Stuart Christie and the Spirit of Don Quixote

by Brian Bamford

REASSESSING STUART CHRISTIE IN CONTEXT

Stuart Christie: a Scottish anarchist writer and publisher. Aged 18, Christie was arrested in Madrid while carrying explosives to assassinate the Spanish caudillo, General Francisco Franco. He was later alleged to be a member of the Angry Brigade, but was acquitted of related charges. When he died he was probably the best know anarchist in the UK.

Born: July 10, 1946, Partick, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Died: August 15, 2020

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From Shakespeare's Macbeth: "I dare do all that may become a man; Who dares do more is none." in Macbeth act 1

From Christie's 'My Granny...' on pages 32-33: 'I couldn't warm to Shakespeare in the classroom. He simply had no resonance with us. The language was remote and difficult, as was the historical period...'. (Rabbie) Burns* was my first encounter with the emotions and ideals I've since come to call socialism. Who could grow up to be anything but a class war socialist on reading Burns' clarion call to egalitarianism in "A Man's A Man For A' That".'

ON REVIEWING Don Quixote and Cervantes** in 'The LITERATURE OF THE SPANISH PEOPLE' Gerald Brenan writes: 'the KNIGHT of the DOLEFUL COUNTINANCE is mad, and that's that. But presently it dawns on us that his madness is confined to one thing - the belief, not itself irrational by the standards of that age, that the books of Chivalry were true histories. Once that is taken for granted, it was no more mad for him to attempt to revive the profession of knight-errantry than it was for a monk to imitate the Fathers of the desert.'

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WHEN CONSIDERING the role of Stuart Christie and his adventures on the Spanish peninsular in August 1964, we would do well to observe his likeness to the knight of the Doleful Countenance. We learn for instance that Don Quixote was conceived by Cervantes in a Spanish jail at a low water mark in his life. Much like, I dare say, Stuart's autobiography 'My Granny Made Me An Anarchist'.

Interestingly Gerald Brenan writes of Don Quixote: '...in so far as Cervantes intended the figure of Don Quixote to stand for anything, it was quite simply for a man who ruins himself and others by his romantic and generous illusions and by his over-confidence in the goodness of human nature.'

Moreover, Brenan claims: In the novel '...there is the contrast between the actual situation and what it appears to be to Don Quixote: there is that between his noble and exalted way of feeling and Sancho's peasant shrewdness and self-interest: and if one likes, that between the knight's wise and sane ratiocinations and his violent fantasies whenever the subject of Chiivalry enters his head.'

In all this it is hard to escape the feeling that the Stuart that I met in Paris in August 1964, already commited to carry explosive to Madrid, was so full of Rabbie Burns* and the Bonnot Gang. So wound-up was he on romance that he could have been a younger version of Lord Byron or a kind of blunt working-class Rabbie Burns; pioneer of the Romantic movement .

In El País, the historian Julián Casanova Ruiz has recently written in what I think is the best memorial of Stuart: 'Yet he was a committed anarchist using his pen and engaged in cultural aggitation, in times when the revolutionaries with "consciences" have past into history. Anarchist solidarity, that reflects on the concequences of industrial capilalism, nuclear disarmament, and abuses by the State. He was a Scot who would have loved to live in the golden epoch of Spanish anarchism.'

Julián Casanova's suggestion that Stuart Christie was steeped in the 'spirit of the older epoch of Spanish anarchism' implies that he was indeed a romantic soul. Quixote, who has gone mad owing to reading too many books about Chivalry, according to Brenan should not be regarded as 'lacking in shrewdness or being gullible by nature' because 'his delusion is a result of a long secretly sustained wish to rise above the dullness of his monotonous life, have adventures and distinguish himself.'

Any objective reading of Stuart Christie's autobiography will I think confirm that that in 1964 he was determined to escape his dreary life in Glasgow and somehow experience what he then believed the anarchist Holy Land. I felt the same about escaping Manchester and going to Spain in the winter of February 1963.

Alas, the actual Holy Land, as was shown in Don Quixote, was in reality somewhat more complex than any of us anticipated in our overwrought and vivid imaginations. Stuart was determine and he asked: 'Why did I, for the most part an unaggressive and easy-going person, commit myself to going to Spain to engage in an unspecified but violent campaign against the Franco regime?' and he continued 'I wanted to change the world because the world needed to be changed. Right in the middle of Europe, Franco was running one of the most brutal and represive regimes in modern history - he had killed more Spanish people than Hitler killed German Jews - and the Western democracies were now helping him to survive. Even now, while the civilized world was humming along to the songs of the Beatles and the Supremes.... the number of political dissidents being arrested and tortured by Franco's secret police was steadily increasing.'

Stuart's view here is clearly that of a foreigner looking at Spain in the early 1960s, and seeing it with eye of an outsider; the Spaniards I got to know between March 1963 and August 1964 both in the fishing village in Alicante where we lived and worked, and later on in La Linea de la Concepcion near Gibraltar, certainly did not have the feel of being downtrodden. The workers I worked with were mostly optimistic, cheerful and I felt they were more amiable than the workers I knew in England, we all seemed have enough money to live on, but I struggled to put something on one side for a rainy day.

All this everyday reality in the period 1964-67 when Stuart was in jail in Madrid was outside his grasp, and he was consequently able to decieve himself about the nature of Spanish life as it was evolving for most workers in the 1960s. Clearly in 1964, I was financially better off working 5-days for the MOD at the airport in Gibraltar, earning just over £8 for a 40-hour week; than when I was working a 48-hour week in Alicante at the Casa Such for 750 Pesetas (about £5).

Among other things, Stuart seemed to have been influenced by George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia', and Orwell wrote in an essay 'The Art of Donald McGill' that 'If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?' and he wrote:

'Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots of beer and women with "volupuous" figures. He it is who punctures your your fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth...'

It seems to me that these attitudes have been poetically displayed in the adventures of Stuart Christie and is amply demonstrated in his autobiography especially were he describes his chance meetings with many amiable fellow prisoners who he concluded to be 'champion' only to later learn that they had committed unimaginable crimes: someone he thought was a 'nice chap' turned out to be Gestapo officer awaiting extradition on charges of mass murder, or an OAS terrorist, a South American gangster, a professional assasin, an arms dealer, a rapist etc. Prison life is like that, you come across all sorts of folk, I don't know about Spain but in places like Strangways prison in Manchester there were clear hierarchies with the wife-killer and the murders at the top, and then people like debtors would be at the bottom, and in the 1960s, this last category were distinguished by having to wear brown, and these days I believe the child abuser is the lowest of the low.

Stuart had been brought up a protestant and he writes:

'Before I went to prison my world-view was black and white, a moral chessboard on which everyone was either a goody or a baddy. But the ambiguities in people I came across in prison made me uneasy and I began to question my assumptions about the nature of good and evil.'

Orwell felt that to be among Spaniards in Spain was to be in the best country in the world for a foreigner. The 10th, July 1967 was Stuart's 21st birthday, and the jefe de servicio agreed to use the infirmary dining room to organise a party for him. The menue was set-up with a kid goat cooked in wine with roast potatoes, ensalada, coffee, cheese and ice cream. Beer, wine and Spanish brandy were supplied. The cabaret was put on by a Philipino rock star who was inside for murdering his agent, together with a band of gypsies who singing and dancing flamenco. The 'do' lasted from 2pm to 11pm. Everyone ended up legless.

Anyone who has lived in Spain and worked among Spaniards in the 1960s will find this account perfect plausable. No wonder Stuart was later to favourably compare his Spanish prison experience with life in an English jail. Somehow the Spaniards conduct themselves a more human manner, sometimes it can be delightful as it was for me when I was detained in the barracks of the Civil Guards up in the province of Segovia after I'd failed to carry my passport as identification returning from a journey to report on a strike of miners in the Asturias. The Civil Guards were unbelievably kind and considerate, and their wives served me up a dinner fit for a King. Maybe a Spaniard who'd failed to carry his identity card would not have received such sympathetic treatment because, as the Gibraltarians have often noted, Spaniards can be cruel to each other; I note for example that Fernando Carballo, Stuart's contact in Madrid, was treated much more roughly in police custody: his wrists were hammered with the butt of a policeman's pistol while another 'systematically punched him in the kidneys and stomach'. (see 'Granny' page 165).

We learn from Gerald Brenan that 'Don Quixote grew out of Cervantes' long and painful experiences of frustration and failure' and he adds 'It thus deals with one of the classic themes of Spanish literature - disillusionment.' According to Brenan, who lived in Spain on and off from 1919 when he came out of the British army after the First World War, 'Spaniards who commonly set their hopes too high and expect a miracle to fulfil them, often come to feel themselves deceived by life.'

When we were in Paris in February 1963 and about to leave for Spain, Salvador Gurucharri our handler told me he was atheist who believed in the God of nature,and I've noticed this with other Spaniards over the years. Gerald Brenan in his book The Spanish Labyrinth writes about this importance of nature with regard to Bakunin: 'He (Bakunin) therefore maintains that a free society will necessarily create strong, open, outstanding men and accepts without fear a strengthening of those great conservative forces that govern societies - custom and public opinion, which are good "because they are natural".' Brenan writes 'Something must be said about this word "natural", for it is one of the keys to Bakunin's ideas.' Bakunin, rather like John Ruskin and the romantics, seems to have felt angish at the growing artificiality of modern life, Brenan claims that for Bakunin 'all artificiality in his eyes was bad, so all "nature" was good.'

Bakunin is recognised as having a great influence on Spanish anarchism.

When I set out to write this piece on Stuart Christie I had in mind a critique based on the idea that he was a romantic who had too much faith in actions like setting off small bombs that at best only got the coverage of a small column in a foreign newspaper outside Spain. Yet I've been seduced by re-reading Stuart's autobiography in conjunction with re-reading Gerald Brenan's Literature of the Spanish People.

Yet, I am aware of that some would have liked me to contrast Stuart Christie's approach to anarchism with that of David Graeber who also died in August this year. Graeber in the USA, and for example Colin Ward in the UK, took a more considered rationalist approach. When I thought about it I remembered what George Orwell said about Tolstoy in his essay 'Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool', in it he wrote of Tolstoy: 'Clearly he could have no patience with a chaotic, detailed, discursive writer like Shakespeare. His (Tolstoy's) reaction is that of an irritable old man pestred by a noisy child. "Why do you keep jumping up and down like that? Why can't you sit still like I do?".' What Orwell concludes is that people like the pacifist Tolstoy would 'make children senile'. On reflection my worry is that those of who argue for a more cerebral approach to life and social change may simply be urging that the young should become old before their time.

It would seem, from this point of view, that the journey for all of us is bound up in an eternal pilgrimage from the madness of youth to the senility of old age.

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* Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796), also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, the National Bard, Bard of Ayrshire and the Ploughman Poet and various other names and epithets,[nb 1] was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in English and a light Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.

He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish diaspora around the world. Celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot by the Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV.

As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song) "Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country.

** Wikipedia on Cervantes: Aside from these, and some poems, by 1605, Cervantes had not been published for 20 years. In Don Quixote, he challenged a form of literature that had been a favourite for more than a century, explicitly stating his purpose was to undermine 'vain and empty' chivalric romances.[61] His portrayal of real life, and use of everyday speech in a literary context was considered innovative, and proved instantly popular. First published in January 1605, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza featured in masquerades held to celebrate the birth of Philip IV on 8 April.[51]

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