Adolf Fittler

By Gerald Hogg

My dad, John Fittler was a racist as was his father before him. Dad always said, to anyone who would listen, that if he had been born in Alabama or Mississippi in the USA, he would have been in the Klu Klux Klan, burning crosses and lynching niggers. Unfortunately for him, he was born in Middlesbrough in the county of Yorkshire in England. I started my life as a racist; I had little choice, as growing up that was all that my father talked about, every conversation always seemed to revolve around or relate to black or Asian people. After the Second World War black and ethnic minorities from Commonwealth countries were now starting to arrive in Britain, driving buses, working in the shops, or working on building sites building new housing estates in the town, there were even two Pakistanis working on the docks, though thankfully not alongside my dad as they worked on the opposite shift to him. Some of the immigrants who arrived in the country with some money decided to go into business and opened up shops or restaurants or other businesses. I had little to do with any immigrants, the ones that were in our school I avoided, as did most of the other white kids in the school and the black and Asian kids tended to stick together as there was safety in numbers. In June 1959 there was a turning point in my life, an event that would transform the way that I would view the world and live my life when Winston and Kaleisha Brown, two kids from Jamaica moved into a council house on Granville Street in the Cannon Street area of town, just two doors down from the Fittler house.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gerald Hogg
• Release date: Feb 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215567838

Gerald Hogg

Originally from the UK, Gerald migrated to Australia in 1974. Since then he has travelled the world working in hotels and restaurants, gold mines, cruise ships, Antarctic supply ships, custom patrol vessels, rig tenders, and oil tankers. In the capacity of his work as a chef, he has also lived in Jamaica, Bermuda, Singapore, the Falkland Islands, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and the USA. He has now retired to Thailand where he lives on the island of Koh Samui and travels extensively throughout South-East Asia. To keep active and to pursue his love of travel Gerald has also written five travel books in his Retirees Travel Guide Series. Gerald has also written a novel The Deptford Mask Murders and his first book in the Thai Died series of books, Murder in Paradise.

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ADOLPH FITTLER

Prologue

MY DAD, JOHN FITTLER was a racist as was his father before him. Dad always said, to anyone who would listen, that if he had been born in Alabama or Mississippi in the USA, he would have been in the Klu Klux Klan, burning crosses and lynching niggers. Unfortunately for him, he was born in Middlesbrough in the county of Yorkshire in England. My grandad, Albert Fittler fought in South Africa during the Boar War and had his foot blown off at the Battle of Nooitgedacht by the time he was repatriated back to England, he hated all black people with a vengeance, a deep hatred that he then passed on to his only child. In 1933 Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and within a few months, Hitler’s Nazi government had assumed dictatorial powers. Once in power the Nazi Party started to take control of every aspect of German life and all other political parties were banned. My dad was sixteen years old in 1933 and his dad had passed away the year before so he was now officially the head racist of the family, idolised Adolf Hitler and worshipped the man and all that he stood for; dad would read everything that he could find on Hitler and his Nazi party, he saw Hitler as the saviour of the free world with his views on antisemitism and his intellectualised racial doctrine The more he read the more he knew that here was the messiah that was going to save the world from all of these blacks, Arabs, Asians and Jews. Adolf Hitler believed in the superiority of the Aryan race and was prepared to do something about it. On leaving school dad started work on the Middlesbrough docks, and not long after he started, he befriended a German seaman named Heinrich, who held similar views and beliefs on the inferior races. Heinrich was an engineer whose cargo ship used to dock regularly at Middlesbrough docks, taking steel from the Middlesbrough steelworks back to the Port of Hamburg where it would then be sent to armament factories to build aeroplanes and warships that would later be used to attack our country. My dad spent hours talking with Heinrich whenever his ship was in port to learn everything that he could about Hitler and Nazi Germany. One time, not long before the outbreak of World War II Heinrich’s ship came into port and Heinrich gave dad a copy of Hitler’s autobiographical political manifesto Mein Kampf although it was written in German dad bought a German translation dictionary from W.H. Smiths and painstakingly translated the book to English so that he could better understand the man. 

When World War II broke out in September 1939 there was no way that my dad was going to go and fight against the Nazis, if anything if he was able to, he would have sailed across the channel and joined the German army as he considered himself a de-facto German and to the amusement of his workmates, he even spoke with a put-on Germanic lilt for a while. Luckily for him, he worked as a stevedore on the docks which was a reserved occupation so he wasn’t conscripted into the armed forces and he saw out the war from the comfort of my grandma’s living room. When he was 18-years old dad joined the British Union of Fascists (BUF) the political party formed in 1932 by Oswald Mosley, more commonly known as the Black Shirts They had quite a following in their early years but as the country grew closer to war and the BUF got more radical in their views and actions, the British public, seeing in the newspapers and on the newsreels in the cinemas what the German fascists were doing to their own country and to their European neighbouring countries, the membership in the BUF started to go into decline and in1939 the party was banned by the British government. Because Middlesbrough was a large steel-producing town it was the first major British town to be bombed by the German Luftwaffe when they bombed the South Bank area of town in May 1940. This did little to endear the Nazis to the people of Middlesbrough so my dad not wanting to bring attention to himself, hung up his black shirt, quit the BUF and for the remainder of World War II, he kept his fascist views to himself and tried to keep a low profile. Five years later when the war finally ended and Adolf Hitler committed suicide, my dad sadly had to come to terms with the fact that Germany had lost the war and that the Germanic Aryan Master Race was not going to come to Middlesbrough or take over the world any time soon.

It was around this time that Britain welcomed tens of thousands of immigrants from commonwealth or ex commonwealth countries such as India, Pakistan, Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and some of the islands of the commonwealth countries of the Caribbean, under the British Nationality Act 1948, when they granted the subjects of the British Empire the right to live and work in the UK. They were brought to the UK to help fill the gap in the labour market after the war for both skilled and unskilled jobs, including public services such as the newly-created National Health Service. Many of the new immigrants got jobs on buses, in hospitals, factories and on building sites, rebuilding the towns that the Luftwaffe had bombed throughout the war. This infuriated my dad as he saw Indian, Pakistani, African and Caribbean immigrants arriving in the town to take up jobs, jobs that should have been for British people. Well not for British, for English people, as he hated the Welsh and the Scottish nearly as much as he hated blacks. If that wasn’t bad enough for him, in 1950 five years after his beloved fuehrer died, what would later turn out to be the second biggest disappointment of his life happened, when me, his only son, later to be named Adolf, was born in Middlesbrough General Hospital.

Chapter 1-1960

My mum, Mary Fittler was never a strong-willed person. Like many women in those days, the man of the house ruled the house and its occupants with an iron fist. Children were to be seen and not heard and women were there to look after the children, cook and clean and occasionally if their husbands weren’t too pissed assume the missionary position and lay back and think of England, which is what mum must have been doing one night around mid-February 1950 as I was born nine months later on November the 3rd. Mum wanted to call me Fredrick so that I would be known as Freddy Fittler, which she said was very becoming and that I would go far with a name like that. Unfortunately, dad had different ideas and it was him who went down to the registry office in the town hall two days after I was born to register the birth and he named his only child Adolf...Adolf Fittler.

I started my life as a racist; I had little choice, as growing up that was all that my father talked about, every conversation always seemed to revolve around or relate to coloured people. Black and Asian people were now starting to arrive in Middlesbrough, driving buses, working in the shops or working on building sites building new housing estates in the town, there were even two Pakistanis working on the docks, though thankfully not alongside my dad as they worked on the opposite shift to him. Some of the immigrants who arrived in the country with some money decided to go into business and had opened up shops or restaurants or other businesses. I had little to do with any immigrants, the ones that were in our school I avoided, as did most of the other white kids in the school and the black and Asian kids tended to stick together as there was safety in numbers. In June 1959 there was a turning point in my life, an event that would transform the way that I would view the world and live my life when Winston and Kaleisha Brown moved into a council house on Granville Street in the Cannon Street area of town, just two doors down from the Fittler house.

It was a Saturday morning and I was home, lounging on the sofa, reading the latest antics and adventures of Dennis the Menace in the Beano when I heard the squeal of brakes and saw through our lounge window a large removal van pulling up outside our house. I put down my comic and ran to the window and a few seconds later a taxi pulled up and parked behind the van. As I stared out of the window, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Dad come and take a look at this. You’re not going to believe this.

Dad put down his copy of The Daily Worker (dad was no longer a fascist he was now a full-blown communist) and he walked over to the where I was standing, pulled back the yellowing net curtain and he saw getting out of the taxi a tall well-built black man accompanied by a colourfully dressed black lady and two black children, a girl of about eleven years old and a boy who looked to be about nine the same age as me. 

For fuck’s sake, said dad.

Watch your language in front of Adolf, you’re not on the docks now John.

Dad gave her one of his looks and when she saw the hostility in his eyes mum turned away and continued with her knitting. The last thing she needed this morning was a slapping.

My dad closed the curtain and cursing to himself went outside to get a better view and to see what was going on, just in time to see the black man take a set of keys out of his jacket pocket, go to the front of number 58 and unlock the door and the whole family, laughing and joking excitedly followed him into the house. The removalists got out of their truck, opened the back door of the van and proceeded to take the furniture that was piled up in the back of the van into number 58 Granville Street. Dad looked up and down the street and saw that there were lots of the neighbour’s standing outside of their houses looking as shocked as he was at the black people who had just moved into their street. I heard dad shout over to Mr Bradley who lived across the road; There goes the fucking neighbourhood Stanley and I heard Mr Bradley shout back; This happened in my brothers street last year, first one family of Pakis moved in, then another now half of the houses on the street are filled with them, ten to a house in some of them. This country is going to the dogs John.

My dad came back inside the house and slammed the door; We’ve got two of the bastards working on the docks, and now we’ve got them living two doors down. What the fuck is this country coming to? We didn’t win two bloody world wars to hand our country over to the Niggers.

Knowing dad’s moods and not wanting to upset him I sympathetically nodded my head in agreement but mum just tut-tutted, looked away and continued with her knitting.

If Hitler had not been stopped by that fucking Churchill this would not be happening he ranted This country is going to the dogs he picked up his newspaper and went through the motions of pretending to read it but I could see that the newspaper was upside down and the paper was starting to shake in dad’s hands...he was getting into another one of his rages. I was well-acquainted with my dad’s rages, and I had a couple of scars to prove it, so I went to the cupboard under the stairs, took out my football and told mum that I was going out to play and mum, suddenly and conveniently remembered that she had promised to visit her sister Jean that morning and she grabbed her headscarf and coat and made a hurried departure, and we left dad alone with his dark thoughts. My mum was much different than my dad and as I grew older, I often wondered why she had married him as there was not much love between them and they hardly ever spoke to one another. Mum had never seemed too worried about the colour of someone’s skin or what country they came from or their religion, but she never said that in front of dad. She wasn’t very religious and never went to church, but sometimes she would say to me in private after one of dads racist rants; Adolf we are all god’s children no matter what the colour of your skin is. Being black does not make you a bad person, same as being white does not make you a good person, its what’s in your heart that counts. You only have to listen to your dad to know that.

I gave mum a kiss on the cheek and went through the back yard and into the back alley where dad had painted goal posts for me a few years before on the wall of our house and I started dribbling the ball around imaginary defenders and then scoring goals. I did this for about twenty minutes and I then tried to keep the ball in the air using both feet, my knees and my head, trying to beat my record of score of 26, but not coming anywhere close. One day I knew that I would play centre forward for Middlesbrough and England like my hero Brian Clough, but I also knew that I would need to practice a lot more before that happened. After half an hour of this, I was starting to get bored playing football by myself and I was thinking of calling for Dave Sprocket or Davey Crocket as he liked to be called, when I heard the back gate being unlatched two doors down and the girl’s black face peered out at me. The two kids then came out of their yard into the alley, the boy looked at me and smiled and wiggled his fingers in a timid wave, so I gave him one of dads looks that I had been practising in front of the mirror lately and the boy backed up and hid behind the girl. I gave the girl a similar look but it didn’t have the same effect on her and she approached me with a smile on her face and said Hello what’s your name, my names Kaleisha, it means a woman who is strong-willed and beautiful I just stared at her, I couldn’t understand how a girl could consider herself beautiful if she was black; my dad had always told me that all black and Asian people were ugly.

This is my brother Winston; he was named after our prime minister Winston Churchill. Can we play football with you?

Not wanting to talk with these two and without saying a word I picked up my ball, gave them another one of my looks and went back through the back gate towards our house, better to listen to dad ranting than to play with two black kids. Just as I was closing the gate, I heard the boy say to the girl; I told you that he wouldn’t let us play with him, they are all the same

I stood behind the closed gate listening and I heard the girl say; Then we are going to have to educate him I peeked out of the gate and saw that they had started to walk back towards their back yard and I heard the girl say something in a strange accent that I couldn’t understand You know what mama says...Pit inna de sky, it fall inna yuh eye then I heard the boy say Well you know what papa says. Yu shake man han, but yu noh shake im hawt and they both started laughing and went back through their gate. I stood there thinking about what they had said and thought, Dads right the blacks come into our country and they can’t even speak fucking English properly

That night I was lying on my bed in my bedroom when I heard voices below in the street. I got up and walked into the hallway and peeked through the curtains and I saw more black men and women carrying what looked like pots of food and gift-wrapped boxes into number 58. After I while when I was just dropping off to sleep, I heard music and laughter coming from the black people’s house, a kind of music that I had never heard before. Not like the music my dad plays on the radio, dad’s music was always sorrowful and joyless, this music sounded as the if the musicians were enjoying themselves and as I lay there, I wished that they would turn the volume up so that I could hear it better. I couldn’t sleep thinking about what was happening in number 58 and later in night the music and laughter got louder and there was a lovely aroma of food coming through my partially opened window that I had never smelt the likes of before and I eventually drifted off to sleep with my stomach rumbling, listening to the beat of the music and thinking about the little black girl...she was kind of pretty. 

I didn’t see the black kids the next day, but on Monday morning when I went to school, I saw them siting outside of the headmaster’s office in their brand-new school uniforms with their mother who was in a different colourful dress but was just as colourful as the one that I saw her wearing when they had moved in. I shook my head and walked on, just what the school needed two more black kids; my dad was going to go berserk when he found out.

I went to find my best mate Davey Sprocket and found him with the bigger kids smoking a Woodbine around the back of the school near the school sheds. Davey was 10 months older than me but he was still in my class because he had been kept down a year. He liked to smoke as he thought it made him look older and sophisticated like his hero John Wayne but he couldn’t hold the smoke in without having a coughing fit which always made the older kids laugh, but he was getting better at it with all of the practice. I never smoked, not because I was a goody two shoes, but because Mr Larson our PE teacher said that it affected your breathing and I didn’t want it to interfere with my football career.

We walked to our classroom together and I told Davey about the two new black kids that had moved into our street and that they were in the head master’s office enrolling in the school. Davey shook his head and in a breath that stunk of cigarettes said; That’s about twenty of them in the school now, Pakis, Africans, chinks and those two twats that wrap the towels around their heads from India. Where are these two new kids from? 

I had only recently got up the nerve to swear so I said, feeling quite proud of myself; How the fuck would I know, I haven’t spoken to them and I am not going to either. My dad might be a dick-head but he is right about not letting in all of these rag heads and chinks into our country. We continued walking around the playground for a while debating the problem and then slowly made our way to our classroom.

Mrs Atkinson our teacher, was writing on the blackboard at the front of the classroom; she made a point of looking at her watch and then said; Thanks for joining us David and Adolf take your seats we have a busy day ahead of us today. A few minutes later there was a tap on the door and Mr Smedley the headmaster, or Mr Smelly as he was known by us kids, entered