He masterminds an alternative spy operation: he edits the anti-Fascist magazine Searchlight, which is not only a magazine for anti-racists, but also required reading for the far right. A phone call to the licensee of the pub and to the police, and another potentially violent confrontation is averted.Gerry Gable is not an MI5 intelligence officer, nor does he work for the Special Branch. Thirty years’ experience running agents inside Britain’s far- right political parties has paid off again. He puts on a show of enthusiasm, drinking and joking, but knows he has to speak to his controlling intelligence officer as soon as possible.So the next day, in a cafe in Soho, Grant meets a man called Gerry Gable, orders a double espresso and tells him about the planned punch-up Gable is pleased.
He recalls an earlier punch-up involving another band at a gig in King’s Cross that ended with fans being treated in hospital. As the magazines are passed around, with their boastful articles about attacks and hit lists, half a dozen of the heavies discuss a plan to attack a pub in Camden where a band with an anti-racist following is due to play.Through all this, Grant sits quietly. Many of the activists are Loyalist supporters, and he knows that some of them have done time for running guns to the UDA and the UVF.Later in the afternoon, a man arrives in a van with the latest issue of Combat 18’s magazine, straight from a Sussex printers. If he is discovered, he knows that it will be more than a bloody nose; it will be a full knee-capping treatment at least – possibly a lot, lot worse. He is not interested in the drug-dealing going on in the corner, but when he hears mention of guns, he feels a tightening in his guts and has to concentrate on appearing casual.Grant (not his real name) has done seven years in the army, but going undercover among Combat 18 activists is the most dangerous mission he has ever undertaken. He is 40 years old, an ex-squaddie who knows how to handle himself, but maybe not against 80 Nazi thugs, were they to find out who he really is.
He listens to the banter about sorting out niggers and queers, making a mental note of anything that sounds specific. Close- cropped, tattooed, aged between 20 and 40, they are the hard men of Britain’s most notorious and brutal neo-Nazi group, Combat 18, whose name comes from the position of Hitler’s initials in the alphabet
Tim Grant fits right in But then he has to – his very life depends on it.
They have an arrangement with the landlord that once the locals drift off, he locks them in and they can get down to serious business.They are a mean-looking bunch. It’s a quiet Sunday, and the lads are having an afternoon drink in a pub in Bethnal Green, in London’s East End. And here they are – cyclists making do among the ruins, solitaries lost in the woods or fleeing the city, or at the wheel of the last car in a landscape gone over to desertPhotographs from `Magnum Landscape’, published by Phaidon Press on 20 Feb 1997, price pounds 14.99Sound of silence: (left) Kun Ming Hu Lake, Summer Palace, Beijing, China, 1964, by Rene Burri; (top right) White Sands, New Mexico, USA, 1952, by Ernst Haas; (above) the Walled City, Hong Kong, 1987, by Patrick Zachmann Modern giants: (above) The Verrazano Bridge and the Queen Mary, New York, USA, 1963, by Bruce Davidson; (right) Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1960, by Rene BurriPale riders: (top right) Sioux horse riders crossing Big Foot Pass in memory of the massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, USA, 1990, by Guy Le Querrec; (below right) Fire at Hoboken, New York, USA, 1946, by Henri Cartier-Bresson. What would it be like, the new turn of mind suggested, if there were to be no survivors, or very few? How would it be to have to forage in the ruins of cities, under weather systems grown inhospitable? What would become of us, on foot in the wreckage, without civilised amenities? Photographers, engrossed by the new narrative, have turned their attention to survivors. Landscape, as envisaged under those Utopian terms, would be subdued; it would either be a managed adjunct to the city, supervised from the air, or it would be a homely world of vignettes seen selectively from the motorway.The first atomic explosions, at the Trinity site in New Mexico on 16 July 1945, began to dislodge that view. Probably to save face, we claimed a negative responsibility for the deadening of the planet.In the 1920s, we had wondered what it would be like to inhabit a perfected, foreseeable future – not far off, if the blueprints were to be believed.
We were no longer to be so safely at home among nature’s objects which we had put to our own uses: all those rocks, trees and rivers of poetry and theology which had long been part of the moral landscape.
From the 1960s onwards, we were invited to think of ourselves rather as short-term visitors to a site that was changing under our feet and largely indifferent to our presence. By enlarging our sense of space and time, the missions with their photographers made it possible – or just easier – to imagine the earth before habitation, or as once more abandoned under the trodden moon dust of 20 July 1969. The great space missions of the 1960s altered our perceptions of landscape irrevocably, for they familiarised us with news of the earth as Elsewhere, or as another planet rising and setting with planetary destinies. This is the place to start that teddy bear collection.Refreshments: Adequate snacks and lunches in the Conservatory cafe.Attractions: Monthly prize draw to win the Hamleys Toy of the Month Rooms to hire for children’s parties.. The two strands of the exhibition, the European pictures shown in London and the reaction by British artists who saw them, are neatly interwoven through eight roughly chronological rooms.