a postwar comeback. It was in this period that he began working closely with the 62 Group, Jewish activists, military veterans and seasoned anti-fascists who were enraged by the re-emergence of nazism so soon after the Holocaust and organised against it. Though Gerry never formally joined the group, he collaborated with its intelligence officer, Harry Bidney, helping to run informants, disrupt fascist activities and gather information and intelligence. Gerry believed that fascism had to be confronted directly, but that intelligence was as important as counter-protests or street fights. Among the group’s most audacious operations were raids on the London headquarters of the NSM and the Union Movement, during which membership files, correspondence and photographs were seized. These included, from the NSM raid, the photographs used to devastating effect by the ANL in the late 70s. On another occasion, a truck was driven into the HQ of a fascist group in south London. In 1963, an ill-fated attempt to obtain confidential documents from the flat of the historian David Irving led to Gerry and two other 62 Group members being arrested and convicted. A sympathetic judge imposed only small fines, prompting Irving to storm out of the court. Gerry left a disapproving Communist party shortly afterwards. When a wave of antisemitic arson attacks was launched on London synagogues in 1965, the 62 Group played a crucial role in identifying the NSM members responsible, persuading one of them to surrender to the police and testify against the others. Perhaps the most daring aspect of Gerry’s work was his extensive use of moles inside far-right organisations. Over the years he recruited or worked with a remarkable cast of informants, including Mosley’s former bodyguard, Les Wooler, the reformed neo-Nazi Ray Hill – whose information helped prevent the planned bomb attack on the Notting Hill carnival in 1981 – and figures such as Matthew Collins, Tim Hepple and Darren Wells from the terror group Combat 18. Others infiltrated the NF and the BNP. One mole, known only as “Arthur”, helped identify the London nail bomber David Copeland in 1999. Gerry’s anti-fascism came at considerable personal cost. He was repeatedly threatened, vilified and sued. He survived a letter-bomb attack and a failed petrol bomb attack on his home by members of Combat 18. That he was targeted so relentlessly was a measure of his effectiveness. For more than half a century, the extreme right failed to entrench itself in Britain in the way it did elsewhere in Europe, and Gerry’s contribution to that outcome was profound. In the final printed edition of Searchlight, he wrote that he had seen its relaunch in 1975 as a short-term project. In fact, it survived 50 years of continuous publication and set him on the course that would occupy the rest of his life. Gerry is survived by his fourth wife, Sonia (nee Hochfelder), whom he married in 1984, and five children. His eldest son, Steven, predeceased him. • Gerald Clark Gable, anti-fascist campaigner and investigative journalist, born 27 January 1937; died 3 January 2026
