1. Peter Ettedgui<\/p>\n
\u201c[Farage] would sidle up to me and growl: \u2018Hitler was right\u2019 or \u2018gas them\u2019, sometimes adding a long hiss to simulate the sound of the gas showers [\u2026] I\u2019d never experienced antisemitism growing up, so the first time that this vicious verbal abuse came out of Farage\u2019s mouth was deeply shocking. But I wasn\u2019t his only target. I\u2019d hear him calling other students \u2018Paki\u2019 or \u2018Wog\u2019, and urging them to \u2018go home\u2019. I tried to ignore him, but it was humiliating. It was shaming. This kind of abuse cuts through to the core of your identity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Peter Ettedgui said he wasn\u2019t Farage\u2019s only target. He would urge other students to \u2018go home\u2019. Photograph: Dave Benett\/Getty Images2. Anthony Butler<\/p>\n
\u201cPeter Ettedgui\u2019s recollections of Nigel Farage\u2019s naked racism and antisemitism in his schooldays left me with a sense of deep regret. A contemporary and classmate of Farage, I clearly recall him relentlessly hectoring and bullying Ettedgui with shouts of \u201cstupid yid\u201d in the playground. Peter was a small, rather shy and sensitive boy, and Nigel was a physical coward who could easily have been silenced.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I do not recall anyone doing so [\u2026] If he will accept it, I apologise wholeheartedly to Peter Ettedgui.\u201d<\/p>\n
3. Jean-Pierre Lihou<\/p>\n
\u201c[Farage] used to say things like, you know, \u2018Jude\u2019, to Peter, which is the German for Jew, in the way it was said in the 1930s, a long \u2018u\u2019 in a menacing way, you know? It\u2019s pretty awful.<\/p>\n
\u201cFarage used to say things like \u2018Hitler was right\u2019 and \u2018gas em\u2019, you know, that sort of thing. But he also used to sing this song, which I later discovered was based on George Formby\u2019s Bless Them All.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe had a whole load of \u2018lyrics\u2019 on this which are pretty awful. I can remember it verbatim: \u2018Gas em all, gas em all, into the chambers they crawl. We\u2019ll gas all the paks, and we\u2019ll gas all the yids, and we\u2019ll gas all the coons and all their fucking kids.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Jean-Pierre Lihou said Farage used to say things like \u2018Hitler was right\u2019. Photograph: Martin Godwin\/The Guardian4. Martin Rosell<\/p>\n
\u201c[Farage] certainly made comments to the Jewish guy in that class, Peter Ettedgui [\u2026] Comments like, under his breath, sort of \u2018Jew\u2019 \u2026 and comments about how they \u2018missed you\u2019, that sort of thing. He was noticeably more of those times than the rest. He was known for it across the school.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rosell is now the chair of the Liberal Democrats in Salisbury.<\/p>\n
5. Bob Jope, a former teacher<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, to another boy. And because I was a young teacher then, it wasn\u2019t my first year, but certainly very close to the beginning [of] my career, I wasn\u2019t really able to handle such kind of sudden out-on-a-limb [incident]. Perhaps an older, wiser teacher. I might have intervened and discussed it or something, but I think I just snapped and said: \u201cRight \u2013 out!\u201d [\u2026] I think he [Farage] said \u2018Shut up you Jew\u2019 to Peter Ettedgui.\u201d<\/p>\n
6. Andy Field<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I became a prefect, he [Farage] said: \u2018I\u2019ll show you how to do it.\u2019 He took me for a walk up to the lower school playground, where all the children from about nine years old to 12 would be. And he singled out, completely at random, a kid of Asian extraction, and just put him in detention for no reason whatsoever. I was flabbergasted, absolutely stunned. I was just disgusted, really. No rhyme or reason, just purely based on the colour of his skin.\u201d<\/p>\n
7. Mark Haward<\/p>\n
\u201cHe loved the sound of his own voice; he would come in usually chanting something. He always wanted to be listened to \u2013 I distinctly remember him coming in several times chanting \u2018Oswald Ernald Mosley\u2019 [the name of the far-right leader of the British Union of Fascists].\u201d<\/p>\n
8. Dave Edmonds<\/p>\n
\u201cI have a very strong memory of him using the W-word for what we now call people of Afro-Caribbean origin and the P-word for those of south Asian origin.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t remember being on the receiving end of antisemitic remarks, though of course he made outrageous comments about the war. I don\u2019t think Jews were his main racial preoccupation. He was generally obsessed, as he is now, with the erosion of Britishness.\u201d<\/p>\n
9. Tim France<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was habitual, you know, it happened all the time. He would often be doing Nazi salutes and saying \u2018Sieg heil\u2019 and, you know, strutting around the classroom. He was a member of the cadet force, [so] often being in uniform. And, yeah, it might have been for shock value, partly, but I think, you know, clearly, he also is very rightwing politically.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was saying really, really unpleasant things, really things that you just knew were wrong. You can\u2019t really defend it as being a joke, or that he was too young to know any better. We were 18.\u201d<\/p>\n
10. Nick Gordon Brown<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat he would do was he would loudly and frequently support that National Front policy at the time for repatriation [\u2026] I always remember his words \u2013 he used to refer to as our \u2018black and brown friends\u2019 with that grin, with that tone of voice, that anyone who sees him on the TV now will be so used to [\u2026] that was a constant narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n
11. Luke Gray<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was proud to be a racist at school. That was his shtick \u2013 he was the school pet racist. [\u2026] A nasty foul mouthed racist and happy and proud to say he was. No contrition at all, trying to pretend it\u2019s just a joke. I\u2019ve heard him say every racial slur you could possibly imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n
12. A former pupil, from a minority ethnic background<\/p>\n
\u201cI was very small in one of the junior classes of the time, and you know that the sixth-formers were probably 17, very tall, much taller than me. And that person\u2019s walk, it\u2019s the same walk he has now, I\u2019ll never forget it.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe walked up to a pupil, flanked by two similarly tall mates, and spoke to anyone looking \u2018different\u2019. That included me on three occasions; asking me where I was from, and pointing away, saying: \u2018That\u2019s the way back\u2019, to wherever you replied you were from.\u201d<\/p>\n
13. A former pupil<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat sticks in the memory most is not just his odious and prejudicial opinions towards black, Asian and minority ethnic students, but how central and public these views were to his whole school persona.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow brazenly and actively he identified with them, wearing them loud and proud as badges of honour.\u201d<\/p>\n
14. A former pupil<\/p>\n
\u201cI was in the CCF [combined cadet force] with him from 1979 to 1982 or so [\u2026] [Farage] did teach the younger members of the CCF the infamous \u2018gas \u2019em all\u2019 song, or at least led the singing of it on CCF coaches to training areas.\u201d<\/p>\n
15. A former pupil<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was very strong-minded and had strong views about particular races. The word \u201cyid\u201d was frequently deployed, used about 50 times in a row.<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember one particular thing he would do, a gesture, where he would put his left hand over his left eye and make a wanker sign with his right hand and chant \u2018Moshe Dayan [an Israeli defence minister] is a wanker!\u2019 Jews were regularly cited.\u201d<\/p>\n
16. A former pupil<\/p>\n
\u201cHis behaviour towards cadets of ethnic background was no better than to those of Jewish religion. He held a cadet rank of sergeant or similar so was able to issue work\/task details of his own devising. All pretty grim and pointless usually \u2013 guess which ethnicity or religion got the wrong end of his stick?\u201d<\/p>\n
17. A former pupil<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was someone who always had slogans. He would repeat things ad nauseam. He would certainly say: \u2018The National Front is the white man\u2019s front.\u2019 Whenever we watched a film in class and there was a black face he would say: \u2018are you English?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
18. A former pupil<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember him singing on occasions, leading those songs. I definitely heard him singing racist marching songs at various occasions. If it comes to it, I would happily stand up in court and say it. My overriding memory is just nasty little shit and a racist.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"1. Peter Ettedgui \u201c[Farage] would sidle up to me and growl: \u2018Hitler was right\u2019 or \u2018gas them\u2019, sometimes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":277497,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-277496","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=277496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/277496\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/277497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=277496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=277496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=277496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}