@MxVerda Ooh, yeah, I would, actually. Please pass on my encouragement to your friend.

And I extracted the bit of the transcript that answered my question! And yeah, that's some uncomfortable associations with the BNP there.

(I love that people narrate their essays, but some days I cannot manage audio, let alone the amount of stimulation that goes with video.)

I bet you were wondering “When’s he gonna talk about the Nazi part?” Apparently, Miss Martindale - who probably was the same person all along, unlike most of the other Silver Sisters - she had been corresponding for two years with John Tyndall, the leader of the white-supremacist, neo-fascist British National Party. In the letters, Tyndall expressed admiration for the way the Sisterhood wanted to isolate itself from the modern, multicultural world. He said that he was, quote, "spiritually with one foot in the 19th century and the other in, perhaps, the 17th and 18th".

The Silver Sisterhood was also involved in rather less explosive, but also traditionalist, political movements: Miss Martindale was one of the public faces of the cleverly named “Don’t Give an Inch” campaign in the 1990s, which sought to reverse Britain’s shift to the metric system. Some former St. Bride’s residents have spoken up about the Nazi ties, saying that if Miss Martindale was involved in something like this, they didn’t know about it and it certainly wouldn’t have been something the rest of them would have supported, but others disagree - one person who claims to have known the Sisterhood while they were in Oxford in the 90s says that everyone in the area knew they had fascist sympathies. It’s hard to imagine a bunch of lesbian feminist separatists, which is really what they were, being all chummy with neo-Nazis, but on the other hand, they did have a rose-tinted nostalgia for the 19th century. Either way, it shows that they sunk deeper into their paracosm than they should have.