ANARCHISM IS not a very well understood doctrine in British politics. I realised this when Tameside Trade Union Council first published a booklet commemorating the 60th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War in 2006 with Durruti on the cover. The then delegates of the Greater Manchester County Association of Trade Union Council clearly didn't appreciate the publication at the time, but during the meeting a large party of French trade unionists from the CGT [communist] happened to be present and while many of the local English trade unionists held back the French delegation waded-in to buy up most of the commemorative booklets we had to hand, and even later following me to the toilets to get extra copies.
It struck us at the time how utterly frigid the English trade unionists were compared to their French 'communist' CGT comrades.
This thought occurs to me now as I now with sadness write my friend and comrade, Stuart Christie's obituary. I remember that sometime after Stuart wrote the first volume of his autobiography 'GRANNY MADE ME AN ANARCHIST', I wrote a critique of it entitled 'God Help the Anarchist movement that Needs Heroes'. This in turn led to a bitter altercation between me and Stuart on the website 'Libcom' in which I believe he labelled me 'an arsehole'. However, in 2006, it was a measure of Stuart's nobility that when I invited him to write an introduction to Tameside TUC's Spanish commemorative booklet he had no hesitation in agreeing to do the job.
He probably did it because he knew me from when I first met him in Paris in August 1964, when he was about to go on to embrace the risky venture in his ill-fated journey to Madrid and ultimately to a Spanish jail for his part in a proposed attempt to assassinate General Franco. At that time we were all staying in a 'safe house' with Germinal Garcia at his apartment near Place de la République*. My wife Joan and I were returning from Spain, having first worked in Denia, Alicante throughout 1963, and later on in early 1964 moved on to La Linea on the border with Gibraltar where I worked for the MOD at the Gibraltar airport. While in Denia my eldest lad was born at the clinica there in September 1963. While in Spain and later Gib. we had taken photos of the conditions in the shanty towns in Barcelona and we sent back reports on working conditions over there for the FIJL publication Nueva Senda. At that time we were being debriefed, and thought Stuart may have been on a similar mission to us, but soon found out that they had other plans for him. At one stage he asked for our advice and was naturally interested in our own experiences.
Stuart was still in Carabanchel jail [Madrid] when my family again returned to Spain in early 1967 on our way to work in Gibraltar having had difficulties working as an electrician in Rochdale following my involvement supporting the national engineering apprentice strikes in November 1964 and February 1964. Having been blacklisted by the British MOD and throughout Gibraltar with private companies with contracts with the MOD and other contracts with the British authorities the only place on the Rock that I had a serious chance of work was with the Gibraltar City Council, supported by the Transport & General Worker's Union and Albert Risso who had close links with Sir Joshua Hassan the Chief Minister.
The anarchists on Gibraltar at that time were active within the Transport & General Workers Union and were basically anarcho-syndicalists. Stuart identified with the syndicalists, and had fallen under the influence of Bobby Lynn who he says 'had become the backbone of the Glasgow anarchist movement'. I'd stayed with Bobby Lynn in the Gorbals in 1961 and he gave me his copy of 'The Sexual Revolution' by Wilhelm Reich. Bobby was a member of the Syndicalist Worker's Federation when I stayed with him in 1961. As news leaked of Stuart's arrest Peter Turner [FREEDOM EDITOR] had contacted Bobby Lynn in Glasgow and up there they had assured him that Stuart was so dedicated to the peace movement and that it was not likely that he was guilty as claimed by the Spanish authorities. This may have influenced the report in the syndicalist Direct Action which took the line that he must be innocent, and Wynford Hicks on behalf of the anarchists argued on TV news that he was probably the victim of an 'agent-provocateur'. Another Freedom editor Vernon Richards argued more sensibly that it mattered little whether Stuart was innocent or guilty the anarchist position should be to support him.
For my part I knew what had taken place, but anticipating returning to work in Spain and expecting to continue to help the group of young Spanish exiles of the FIJL involved with the failed attempt, I decided to remain silent. Stuart himself had not been prudent before his departure for Spain and had actually participated in a BBC2 program entitled 'Let Me Speak' hosted by Malcolm Muggeridge. Muggeridge, who had been a friend of George Orwell, had often identified morally and intellectually with Tolstoy and anarchism.
In his autobiography 'MY GRANNY MADE ME AN ANARCHIST'[2004] Stuart documents the sequence of events in the summer of 1964: 'In mid-July Salvador and Bernado [Gurucharri] told me I should be ready to leave for Paris by the end of the month. Everything was now in hand for my trip to Spain. Shortly before I left... I was invited to appear on what later turned out to be, for me, an almost disastrous chat show called Let Me Speak, on ...BBC2. Having a small spectrum of anarchists, with me and another young lad called Vincent Johnson representing the "revolutionary anarchists" Muggeridge asked me if I was sincere in my revolutionary aims...would I, for instance, given the opportunity, assassinate Franco?" It was an unlucky shot in the dark, for that was pretty damn close to what I was hoping to do. What could I say but yes?.'
It is an extraordinary admission for a revolutionary anarchist to make! I doubt that the Spaniards I knew in Paris or in Spain in the 1960s would have made such a confession on the BBC or before going on a mission such as Stuart anticipated. It's almost as if he had a death wish or secretly wanted to get caught. When we knew him in Paris in August 1964 he was hopelessly naive and clearly knew little of the reality of everyday Spanish life or working conditions. He struggled to pronounce the Spanish word for 'workers'.
On page 107 of his autobiography he writes: 'I may not have been wise or competent in what I did or the way I went about it, but I did not have the benefit of hindsight'.
Never mind 'hindsight' given what he had done did he have the benefit of foresight or even a glimpse of common sense? I say this knowing, as Stuart did, that other people suffered as a consequence of what he did and the mistakes that he and his handlers made at the time. I also say this as a friend of Stuart who exchanged correspondence with him regularly over the last few years, and had documented and detailed our differences in my earlier pamphlet. One thing that troubles me is not that he wore a kilt, but that he sported a war resister badge of a broken rifle on his chest while walking around Paris in 1964 as he carried our one-year-old son Deon. He told us that he'd visited Paris the year before in the Spring; it was more 'romantic' than in August. Being romantic was probably what attracted most people to Stuart as it was part on his charm.
Yet, when we had visited Ken Hawkes, then secretary of the Syndicalist Workers Fed., and his wife before we went to Spain in February 1963, the worst winter since 1947, they treated us to a bottle of Champagne as we'd just got married and reminded us to remove our Ban the Bomb badges before we left their house on Parliament Hill for Spain. I wonder why none of us thought to urged Stuart Christie to take off his tell-tale War resister badge?
I suppose that in August 1964, we were all a bit intoxicated by the atmosphere of a time in which Franco had just celebrated 25-years of peace, and a pale-faced Salvador Gurucharri and others had just been released from jail. In Paris, at that time, we were all in high spirits as things seemed to be moving in the right direction.
While there Stuart met other major figures in the exiled Spanish anarchist movement, the organised FIJL [Fed. of young libertarians] around the Internal Defence (DI), and including militants of long standing like Octavio Alberola* and Luis Andres Edo.
In his autobiography he describes what he did as 'the act of an adolescent' and he quotes a verse from Longfellow:
'A boy's will is the wind's will, and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.' [page 120]
On reflection he goes on to admit: 'Now it will seem like to many a foolish, naive, impulsive act...'and 'I cannot claim, either, that it was entirely altruistic - my motives were certainly in part a desire for excitement and adventure.'
On reflection he goes on to admit: 'Now it will seem like to many a foolish, naive, impulsive act...'
Essentially he was doing what we had done a year earlier when we went to Spain to escape from what then seemed like dreary Manchester; he was he says not satisfied with what would now be called 'gesture politics' of petitions and protests, and sought to engage directly with a struggle in Spain. Foresight or prudence would make cowards of us all; it was not part of his engaging personality at that time. It set Stuart outside the smelly little left wing orthodoxies which he left behind. Yet it led him to get a 'GO TO JAIL' card to a Madrid prison cell, and was for him a life changing event.
Once in Paris Stuart had made contact with the action groups of the exiled Spanish anarchist movement, organised around Internal Defence (DI) and involving militants of long standing like Octavio Alberola and Luis Andres Edo. As such during his disastrous mission he was later arrested in Madrid and charged with the possession of explosives. These were intended for an attempt on Franco’s life and he was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment. Thanks to a continuing international pressure he was freed after 3 years.
Why was General Franco and the Francoist regime so susceptible to international public opinion in the 1960s?
I think it was in his book 'The Face of Spain' [1950] that Gerald Brenan tried to explain the mellowing of the Franco regime. In that book he explained how the Falange and those who adhered to Franco began invest in real estate and escape the relative poverty of the 1940s and 1950s. We too quickly forget that it was not just the Spanish working-class that suffered after the Civil War, but the Spanish middle-classes experienced insecurity also. My boss Senor Such told me of how in the 1940s everyone in the fishing village where I lived and worked in 1963-4 had suffered depravation after the war and some had to eat cats. Later on it had become possible to make some progress and by the time we got there in the early 1960s things were looking up as the tourists began to arrive and with the development building work on the costas things were much more prosperous for many including the low-level Falangists. This allowed some softening of the regime which may some helped Stuart Christie escape with what turned out to be a relatively short sentence of 3-years in the end. Had he been arrested some ten years earlier for the same offence it may have been an altogether different story, but by the mid-1960s the supporters of the Franco regime felt much more secure than they had been during the Second World War or in its aftermath when to some extent Spain had been isolated internationally.
* FOOTNOTE: In the early hours of 11 May 2011, 86-year-old Germinal García, a militant of the Juventudes Libertarias (FIJL) and the Paris Local Federation of the CNT in the 1950s and 1960s, passed away (in Paris). At the end of the Spanish Civil War, 13-year old Germinal had been interned in Argeles-sur-Mer concentration camp where an unknown English woman, to whom he was ever grateful, cared for him. Stowing away on a Danish freighter, the Kitty Skov, from the port of Barcelona, he escaped to the United States, where he remained for a time in New York, passing himself off as a French citizen, returning later to France to became active in the anti-Francoist struggle. Shunning the limelight, but always in the background with his strong sense of solidarity, Germinal’s apartment in the Rue Lancry was a safe haven for comrades who had escaped from Franco’s Spain — and for guerrillas such as Quico Sabaté whenever he was in Paris (it was also used by Stuart Christie prior to his trip to Spain in 1964). For that and for his ongoing service to the libertarian movement, Germinal won the respect and friendship of all who knew him. With his passing, we have the satisfying memories and the privilege of having known the friendship of a good comrade. Germinal’s remains were cremated in Paris on 17 May 2011.Octavio Alberola, May 12, 2011 SEE ALSO https://www.facebook.com/TheOrwellSociety The Orwell Society - Home | Facebook The Orwell Society. 1.4K likes. The Orwell Society aims to promote the understanding and appreciation of the life and work of George Orwell. Join here:... www.facebook.com
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