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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The Plot to Kill Franco - Stuart Christie

Was General Franco a Fascist? by Brian Bamford

JOE Bailey sends NV a quote from Paul Preston, historian: “If people are looking for a quick and easy insult to those on the right, then fascist, is your go-to term,” he says. “If you’re asking an academic political theorist what constitutes a fascist then you’d have to say Franco isn’t.”

Derek Pattison had asked the question 'Was Franco a Fascist?' and he drew attention to some similarities and differences: 'Franco did use forced labour, concentration camps, and mass executions and terror was a deliberate strategy used to pursue his goal of overthrowing the republican government and winning the war. He then established a military dictatorship, but I don't think he'd much time for fascism, the Falange or its leader, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera.'

The historian, Sir Paul Preston, is an interesting personality to turn to for an answer to this question 'Was Franco a Fascist?'. The then Prof. Preston answer to the interviewer Rob Attar, was:

'If people are looking for a quick and easy insult to those on the right, then fascist, is your go-to term,” he says. “If you’re asking an academic political theorist what constitutes a fascist then you’d have to say Franco isn’t.'

And then Preston continued:

'But that’s not intended to let the Spanish dictator off the hook. “I caused quite a stir in Spain a few years ago when asked this question,” Preston recalled, “and I said Franco wasn’t a fascist … he was something much worse.

'What I meant by that is that the only absolutely indisputable fascist leader is Mussolini and the only indisputably fascist regime is Mussolini’s regime. And, there are so many ways in which Franco is different.'

'How, then, was Franco “much worse”? Preston argues that Franco was a “deeply conservative” man who, having previously served with the Spanish Army in North Africa, “had the mental furniture of a Spanish colonial officer”. This had seemingly imbued him with a shocking disregard for human life.'

Derek Pattison was questioning Stuart Christie's assumption that Franco was a 'Fascist' and I believe Derek is right to say General Franco didn't have much time for the Falange (the Spanish Fascist Party). In 1963, my boss pointed to a house where a local Fascist lived in Denia, Alicante, and told me that he'd been imprisoned for a time under Franco. What Sir Paul Preston now calls 'the mental furniture of a Spanish colonial office', Sr. Juan Paris, my boss, saw Franco as a solid army man who couldn't be swayed by the dodgy nature of party politicians. Later on in 1975, after Franco had died* my boss told me that he then regarded democracy as the best thing for Spain.

Juan was probably the best boss I've ever had and he looked after me and my family as best he could, but when I think on this, I'm put in mind of what Ignazio Silone said in 'School for Dictators' where he wrote on Fascist Italy about how folk flock to those in power and this was his advice:

'Don't be in such a hurry, I beg you. The poets and the monsignori, the generals, the ladies and their escorts will all come to you after you are in power. With some exceptions, they flock to success like flies to honey, or if you prefer, like rats to cheese. Democratic when there is a democratic government, they are naturally fascists under a fascist dictatorship and Communists under the hammer and sickle. The behaviour of the priests might surprise us, if the pagans hadn't already advised us that the winning cause has always pleased the gods. Christian theology later corroberated this interlectually, explaining that all authority comes from God. And as for the ladies, it's well known that Venus has always felt a particular attraction for Mars, the God of strength.'

This quote is probably a good explanation of the evolution of Franco's Spanish dictatorship, which was an authoritatian, regime rather than totalitarian as in Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia.

Sir Paul Preston himself also represents a good example how to get on in academia, he doesn't yet seem to have commented on the death of Stuart Christie, which is a little strange given that he was very keen to court Stuart, particularly in the early days, and Stuart told me he helped to get some anarchist publications into print in English. One of Preston's students 'Neil' told me that Preston made much of his association with Stuart in academic circles. When I once, some years ago, mentioned to Stuart about Prof. Preston's association with the International Brigade Memorial Trust, he told me that 'it was his bread and butter'..

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* Officially, Franco died a few minutes after midnight on 20 November 1975 from heart failure, at the age of 82 – on the same date as the death of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange, in 1936. Historian Ricardo de la Cierva claimed that he had been told around 6 pm on 19 November that Franco had already died.[171] Juan Carlos was proclaimed King two days later.

Regarding Stuart Christie by Martin Gilbert

I ONLY met him once. It was outside the gates of Speakers Corner, Hyde Park, in 1963, Stuart had only been in London a short while. His accent was so thick I had difficulty understanding him. We were both selling papers. I had PEACE NEWS, and SANITY, (now long-gone, published by national CND). Also, we were both selling FREEDOM, a very different paper from what it has declined into. Stuart indicated that the papers were selling very well. Soon, we were were both busy chatting with different people and I never saw him again.

When he was arrested [in August 1964] reactions were very mixed. Predictabley, the media’s response was something like”….typical anarchists...”. Young CNDers and our fellow travellers showed 100% solidarity with Stuart. We had an old motor coach to aid our campaigning, so drove to Blackpool for the Labour party conference.

Readers may know that back then CND was much more establishment oriented. The line was only to approve of traditional methods of getting our messages across. This was years before national CND voted to support non violent direct action; thanks to the women at Greenham Common in 1980. So instead of following the (then) strict line we lobbied for Stuart’s release. Old campaigners were furious with us. In mitigation we claimed, incorrectly, that he was only carrying literature; which was also illegal in Franco’s Spain.

Lessons were gained from it all. One was awareness of the extent of Franco’s spies. Also, how open we and other groups were to infiltration from different kinds of Cops. But too much caution can only lead to quietism.

martin gilbert Sept. ‘20

Octavio Alberola says goodbye to Stuart Christie

Octavio Alberola, who was in charge of Defensa Interior and was a close friend of Stuart’s has left us this farewell message to his friend.

Stuart Christie, comrade and friend

by OCTAVIO ALBEROLA

THE news of Stuart Christie’s death arrived by phone halfway through yesterday afternoon from comrade René after he asked if I had heard the bad news and after I quizzed him brusquely: Who’s dead? I could tell from his tone of voice that it must have been somebody close who had passed away.

René’s answer stopped me in my tracks, because even though Stuart had told me a week before that the cancer had left him still hoarse and that the findings of his medical tests were none too encouraging, it never at any moment occurred to me that he would be taken so quickly. I am surrounded by several male and female comrades – more or less of my own age – who are in none too rude health and at my age (due to turn 93 shortly) the thought that one’s days are numbered is just “normal”.

But in Stuart’s case, how could this be when he was eighteen years my junior? Besides, we had both been working on joint projects and both had been determined to plough ahead with our battles with the world of authority and exploitation.

To me, his death represents not just the loss of a comrade and friend but an end to long years collaborating on joint actions and initiatives designed to expose the injustices of the world in which we live and the fight for a fairer, freer world. A world that is possible for all of us who have not given up on wishing and trying to work towards a consistent practice of active, internationalist revolutionary solidarity.

We have known many years of brotherly relations ever since our first meeting back in August 1964 and up until 2020, without interruption. Half a century of our lives in tandem, one way or another, working on behalf of a common cause, heedless of borders. That struggle, though centred on the Spanish people’s political and social vagaries, initially under the Franco dictatorship and later under this phoney democracy spawned by the Transition/Transaction, has at all times carried the imprint of an internationalist revolutionary outlook.

The evidence of that, in Stuart’s case, was the time he spent behind bars in Spain and England, and in the case of Brenda his partner, in Germany and, in the cases of Ariane and myself, in Belgium and France. Experiences that bear witness to struggles that knew no borders as we knew that a characteristic of freedom is that it is the right of every man and woman.

So how could I not feel impelled to remember it now that our fraternization with Stuart has ended with his death? As well as with the death just a few days ago of the German comrade Doris Ensinger, the partner of Luis Andrés Edo, with whom Stuart shared some of his prison experiences and with whom he rubbed shoulders in their struggles; obviously, speaking for myself, the loss of Doris in a way represented the final ending of my fraternization-in-struggle with Luis. A finale that started some years back with Luis’s own death.

The fact is that in the case of Doris’s death too I was stopped in my tracks, startled by the news of her demise communicated to me by Manel, as barely a week earlier she had sent Tomás and me an email to let us know that she had been abruptly recalled to the hospital and undergone a transplant operation … But was now back home and feeling well …

Meaning that yet again I am brought face to face with the tenuousness of our existence and the need to preserve the memory of what we strove to be and do, to the very death.

Perpignan, 17 August 2020

Octavio Alberola

From RojoyNegro_Digital el Mar, 18/08/20; 15:02 http://rojoynegro.info/articulo/memoria/octavio-alberola-se-despide-stuart-christie Translated by: Paul Sharkey & REPRINTED BY KATE SHARPLEY

Brenda Christie: Stuart Christie's eulogy to his wife

Good morning everyone and thank you all for coming on this sad occasion to say goodbye to Bren, my wife, life partner, friend and comrade through fifty-one years of life’s vicissitudes, caprices and blessings — the beloved mother of Branwen — and Nanna to granddaughters Merri and Mo.

Brenda was an intensely private person who— although engaging, sociable and witty — disliked being the focus of attention, but I’ve no doubt she would have been pleased to see everyone here, sharing this day with us.

A baby-boomer, born in Shoreditch in London in April 1949, Bren’s formative years were spent in Gosport in Hampshire where her lovely dad, Bert, was a Chief Petty Officer, a ‘Sparks’ in the Royal Navy.

She hoped to take up a career in journalism, but despite her sharp intelligence, enquiring intellect, love of literature and creative writing skills, the breakup of her parents’ marriage and her tense relationship with her mother Eliza forced her to leave home at 15 and move to London where she became a copy typist, working in a variety of temporary jobs, including at the Treasury.

In 1967, her adventurous spirit took her to Milan where she worked for a time as companion to a glamorous American model, a job that introduced her to the dolce vita of Milan and Portofino, but it was a lifestyle that failed to satisfy her sense of moral integrity.

With news of the events of May 1968 in Paris and the radical political, musical and cultural turbulence that was taking place in Britain, largely provoked by the U.S. war in Vietnam, the feisty-spirited 19-year-old Brenda was drawn back to London to be part of the radical social and cultural revolution then taking place, which is where we got together on Bastille Day, 14 July 1968, shortly after my 22nd birthday.

We were together from then until the morning of her passing, just a month after she turned 70.

Those fifty-odd years of our lives together saw many adventures, good and not so good — laughter and tears — as happens in all relationships.

But it’s the treasured, shared and cheery memories that are the abiding ones.

On our first date in 1968 I took her to Jimmy’s Greek Restaurant, a carpeted sewer in Soho’s Frith Street which to me was excitingly cosmopolitan in character, but was also cheap with plentiful Mediterranean-style food. Brenda, however, was distinctly unimpressed, particularly when she spotted the column of cockroaches marching along the wainscoting by our heads.

We made our excuses and left for the more salubrious Amalfi in Old Compton Street. From there we went on to the theatre; Unity Theatre in Somers Town to see Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs for which I had wangled complimentary tickets.

I certainly knew how to treat a girl in those days.

After the performance we went back to my flat in Crouch End in North London where I further tried to impress Brenda with my skill in tossing a Spanish omelette, but my hand to eye coordination was skewed that night and it ended up splattered on the floor.

Brenda, who was precariously balanced on a three-legged chair at the time, laughed so much she leaned back, lost her balance and ended up on her back on the floor with the remains of the omelette, legs akimbo, unladylike, flashing her knickers.

Despite those early misadventures, and fortunately for me, Brenda shared my surreal sense of humour, and so began a tumultuous, lifelong, genuinely loving relationship.

Brenda was introduced originally to the Marxist-led International Socialists through her best friend Valerie Packham, and the pair were deeply involved in the staff and student occupation of the Hornsey College of Art in Crouch End, which took place from May to July 1968.

Later, during the final years of the fascist dictatorship in Spain, she became increasingly committed to the anti-Francoist cause, working closely with the clandestine anarchist First of May Group, which brought her under the radar of the Metropolitan Police Special Branch and the Security Service, MI5. That, of course, ran alongside her role as a co-founder of the anarchist publishing house Cienfuegos Press and her involvement with the Anarchist Black Cross and Black Flag magazine.

In the summer of 1971 I was framed and arrested on conspiracy and possession charges which led to me spending eighteen months on remand in Brixton Prison, which is when Brenda came into her own.

While holding down a job as a temporary copy typist, not only did she visit me most days throughout those eighteen months, she brought me cooked meals all the way from Shoreditch to Brixton on public transport.

She also played a crucial and pivotal role in helping to organise and coordinate my ultimately successful defence — that the only incriminating evidence against me had been planted by former Flying Squad detectives, with their superiors’ knowledge! — that and working late into the night typing up the barristers’ notes during the eight-month Old Bailey trial, one of the longest in British legal history.

Her character and integrity won her the grudging respect of the senior police officers involved in the case. One of them, Commander Ernest Bond, brazenly admitted to her — in the presence of a Chief Superintendent — that they knew I’d been ‘fitted up’, but they could live with my possible acquittal. As far as they were concerned they’d succeeded in keeping me out of circulation for eighteen months.

It’s at times such as those these that we come to really know people in ways of which others remain completely ignorant. Brenda, to me, exemplified the Sufi and humanist ideal of ‘faithful in loving friendship, kindness, compassion and solidarity’.

A few months after my acquittal, in May 1974, following the kidnapping in Paris by anti-fascists of a Francoist banker, a Special Branch officer visited our flat in Wimbledon and advised us to move out of London. Whether or not this was friendly advice or an implicit threat we decided not to put to the test. As Falstaff says in Shakespeare’s King Henry the Fourth, ‘The better part of valour is discretion’, and so we began our life Odyssey.

I may not always have been her Odysseus, but she was certainly always my Penelope.

Our first house was an nineteenth century mill house in Honley, Last of the Summer Wine country in West Yorkshire, in fact its exterior featured in a few episodes of that long-running series.

As well as typesetting our books and journals, Brenda and a friend opened a competitively priced teashop called Touchwood, which became a popular eatery for local mill workers and long-distance lorry drivers on the Trans-Pennine A6024 between Huddersfield and Manchester. Their home-made pies and pasties were to die for. On Touchwood’s last day, when we were preparing to leave Yorkshire for Sanday in Orkney, she and her partner Deanna gave all their regular customers free lunches. Many were in tears when they learned the teashop was closing down.

Our next home was the penultimate of the Northern Isles, Sanday in Orkney, where we lived for seven years with Bren’s beloved dad, Bert. It was idyllic for a time, especially made glorious by the birth of our daughter, Branwen, albeit in fairly dramatic circumstances.

Our wonderful lady doctor had been struck down by cancer and she had been replaced by a series of locums straight out of the animated cartoon Scooby Doo. When the one arrived who was to deliver Branwen he had clearly been drinking, as had the taxi driver of the Commer van that doubled as the island ambulance. To aggravate the situation, the only bottle of oxygen on the island had been used up that morning trying to revive a suicide who had jumped off the end of the pier, having filled his pockets with stones.

I lay on the bed beside Brenda dripping chloroform onto a tea towel covering a flour sieve, both of us breathing the fumes intended to ease the pain of the birth contractions, which somehow the doctor’s ineptness had caused to go out of synch.

In the end we had to call for the local inter-island aeroplane to airlift her to hospital on the Orkney mainland. Even that was problematic as a heavy haar, a sea mist, had enveloped the islands so completely that the pilot had to fly in dangerously low, just above sea level. Even the lifeboat couldn’t make it.

That and a few other run-ins with incompetent locums, some of whom had already been struck off the Medical Register two or three times, proved to be the writing on the wall, especially given our now elderly Bert’s deteriorating medical condition.

From Sanday we moved south again, to Cambridge where Brenda found a job as an editorial assistant with Cambridge University Press, working with the leading historian Albert Hourani and the noted Arabist Trevor Mostyn on a number of prestigious CUP titles such as the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa. Both men insisted Brenda was credited by name for her work on the encyclopedia, threatening to remove their names as authors and editors if the class-driven Press Syndics refused to comply, which they had done initially. To credit a lowly editorial assistant by name in such a distinguished publication was unheard of, and I doubt if it has happened since.

It was in Cambridge too that Brenda discovered what proved to be her true métier as a teacher, initially teaching Business Studies to 16- to 19-year-olds at Cambridge College of Further Education where her best friend Valerie was Senior Lecturer in charge of Secretarial Studies. Although to be honest she did think it was a thankless task trying to teach teenagers things they didn’t particularly care about — and to be somewhere they didn’t want to be.

However, after six years in Cambridge, Bert, Brenda’s delightful dad, who’d lived with us since our Yorkshire days, passed away. It was time again to move on, this time to Hastings where we settled for twenty years, largely to ensure that Branwen, our daughter, could put down roots and enjoy some stability with regard to her education and friends.

Among her talents Branwen had a predilection for drama. But it turned out that the principal of the local after-school drama studio she attended was not only a drama queen, but a complete chancer to boot, one whose knowledge and understanding of Shakespeare and his time and plays was embarrassingly superficial. Think Donald Trump meets Danny La Rue and you’ll get some idea of the kind of person I’m talking about.

The bottom line was that Brenda ended up teaching Branwen herself, and was so successful that she swept the board at the local Music and Drama Festival, as well as other festivals in East Sussex, Kent and South London, putting to shame the competing local drama schools. Other mothers approached her to teach their children, which led to Brenda setting up her own Rude Mechanicals Drama Studio. This lasted for almost 10 years and won the hearts and minds of her pupils, whom she enthused with her love of Shakespeare — to say nothing of winning countless drama festivals across the South East.

Our final move was to Clacton. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it coincided with a decline in Brenda’s health. A heavy smoker for more than 50 years, she had increasing breathing and mobility difficulties, but these were eased by the entry into her life of her two darling granddaughters, Merri — born in 2014 — and Mo, in 2017.

Their dynamic and irresistibly exuberant personalities boosted her spirits and recharged her morale enormously.

The end came much sooner than any of us expected.

Hardly a month had passed between her biopsy and diagnosis of small-cell cancer, the first chemo session, and her death.

It was sudden and unexpected — it came in the hour of the wolf, the hour between night and dawn.

What Branwen and I draw some small comfort from is the fact that it wasn’t a long and painful process. She didn’t suffer, she died at home, loved and cared for, not in a cheerless hospital ward or strange hospice room, and I was beside her, able to comfort her at the end. It was her time to go.

This morning we say goodbye to Brenda’s body, but not to her spirit or to the love we had for her and she for us. She has joined what some African societies call the ‘sasha’, the recently departed, whose time on earth overlaps with people still alive. They do not die, they live on in the memories of the living, who can call them to mind, and bring them to life in stories and anecdote. Only when the last person to know an ancestor dies does that ancestor leave the ‘sasha’ for the ‘zamani’; the generalised ancestors who are never forgotten, but are revered in memory.

Brenda was a feisty and spirited woman who found it difficult to pull her punches in her dealings with others. She didn’t suffer fools gladly — or even badly, including me on occasions. But despite our sporadic harsh but soon forgotten and forgiven outbursts of frustration, words can never express my own and Branwen’s profound gratitude to Brenda for bringing purpose, happiness and a sense of fulfilment to our lives — not least for her constant part in the general effort to alleviate the burden of the darker times we’ve shared.

Goodbye, dear.

 **************************************************************************

Brenda Christie died at home in June after a short battle with cancer. At the KSL we have always tried to commemorate the less famous comrades who made up the anarchist movement. Intensely private, she appeared only as ‘Marigold’ (the typesetter) in the Cienfuegos Press titles she helped publish. Later, the academic authors ensured she was thanked by name when she worked as an editorial assistant at Cambridge University Press.

Brenda worked with the First of May Group against Franco’s dictatorship. She also thought of the name for and played a central role in the Stoke Newington Eight Defence Group. Stuart Christie in his eulogy says Brenda ‘played a crucial and pivotal role in helping to organise and coordinate my ultimately successful defence… working late into the night typing up the barristers’ notes during the eight-month Old Bailey trial, one of the longest in British legal history. Her character and integrity won her the grudging respect of the senior police officers involved in the case.’ John Barker, one of those convicted, later thanked her for her work with the defence group saying that she had saved him several years of prison time.

Anarchists can have complex lives: Brenda loved Shakespeare and ran a drama school. In the eulogy, Stuart tells how she turned her back on the ‘dolce vita’ of sixties Milan because it ‘failed to satisfy her sense of moral integrity.’ Instead, she lived a life full and committed. Our thoughts go out to Stuart, Branwen, Merri and Mo and all who knew and worked with her.

[You can read Stuart’s Eulogy at https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/9kd6dm]

Image: Stuart and Brenda Christie, Paris, 1974: photo by Antonio Téllez (who also cooked the delicious rabbit á la Basque). With thanks to Stuart Christie. https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/djhc94

 KSL

Brenda Christie, who has died of cancer aged 70, was my wife, friend and comrade for more than 50 years. An intensely private person, though engaging, sociable and witty, she was a typist, editor, teacher and political activist; we met in London in 1968 on Bastille Day.

Brenda was born in Shoreditch, east London, daughter of Eliza (nee Evans) and Bert Earl, and grew up in Gosport, Hampshire, where her father was a chief petty officer in the navy. With a love of literature and a sharp intelligence, she had hoped to make a career in journalism, but the breakup of her parents’ marriage led her to leave home at 15 and move to London, where she became a copy typist.

In 1967 her adventurous spirit took her to Milan, where she worked as a companion to an American model, but the political and cultural turbulence of the time drew her back to London. Brenda was introduced to the International Socialists (which became the Socialist Workers party) through her best friend, Valerie Packham, and they were involved in the occupation of Hornsey College of Art in 1968.

She was also committed to the anti-Francoist cause, working with the anarchist First of May Group, which brought her to the attention of the Metropolitan police’s special branch and the intelligence services, as did her role as a co-founder, with me, of the anarchist publishing house Cienfuegos Press, and her association with the Anarchist Black Cross and Black Flag magazine.

When I was arrested and falsely charged with being involved in the Angry Brigade conspiracy in 1971, Brenda visited me almost daily in Brixton prison for 18 months, bringing home-cooked meals on public transport, and helped my legal team in my successful defence and acquittal.

In 1974, following the kidnapping in Paris of a Francoist banker by anti-fascists, a special branch officer visited our flat in Wimbledon and advised us to move out of London. We went first to Honley, in Yorkshire, where Brenda and a friend opened a teashop, Touchwood, which became popular with local millworkers and lorry drivers.

Our next home was Sanday in Orkney, where our daughter, Branwen, was born and where we continued our work on Cienfuegos Press. We then moved to Cambridge, and Brenda worked for Cambridge University Press on a number of titles with Albert Hourani and Trevor Mostyn including the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Middle East and North Africa.

In Cambridge she discovered her true metier in education, initially teaching business studies at Cambridge college of further education. After a move to Hastings, East Sussex, where we settled for 20 years, Brenda’s teaching extended to giving drama lessons to Branwen – who later became an actor – and setting up the Rude Mechanicals Drama Studio.

Our final move to Clacton, Essex, coincided with a decline in her health, the pain of which was eased by the arrival of our granddaughters, Merri and Mo, who survive her, along with me and Branwen.

********************************

REVIEW: The Spanish Revolution 'Explained'

Review:  'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution 1936-39' 

by Vernon Richards (introduction by David Goodway). 

£15.00 ($21.95) Published by PM Press / Freedom Press.

reviewer Brian Bamford

Spanish Civil War &  

Sinful Post-Hoc Reasoning *

VERNON RICHARDS, a former long-term editor of the anarchist newspaper Freedom, in his introduction to the First English Edition (1953) of his 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution' made a modest admission of his own limitations as he tried to counter his  critics:  'Some have cricised me for being wise after the event and for writing on events of which I was but a spectator from afar.  I mention these criticisms as a warning to the reader of my limited qualifications for dealing with such a complex subject.  But I feel I should in my defence also point out that that most of the criticisms I have made in this book were expressed by me in 1936-1939 in the columns of the journal Spain and the World.'

When recently I spoke to the historian David Goodway, who wrote the introduction for this current PM PRESS edition, he suggested that his distance from the events in Spain allowed Vernon Richards to be more 'objective' in his analysis. His remark did not entirely surprise me both because it reflected the view of other people in the Freedom group with whom I have discussed this matter, but additionally this approach fits with what Dr. Goodway argued when I attended one of his lectures at a Northern Radical History Network event in Bradford in April 2013, where he passionately argued that historians in the nature of things all develop a narrative, and then go on to relentlessly pursue the advocacy of that perspective.  Thus, history becomes a form of the art of advocacy and polemical presentation. 

'History is what historians do'?

'History is what historians do', declared Isaiah Berlin in his book 'The Proper Study of Mankind'.

Post-hoc reasoning is the fallacy where we believe that because one event follows another, the first must have been a cause of the second.  In some cases this is true, but other factors may be responsible.

Did the decision of the CNT to participate in the governments first in Barcelona and later in Madrid lead to a degeneration of the integrity of the whole of the Spanish anarchist body politic?  Was the leadership to blame for the compromise of principles or was it also a dereliction of duty on the part of the rank and file in the CNT?

In Chapter XX Vernon Richards responds to some of the critics of the original English edition.who claimed he had 'over-emphasised the faults of the leaders of the CNT-FAI' and 'had been "over-charitable" to the rank and file members of the revolutionary organisations.'   Richards admits these criticisms are 'valid, though we (he) also believes that we (he) has erred in the right direction!'

He argues further:  'The rank and file saw - or "instinctively felt" - more clearly than the leaders, and we (he) have no doubt in our mind that the action of the workers in raising the barricades in Barcelona in May 1937 was a last desperate attempt to save the revolution from strangulation by the Jacobins and the reactionary politicians who had insinuation by themselves once more into positions of power.  Barcelona in May 1937 was to the Spanish Revolution what Kronstadt, sixteen years earlier, had been to the Russian Revolution.'

The seeds of the 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution'?

VERNON Richards admits in his Introduction (1953) that his historical account would never have been written but for the publication of the first two volumes of La CNT en la Revolution Espanola by Jose Peirats.  Other sources he gives are Diego Abad de Santillan's Por que perdimos la guerra and Gerald Brenan's Spanish Labyrinth.  

Recently Stuart Christie told me that Vernon Richards had written this history in response to Felix Morrow's Revolution & Counter-Revolution in Spain (New York: Pathfinder, 1938).  I haven't been able to confirm this but in his Biographical Postscript in 1972 Vernon Richards welcomed 'more material.... from.all quarters on the left' including Felix Morrow's  book.  

Stuart Christie e-mailed me to say:  'My recollection of Vero’s book was that it was an attempt to respond to Felix Morrow’s half-decent 'Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain’.

What is notable about Felix Morrow's Trotskyist account here is that he, like so many Marxists, focuses on the correct  political leadership and he argues that the anarcho-syndicalist CNT 'had changed little since its origin in the Cordoba Congess of 1872' and being 'Hopelessly anti-political, it played no role in bringing the Republic', adding  'Spain would not find its ideological leadership here'.  

Mr. Morrow concludes his analysis:  'Thus, the (Spanish) proletariat was without leadership to prepare it for its great tasks, when the republic arrived.  It was to pay dearly for this lack!'

What Morrow is doing here is using apriori or cookbook thinking in which he and Leon Trotsky use to make sense of the Spanish context in the historical background and development of the Spanish Civil War and to create a blueprint for what to do.  He takes the view that what was needed in the Spanish conflict was a 'Bolshevik methodology' (p6 of 'Revolution & Counter-Revolution in Spain' pub. by Pathfinder) arguing:
'The making of the Soviet Union and its achievements - a peasant country like Spain - were extraordinarily popular in Spain.  But the Bolshevik methodology of the Russian Revolution was almost unknown.  The theoretical backwardness of Spanish socialism had produced only a small wing for Bolshevism in 1918.'   

And yet most of the Spanish anarchists rejected the Bolshevik model.  Indeed, one of the main concerns of the adherents of the CNT and the anarchists in the FAI in July 1936, was to avoid what they saw as the errors associated with the development of the Russian Revolution.   Vernon Richards presents it thus in Ch. IV entitled 'ANARCHIST DICTATORSHIP OR COLLABORATION AND DEMOCRACY':
'The dilemma of the "anarchist and confederal dictatorship" or "collaboration and democracy" existed only for those "influential militants" of the CNT-FAI who, wrongly interpreting their functions as delegates, took upon themselves the task of directing the popular movement. '

Mr. Richards begins by saying:  'The first mistake, it should be remembered, was made in the early days of the struggle, when an ill-armed people were halting a carefully prepared military operation carried out by a trained and well-equipped army, which no one, not even some of the "influential members" of the CNT-FAI, imagined could be resisted.'

Richards concludes:  'The slogan of the CNT-FAI leadership - "the war first, the revolution after" - was the greatest blunder that could have been made.'
He supports this with a quote from Diego Abad de Santillan:
'We knew that it was not possible to triumph in the revolution if we were not victorious in the war.  We even sacrificed the revolution without noticing that that sacrifice also implied the sacrifice of the objectives of the war.'

Against this there is the view of Paul Preston, perhaps currently the most widely read historian in the English language on the Spanish Civil War, who argues:
'While exhilarating to participants and observers such as George Orwell, the great collectivist experiments of the autumn of 1936 did little to create a war machine.... The May events witnessed by Orwell in Barcelona were provoked by the need to remove obstacles to the efficient conduct of the war.  Despite incorporating the working class militias into the regular forces and dismantling the collectives, Negrin's government still did not achieve victory - not because its policies were wrong but because of the international forces arrayed against the Republic.'

Shortly before I embarked on this review one of  Preston's former students sent me this e-mail:
'The bottom line is Paul’s (Preston) fundamental and unshakeable belief that the absolute priority on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War should have been to focus on the conventional war effort and not on the Revolution, which was detrimental to that effort — and his total support for the actions of the Negrin government and the integrity of Negrin himself.'

On the 15th, July 2016, during an interview with the historian Ian Kershaw, entitled 'The Last Days of the Spanish Civil War', Paul Preston had even claimed that Negrin was 'the Churchill of the Spanish republic - the great War Leader.'   

The main danger in philosophy, as Lars Hertzberg identifies it, is the danger of apriorism, the idea that we can tell how things “must be”.  It strikes me that some English historians like Sir Paul Preston and Dr. David Goodway readily embrace apriorism: Preston in 'The Spanish Holocaust'** and Goodway in his claim that all historians pursue and advocate a preconceived narrative.*** 

Yet Isaiah Berlin in his monumental book The Proper Study of Mankind wrote:  'History does not reveal causes; it presents only a blank succession of unexplained events.'   

In Sir Paul Preston's interview above with Ian Kershaw, Preston said that he intended to write a book about the 'guilty men' and specified Largo Caballero as a principle culprit in this respect.  Similarly Mr. Richards reveals his own bias when commenting on Burnett Bolloten's book, which he otherwise admires, he writes:  'The new material I think presents the socialist/trade union leader Largo Caballero in too favourable a light - as a victim of intrigues - whereas he was an old fox, as are all trade union leaders - not least the anarcho-syndicalist variety, such as Lopez, Peiro, and Pestana.'

I remember Jim Pinkerton, the former International Secretary of the old Syndicalist Workers' Federation, once told me that Vernon Richards would never join a trade union because it was not in his nature to do so.  At one point in this book he even describes a trade union as if it were what the sociologists call a 'total institution':  
'And trade unions just like other self-contained concentrations of human beings, such as prisons, armies, and hospitals, are small-scale copies of existing society with its qualities, as well as its faults.' 

Like Vernon Richards I've spent some time in prison in the UK, and in the summer of 1963, I was even held in a dungeon in a small village in the province of Segovia, and I can tell him that there is a vast qualitive difference in these experiences to being a rank and file member of a trade union in either the UK, in the T&G in Gibraltar, or in the La Linea branch of the CNT in Spain.  
 
Mr. Richards demonstrates his apriorism in the section subtitled 'Anarchism and Syndicalism' which begins by declaring:  'In organisations with a mass following, the small anarchist minority can only retain its identity and exert a revolutionary influence by maintaining a position of intransigence.' 

Then Richards concludes by telling us and the Spaniards struggling to tackle the privations of the Civil War, that:  'Thirty years earlier, Malatesta, with that profound understanding of his fellow men which inspired all his writings, had clearly seen the effects of the fusion of the anarchist movement with the syndicalist organisation...'  

In reviewing this book it is clear that it is well worth reading the present work, for as Jose Peirats in 1954 wrote:  'It is important to anarchists to draw the lessons of the facts and actions of their own movement.'    Yet Peirats argues Richards's book which extols Malatesta and anarcho-communist insurrection over the anarcho-syndicalist General Strike has flaws as well as virtues.  Indeed I seem to recall that Peirats book on  The CNT in the Revolution Espanola arguing that the anarchists were in fact 'too insurrectionary' in so far as they seized the towns and then neglected the small pueblos.

And yet, though I would have you read these histories I am mindful of what Peirats said about the Vernon  Richards' Lessons of the Spanish Revolution, he declared:  
'este obrita' (small work) is too 'severo' and 'demasiado lateral' (too bias) and 'selectivo'.  Peirats concludes that 'none of his (Richards's) statements will be contradicted by history' but it is necessary 'to give to facts their relative importance.'

We must be aware that all these historians Richards, Goodway, and Preston are guilty of  apriorism.  Both Richards and Preston, have criticised Orwell for his original naivety about both the situation in Spain when he went to Spain.  That, in my view, makes Orwell's observations more reliable because it helps him to observe the unfolding of events without the clutter of preconceived notions.

Lars Hertzberg takes up this question 'apriorism' by addressing an issue that was absolutely fundamental for a philosopher like Wittgenstein: the question of honesty.  According to Hertzberg, Wittgenstein always regarded honesty as an issue in philosophy, and the question of what it means to “try to keep philosophy honest” is unavoidable for anyone working in the Wittgensteinian tradition.  Hertzberg is not saying that philosophers in that tradition are more honest than others.  His point is rather that for Wittgenstein “a concern with one’s intellectual honesty is internal to the difficulty of philosophy”. 

In the case of the historians like Richards, Goodway and Preston, their primary concern is the art of advocacy. 

When Peirats writes it is necessary 'to give to facts their relative importance' it is because he is conscious that Richards has undervalued the experience of the heat of the moment in the context of the Spanish Civil War.  When I wrote in Freedom an obituary for Frederica Montseny**** in January 1994, Vernon was critical complaining to Charles Crute that it was too sympathetic to 'someone like her' and that that I hadn't refered to his own book.  Frederica had joined the republican government as a Minister but had later admitted that it was a mistake.

Helenio Capellas, the Catalan anarchist whose father was in the same Los Solidarios group as Durruti and Garcia told me in the 1990s that while Durruti was not so bright, Spanish anarchism had a lucky escape when Garcia Oliver didn't succeed in dominating the anarchist movement, because he would have proven to be a bit too much like an anarchist Lenin.

This is what Peirats means when he claims Richards is too severe on 'individuals' by which Richards means those guilty folk who joined and supported the republican government: I remember in 1964 reading in a  glossy Spanish Civil War history publication on a news-stand, that was produced by people sympathetic to Franco, and it claimed that the effect of anarchists joining the government was shocking in its effect on Spaniards in the 1930s.  

“Propuesta Premio Nobel de la Paz al Generalísimo Franco”

In 1964, General Franco's Spain commemorated 'XXV años de paz franquista : sociedad y cultura en España hacia', and I was with my family in the Andalucian town Ronda in the August of that year when the festival was in full swing; indeed 1964 was also the year that Franco was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace.  At that time I was just discovering Ronda a town which Ernest Hemingway and Ava Gardner spent time, but it was also where my one-year old eldest son caught a dose of hay fever and started to vomit and failing to keep his food down.  A visit to the local Chemist - we could't afford a doctor - who gave us suppositories (Spain at that time depended on imported French medicine and it meant using suppositories for more ailments than constipation) which cured him within a couple of days.

But such everyday problems are trivial to the historian who works on a grand scale.  The problem with the historians according to Tolstoy is that 'Everything is forced into a standard mold invented by the historians:  Tsar Ivan the Terrible,... after 1560 suddenly becomes transform from a wise and virtuous man into a mad and cruel tyrant.  How?  Why? - You mustn't even ask...'  

This is what Dr. David Goodway has already admitted above and it is something which truly represents the poverty of the historians.  At least Goodway was honest about that,   But Vernon Richards, unlike his companera Marie Louise Berneri, never went to Spain during the Civil War.  He later, after 1958 helped to set-up a resort on the Costa Brava.  In that way he had contact with the Catalans and found that in the rural areas the people in the villages 'talked openly, because they knew who could not be trusted in the community, whereas in Barcelona, for instance, you did not know your neighbour at the next cafe table and therefore talked openly at home or outside away from the crowds.'  That seemed  consistent with my own experience in Alicante in 1963 and later in Andalucia; I remember what a shock it was in 1967 when I went to live briefly in Portugal, in Elvas, and found the Portuguese talking freely in bars about politics.

The texture of life & 'unreal histories'

or how historians get fat?

When Isaiah Berlin***** addressed what Tolstoy had to say about the historians he quoted from the War and Peace, epilogue, part 1, chapter 1:  'If we we allow that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life [i.e. as a spontaneous activity involving consciousness of free will] is destroyed.' 

According to Berlin: "Tolstoy wanted to write a historical novel whose 'principal aims was to contrast the 'real' texture of life, both of individuals and communities, with the unreal picture presented by historians.  Again and again in the pages of War and Peace we get a sharp juxtaposition of 'realty' what 'really' occurred - with the distorting medium through which it will later be presented in the official accounts offered to the public, and indeed be recollected by the actors themselves - the original memories having now been touched up by their own treacherous (inevitably treacherous because automatically rationalising and formalising) minds.  Tolstoy is perpetually placing the heroes of War and Peace in situations where this becomes particularly evident."

What we have in these histories of the historians is what Tolstoy calls the 'great illusion' which he sets out to expose.  The historian Paul Preston in the interview already referred to with Ian Kershaw,  related about when he went to Spain:  'Of course the Spain of the late 1960s, was much nearer to the Spain of the civil War than the Spain of today, ... original memories.'  He also made a joke to Kershaw:  'I was thin when I went to Spain'.  Since then he's made a good living writing about little else.


It is because of this defect attributed to the historians so clearly perceived by Tolstoy, that explains why George Orwell's 'Homage to Catalonia' with all its limitations is in the end is so much more a populat and influential to the work of the professional historians of the likes of Paul Preston.   As I write this Sir Paul Preston himself is having to admit his debt to Gerald Brenan, formerly a member of the Bloomsbury Group; with  ‎Lytton Strachey,  Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, and E. M. Forster, and later author of The Spanish Labyrinth: an Account of the Social & Political Background of the Spanish Civil War.  Brenan was more of an anthropologist than a historian and besides the Spanish Labyrinth wrote about village life in Andalucia, as was  Julian Pitt-Rivers who wrote People of the Sierra a study of the village of Grazellema a short bus ride from Ronda.  Franz Borkenau  produced an eye-witness accounts in the The Spanish Cockpit as a sociologist who visited Spain in the midst of the war in 1936 and 1937.  Even Vernon Richards and Jose Peirats were really autodidacts rather than professional historians, and I believe they were better off for this.

I together with my young wife lived for over a year in the home of a recently widowed seamstress and her two daughters, Conchita and Pepita, in the fishing village of Denia.  It was there that my eldest lad was born in August 1963.  Vernon Richards refers in his biographical postscript to Margarita Balaguer, an eighteen-year-old seamstress in a haute.couture fashion house 'which she had attempted  unsuccessfully to collectivize found the liberation of women the most rewarding of all the revolutionary conquests.  For as long as she could remember she had fought the accepted notion that 'men and women could  never be friends.'  Now she found she had better friends among men than among women.  A new comradeship had arisen."  I don't know what my seamstress landlady, Senora Lola, in Denia, would have had to say about that all those years ago when we went to tidy-up her dead husband's niche in the cemetery on All Souls Day in 1963.  Last month, some 65 years after General Franco was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, the socialist goverment of the acting Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sanchez has had the remains of its former dictator from the state mausoleum in the Valley of the Fallen, where he was buried in 1975, for reburial in a private grave, and  Sanchez claims it is a step towards national reconciliation, the exhumation was the most significant move in years by Spanish authorities to lay the ghost of the general whose legacy still divides the country he ruled as an autocrat for nearly four decades.  Meanwhile Catalonia is in crisis over the imprisionment of the Catalan nationalist leaders, and a poll by the pollster 40dB for EL PAÍS is suggesting that Spain which will be holding its fourth general election in four years his coming Sunday, and yet the new vote is not likely to break the prolonged political stalemate, according to a survey by the pollster 40dB for the newspaper EL PAÍS.


*  Logic and Sin in the writings of LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN by Philip R. Sheilds:  Bertrand Russell was fond of relating the following story about Ludwig Wittgenstein's student days at Cambridge:  "he used to come to my rooms at midnight and, for hours, he would walk backwards anf forwards like a caged tiger.  On one such evening, after an hour or two of dead silence, I said to him, 'Wittenstein, are you thinking about logic or about your sins?'  'Both,' he said, and then reverted to silence." .'

**Danny Evans in the Bibliographical Postscript to 'Lessons of the Spanish Revolution' writes:  'Paul Preston, has moved in the opposite direction to the drift of specialist historiography, providing increasingly caricatured depictions of Spanish anarchists in his later work, most notably 'The Spanish Holocaust' (London: Harper Press, 2013).'

***  Dr. Goodway in his portrayal of the job of the historian at the 4th Northern Radical History Network meeting held on Saturday 20 April 2013, in Bradford

****    In November 1936, Francisco Largo Caballero appointed Montseny as Minister of Health. In doing so, she became the first woman in Spanish history to be a cabinet minister.^[2] She was one of the first female ministers in Western Europe (but preceded by Danish Minister of Education, Nina Bang and Miina Sillanpää of Finland). She aimed to transform public health to meet the needs of the poor and the working class. To that end, she supported decentralized, locally l-responsive and preventative health care programs that mobilized the entire working class for the war effort. She was influenced by the anarchist sex reform movement, which since the 1920s had focused on reproductive rights and was minister in 1936 when Dr. Félix Martí Ibáñez, the anarchist director general of Health and Social Assistance of the Generalitat de Catalunya, issued the Eugenic Reform of Abortion, a decree that effectively made abortion on demand legal in Catalonia.  Once in exile took the view that it was an error for the anarchists to have participated in the republican government in 1936.

***** The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays by Isaih Berlin (PIMLICO) 1998.

  

Torment and Corruption in British Jails



Specialist "Tornado" teams were sent into HMP Swaleside, on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, after a disturbance at about 19:00 GMT on Thursday.

Meanwhile a prison spokeswoman said:

'The challenges in our prisons are longstanding and won’t be solved overnight but the justice secretary is committed to making sure our prisons are stable while we deliver wholesale reforms to the prison estate to help offenders turn their lives around and reduce reoffending.'
Meanwhile, a week ago rioting prisoners took over four wings of HMP Birmingham, setting fire to stairwells, destroying paper records and causing £2m in damage. It was the latest high-profile disturbance to break out in a jail, prompting Justice Secretary Liz Truss to warn that "long-standing" problems in the nation's prisons could take months to solve.

AN editorial in the Financial Times last Wednesday commenting on the state of British prison's being 'a national disgrace', quoted Fyodor Dostoyevsky as saying that 'the degree of civilisation in a society can be judged by entering its prisons'.

In 1971 or thereabouts, a prison officer in Brixton jail suggested to Stuart Christie then remanded in there of charges relating to the Angry Brigade, that he should write a comparative book about his experiences in Spanish and English prisons.  He was found not guilty when the case came to trial.  Later in his autobiography 'Granny made me an anarchist' Stuart Christie wrote:

'I discussed this with Miguel Garcia, my friend and former fellow prisoner, he agreed that it was the soullesness of British prisons that made them outstanding in the history of penology.  National characteristics come into it as well.  Cold cabbage, muddy fishcakes, soggy sponge lumpy custard and gnats' piss for tea would be considered a provocation diet in Spain.  The authorities offering it would be expecting a riot.  British prisoners have probably been conditioned by years of factory canteens, greasy spoon cafes and now Macdonalds. 

'But there was another striking difference between the two countries: British jails were run on a system of state socialism, where you get what your given ('Incentives' and 'earned privileges' are now the system).  Spanish jails in Franco'ws time were run along on much more humane lines inasmuch as there was some degree of choice involved.  You could work and earn more, or – and this is a punishment – not work and scrape by if you were prepared to do without things like fags and Serrano ham sandwiches.  You could have money sent in from outside and spend it in a fanteen or the prison restaurant.  Thus responsibility for the individual's quality of life in prison became his own, that of his family and his comrades.

'Like money everywhere, its circulation in jail leads to corruption, but it is also the one thing that eases tyranny.  Corruption certainly exists in English jails – albeit fitfully.  In Spain it was built into the system.  But for those who have illusions as to what can be achieved by the parliamentary system, a comparison of Spanish and English prisons would be interesting.'

As the prison spokeswoman said 'the challenges to our prisons are longstanding...'

  

THE OTTER MEMOIR

by Séamas Cain
'I first met Laurens Otter outside a Labour Party Conference in Blackpool in 1959:  he was selling Peace News and I was with some Young Liberals from the North West demonstrating.  Later, in 1960, Laurens came to address the Rochdale Young Liberals on anarchism and worker's control.  He was involved in the peace movement and the Committee of 100, and for some of us he had a big influence on our development as anarchists in this country in the 1960s.  A member of the Syndicalist Worker's Federation, he had been a founding member of the National Rank & File Movement in London in 1959-60.'  (editor) 

LAURENS Otter was a prominent activist in the Ban-the-Bomb Movement in Britain during the late 1950s and early 1960s.  Indeed, he was a strategist and theoretician for The Committee of 100 and Polaris Action.  Mr. Otter has now published a Memoir of his life and activism.  I think it will prove to be of some historical interest.

Over the years Mr. Otter has been a prodigious small-press publisher.  He has published any number of collections of essays, as well as collections of poetry and plays by various authors.  His Memoir, however, provides a wealth of specific details and glimpses of movements that challenged established institutions throughout the world.

Laurens Otter has written:  “My parents knew Gandhi in India — mother had first contacted him when she was in South Africa, she used to fast whenever he did and my elder brother and I (in my case from the age of 4) used to fast for a day or two whenever Gandhi began to fast.”

Martin Bashforth, the editor of The Otter Memoir, has written that “Laurens belongs to a generation who, though they did not know it at the time, laid the foundations for the New Left in the 1960s and beyond.  Laurens was very much one of the activists from that generation — people who gave the movement its practical impetus.  They created organisations, movements, and publications to which those of us born after World War Two could turn as we worked out our response to the world around us.  In particular, during the late 1950s and early 1960s their use of non-violent civil disobedience was an inspiration, even for those of us too timid to adopt these tactics ... The Memoir as it stands admirably sums up the culture on the Left that had been created since 1945 and that deserves to be revisited by today's networked dissident generation.  They need to honour their forebears and learn from them.”

The Otter Memoir is available here as a free download ...

https://oldredfogey.wordpress.com/laurens-otter/

This Memoir contains descriptions of encounters, disagreements/agreements, and/or interactions between Laurens Otter and Richard Acland, Alex Alexander, Frank Allaun, Andy Anderson, Lady Clare Annesley, Pat Arrowsmith, Brian Bamford, John Banks, Donald Bannister, Robert Barltrop, Ernie Bates, Olwen Battersby, Brian Behan, Desmond O'Neill Belshawe, John Bishop, John Boland, Claude Bourdet, Maurice Brinton, Eileen Brock, Hugh Brock, Lily Brown, Peter Copper Brown, Tom Brown, Dr. Noel C. Browne, Oliver Browne, Forbes Burnham, Melita Burrell, Mike Callinan, Mary Canipa, April Carter, Ian Celnick, Ray Challinor, Terry Chandler, Terry Chivers, Stuart Christie, Bill & Joan Christopher, Chichester Clark, Howard Clark, George Clarke, Tony Cliff, Ken Coates, Kelso Cochrane, G.D.H. Cole, Canon John Collins, Phil Cooke, Mike Craft, Rikki Dalton, Lawrence Daly, Sir Tam Dalyell of the Binns, baronet, Dorothy Day, Francis Deutsch, Ian Dixon, Dr. Richard Doll, Kurt Dowson, Peggy Duff, Raya Dunayevskaya, Father Alan Edwardes, Freda Ehlers, Robert Ehlers, Stanley Evans, Marianne Faithful, Baron Brian Faulkner, Leah Feldmann, Michael Foot, George Foulser, Crystal Gates, Dorothy & Norman Glaister, Ygael Gluckstein, Victor Gollancz, David Goodway, David Grahame, Martin Grainger, Eddie Grant, Robert Green, Jo Grimond, Reg Groves, Stephen Gwynn, Denzil Harber, Margaret & Bryan Hart, Ernie Hartley, Ken Hawkes, Stephen Hawking, Eric Heffer, Ammon Hennacy, Wynford Hicks, Axel Hoff, Philip Holgate, Gerald Holtom, Bishop Trevor Huddlestone, Cheddi Jagan, C.L.R. James, Brenda Jordan, Pat Jordan, Francis Jude, Matt Kavanagh, Douglas Kepper, Jim Kilfedder, Father Gresham Kirkby, Charles Lahr, John Lall, Kitty Lamb, Bill Lean, Father Kenneth Leech, John Lloyd, Meng-Tse Lo, Keith Lye, Freddie Lyons, Seán MacStíofáin, Ollie Mahler, Father Donald Manners, Harry Marsh, André Marty, Madame Natalia Trotskaya, Tom Mboya, John McGuffin, Pronchais McGuinness, George McLeod, Harry McShane, Clifford Mélotte, Albert Meltzer, Hélène Michon, Renée & Lucien Michon, Yvonne Michon, Bernard Miles, Rita Milton, Harry Mister, Ron Moir, George Molnar, Sybil Morrison, Ken Morse, Peter Moule, Arthur Moyse, Hilda Murrell, Colin Myers, Mike Nolan, John Olday, Captain Terence O'Neill, Dr. Chris Pallis, Jeanne Pallis, Max Patrick, Geoffrey Payne, Inge & Donovan Pedelty, John Pilgrim, Carl Pinnel, George Plume, Eric Preston, J.B. Priestley, Stu Purkiss, Jim Radford, Mike Randle, Vero Recchioni, Vernon Richards, Archbishop Tom Roberts, S.J., Adrian Robertson, Mary & Jack Robinson, Jeff Robinson, Ernie Rodker, Roger Rolph, Donald Rooum, Father John Rowe, Bertrand Russell, Raphael Samuel, Philip Sansom, Simon Schama, Ralph Schoenman, Father Michael Scott, Natalia Ivanovna Sedova, Mike Segal, Gene Sharp, Dr. Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, Sydney Silverman, Allen Skinner, Jim Slater, Colin Smart, Harry Smith, Joan Smith, Dr. Donald Soper, Harold Steele, Mary & Jack Stevenson, John Stockbridge, Bishop Mervyn Stockwood, George Stone, Douglas Stuckey, Buck Taylor, Carol Taylor, Joe Thomas, E.P. Thompson, Tommy Thompson, David Thornley, Charles Tillon, David Toogood, Peter Turner, Arthur Uloth, Fred Walker, Barbara Wall, Bernadine Wall, Digger Walsh, Nicolas Walter, Colin Ward, Tom Wardle, Will Warren, Kate & Bobby Waters, Kurt Weisskopf, Fran White, Roma White, John Whiteley, David Wicks, Kathy & Wilfred Wigham, Thomas Willis, Tom Wintringham, and Lillian Wolfe.

The Otter Memoir is available here as a free download ...

https://oldredfogey.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/the-accidental-making-of-an-anarchist.pdf

For Séamas Cain go to:

http://www.priosma.net

http://seamascain-writernetwork.org