The Curious Case of Kate Sharpley Library ________ by Christopher Draper_____________

“KATE SHARPLEY LIBRARY (KSL)” is an institution “dedicated to researching and restoring the history of the anarchist movement”. Its name commemorates a young woman who “under the influence of anarchist propaganda” in 1917 reacted to the carnage of WWI by flinging her family’s war medals back into the face of Queen Mary - a defiant gesture that earned her a severe beating from the boys in blue. In his book “I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels”, Albert Meltzer recorded extensive details of the incident after meeting Kate shortly before her death in 1978. This dramatic protest was cited by Nigel McCrery in his book recording professional footballers killed in WWI, which linked it to the death on the Somme of Kate’s brother, William. It’s an extraordinary tale but is it true?

THE FOOTBALLER’s TALE

IN April 1912 Sgt William Sharpley of the Essex Regiment made a trial appearance for the Leicester Fosse reserves football team playing against Worksop Town. After winning this match 4-0 he was picked to play left back, for Leicester’s first team the following month, in a second division game against Leeds City. Although Leicester won that game 4-1 William made no further appearances for the club and returned to his unit to serve as a regular soldier. With the outbreak of war he was immediately sent with his regiment to the Western Front where “he served with honour” and was decorated before being killed on 1st July, 1916.

This story has recently been told by Nigel McCrery in his book “The Final Season” (Random House) where the author goes on to reveal that this early casualty of the Somme offensive was none other than the brother of impassioned anarchist protester, Kate Sharpley.

ALBERTS’s ACCOUNT

KATE SHARPLEY LIBRARY acknowledges that, “One of our frequently asked questions is who was Kate Sharpley?” In response KSL publishes two overlapping accounts, both written by Albert Meltzer. The first, originally penned in 1978 was printed in “KSL Bulletin 6, Sept 1996” while the second appears in Meltzer’s “I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels” - both accounts are freely available online. Meltzer, and hence KSL, makes several very specific claims, including:

·

“Sixty-five years ago Queen Mary was handing out medals in Greenwich, most of them for fallen heroes being presented to their womenfolk.”

·

“One 22-year old girl, said by the local press to be under the influence of anarchist propaganda having collected medals for her dead father, brother and boyfriend then threw them in the Queen’s face”

·

“The Queen’s face was scratched and so was that of her attendant ladies.”

·

“The girl was Kate Sharpley.”

CURIOUS and CURIOUSER

MELTZER’s first reference to “sixty-five years ago”, made in 1978, dates Sharpley’s medal protest to 1913. Was it not remarkably prescient of Queen Mary to present commemorative medals for a war and its consequent casualties yet to occur? Is it not curious that such careless inattention to detail was not spotted by either Meltzer or KATE SHARPLEY LIBRARY corrected over the four decades since publication?

Is it not more curious still that despite extensive research there appears to be no report or record of this most dramatic incident in any contemporary newspaper or other documentary archive? No reference to this incident of any kind has been recorded that does not derive from Meltzer’s entirely unreferenced account. Meltzer specifically states that “the local press” claimed she acted under anarchist influence yet there appears to be no reference of any sort to “Kate Sharpley” in the local press for this or any political action. Even if the authorities conspired to effect total censorship of the mainstream press it would certainly have been reported in anarchist, socialist or pacifist papers. As a fearless activist surely Kate would have afterwards informed the radical press of her action and the police’s violent reaction.

Confirmation?

MELTZER’s account might appear to derive a degree of substantiation from McCrery’s description of the death of Kate Sharpley’s brother on the Somme were it not for the fact that Sgt William Sharpley (Reg. No. 9214) of the 2nd Battalion Essex Regiment had no sister called Kate, Kath, Catherine or any other variant. Like Mr Meltzer, who he references and relies upon, McCrery doesn’t seem to have done his homework by insisting on primary evidence. Although I emailed my detailed criticism of this invalid claim to a familial relationship to McCrery’s agent on 7th April 2021, requesting evidence for his assertion, answer was there none.

Dodgy Dogma

I DON'T DOUBT Meltzer met Kate Sharpley sometime in the late 1970’s and she recollected fragmentary tales of a half-remembered anarchist past. There’s usually a germ of truth in every story and it’s not clear who was the more guilty of over egging this particular pudding but Meltzer’s subsequent account is certainly more akin to anecdote than history. Through extensive research into primary evidence I believe I have identified the Kate Sharpley that Meltzer met and whose life he purports to describe but I’ve learned from experience that KSL prefers convenient myth to inconvenient truth.

It’s ironic that Meltzer’s autobiography claims “I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels” for much of what now passes for “anarchist history” is little more than gilding applied to plaster saints. In claiming to chronicle anarchist history “FREEDOM" “Lib Com” and “KSL” all enforce ideological censorship with an absence of self-critical rigour.

ON 15th May 2006 “Lib Com” published Meltzer’s account on its own website. Eleven years later it finally dawned on editor “Steven” that the account lacked evidence if not credibility. On 15th May 2017 “Steven” belatedly, and unsuccessfully, asked “Does anyone know any dates in her life, either when she was born, when she died, or the date of the medal-throwing incident?”

In conventional journalism, which is after all the first draft of history, it’s generally considered good practice to test the evidence before publishing the story but at Lib Com it’s apparently an afterthought and at KSL a revisionist tendency to be defiantly resisted.

Anarchist History or Jesuitical Dogma?

SO dear reader, KSL - “dedicated to researching and restoring the history of the anarchist movement” has had 43 years to come up with evidence to substantiate this tale it began promulgating in 1978. I challenge KSL and its acolytes to now stand this story up with independent evidence or otherwise accept their founding myth is as false and dishonourable as that of the Catholic Church.

Christopher Draper (May 2021)

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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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Freedom: Anna Kleist & Spring Cleaning

by Brian Bamford

ON the 30th, October, a writer called Anna Kleist wrote on the FREEDOM website complaining of 'anarchist smugness' following the defeat of what she called 'the first mass movement for socialism this country has seen in decades': the Corbynista experiment which seemingly ended last December after the General Election. She was refering to the gloating of London anarchists in the FREEDOM bookshop following the result coming through.

According to Anna it amounted to a good dose of 'I told you so'!.

This is how she colourfully described the scene in the FREEDOM BOOKSHOP at the time:

'While these bilious has-beens represent a particularly grotesque extreme of anarchist opinion, their unabashed joy at Corbyn’s defeat is not so far different from the smug “we told you so” that has, for the most part, constituted “the anarchist response” to December’s election results. One might have hoped that anarchists would have had something useful to say following the defeat of the first mass movement for socialism this country has seen in decades. Sadly, with one or two minor exceptions, all we seem to have produced are some rather tiresome Urban 75 posts about how we’re so wise and everyone else is pathetic and naïve.'

Following a brief consideration of the history of British anarchism she bitterly concluded:

'

'My contention is that we in the British anarchist movement are way overdue such a period of radical reassessment. Capitalism is in crisis, fascism is in the ascendency and yet we have never been more politically irrelevant. Now is not the time for smugness or schadenfreude. It is time for us to turn our “ruthless criticism” back upon ourselves.'

JON BIGGER Knows Best: Having the Key to the Universe!

SUCH criticism couldn't go unchallenged by those clever dicks who reckon to know better; one such 'Jon Bigger'* only the very next day scolded Anna thus:

'Yesterday, Freedom published a piece encouraging anarchists not to be smug, instead looking inwards at how we have failed to build a mass movement. I agree, but standards and principles matter. Let the last few years be a lesson about principles, as much as it is a lesson in building a mass movement.'

Yet to the non-partisan observer British anarchism is a political non-entity, as indeed Ms. Kleist described it in her brief contribution: the best thing it used to be able to do was to run bookfairs, but nowadays it can't even accomplish that. Despite what the Community of Scholars at Loughborough University claim, seldom has British anarchism been more ineffectual. Only if you count Extinction Rebellion can it claim any significance or real relevance today.

FREEDOM and SPRING CLEANING ANARCHISM

CURIOUSLY the editor of FREEDOM [Vernon Richards?] writing on the January 31,1953 in an editorial entitled 'SPRING CLEANING ANARCHISM' asked:

'IS anarchism, the denial of the State, of the right to rule, a merely negative doctrine? Should it not put forward also a positive contribution to political, social and economic theory? Such questions have periodically been asked since the time when the parliamentary Marxists of the eighties and nineties first accused anarchism of being a negative conception.'

At that time, almost 60 years ago, the FREEDOM editor was responding to a correspondent, R. A. M. Gregson, who had called for 'a Revaluation of Ideas' making a plea for 'recapitulation. for a re-evaluation of M basic ideas, and evolving new ones'. Mr. Gregson wrote: 'Destructive criticism, is easier than the expression of posit!ve beliefs and proposals.' Following this up with the claim: 'The literature of the movement . . .intents itself with protestations on the one hand and yearnings after past revolutionaries on the other.'

The FREEDOM editor then asks:

'How does such criticism apply to FREEDOM? To keep ideas up to date is an important function of a paper such as this, and it is always important to be on guard against the hardening of ideas into dogma, of their losing their significance through mere repetition. To do so all the more necessary since fundamental anarchist ideas have to changed much over the years, much that Godwin wrote over a century and a half ago could not usefully be added to to-day.'

Here the Freedom editor recognises the real dilemma for an editor who has sat perhaps too long in the editor's chair and is in danger of a cookbook approach to every unfolding event. Many of the publication on the left fall into this trap of repetitous cliques and dogma. Anna Kleist may not have fully grasped the real problems, but I venture to say, she can see things more sharply than the more mature than Jon Bigger with his plea for 'standards and principles'. The Direct Action Movement [DAM] to which I was once affilated in the 1980s spent time endlessly debating its 'Aims & Principles' but i never had a policy directed at the real world. The Anna Kleist approach is refreshing as the Gregson analysis was in 1953 because their assessments detect some seen but unnoticed features of the current crisis in the anarchist tribe.

* 'Jon Bigger' was a post-graduate at Loughborough University.

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David Graeber (1961-2020): ethnographer, anthropologist and the study of everyday life

David Graeber (February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020

David Graeber, anthropologist and anarchist author of bestselling books on bureaucracy and economics including Bullshit Jobs: A Theory and Debt: The First 5,000 Years, has died aged 59.

On Thursday Graeber’s wife, the artist and writer Nika Dubrovsky, announced on Twitter that Graeber had died in hospital in Venice the previous day. The cause of death is not yet known.

Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death. His final book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow, will be published in autumn 2021.

THE GUARDIAN

Sian Cain

Thu 3 Sep 2020 16.18 BST

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AS an ethnomethodologist I immediately recognise the anthropological approach of David Graeber. For example in an essay he asks:

'If there’s a line to get on a crowded bus, do you wait your turn and refrain from elbowing your way past others even in the absence of police?'

IN the 1990s, members of our Ethnography group John Lee and a colleague at Manchester University did some research work on queuing in France and found that although people didn't queue in a line at metro stations in Paris etc. there was none the less a pattern with rules that could be applied without any formal enforcement. I notice that in Spain that people didn't form lines at stalls in the market place but when approaching a stall simply asked the question 'Quien es el ultimo?'. Once that was known it was not necessary to stand in a rigid line and one could freely chat and wait one's turn.*

In the UK there are regional differences and Northerners will, I think, notice a difference between people using the Underground in London and between folk waiting for the No.11 bus in say Chelsea. The Underground will seem a rougher experience for the first time user I think.

The Spanish experience will also vary according to where you are and what context: villages and small shops have slightly different customs. In Morocco, I noticed that people sleep in the bus stations over night before catching an early morning bus. Tickets were often not on sale in advance of the bus ariving because touts would buy them up and offer them for resale at a premium. And when the bus arrived at Rabat bus station a wrestling match would break out as to who could get to the front. When this happen once to me and I was forced to wait flexing my muscles I ostentatiously took off my jacket and handed it to my wife; whereupon an observant man selling the tickets quickly arranged that we got a seat on the next bus.

TIM HARFORD the 'Undercover Economist on the FT' has examined the problem of queuing thus:

Mathematicians reckon the odds are against you. If you choose a queue at random, there will be a line on either side of you, and thus a two-thirds chance that one will be faster.

Economists take a more sophisticated view. David Friedman, for instance, argues that the relevant discipline is financial market theory. Choosing the right queue is like picking the right portfolio of shares: if it were obvious which shares were good value, they wouldn’t be good value any more. If it were obvious which queue would be quickest, everyone would join it. Naive attempts to “beat the market” will fail.

Then there is “efficient market” theory – you can’t out-perform a random choice of shares because public information is immediately incorporated into share prices. In truth, most markets are not efficient and thus it is possible for an informed decision-maker to beat them. Even if supermarket queues were efficient, no queue would be a superior bet, because expert supermarket customers would quickly join any queue that was likely to be quicker.

More likely, queues are not efficient because few have much to gain from becoming expert queuers. Some have other considerations, such as minimising the distance walked, while others shop rarely, so the calculations are more trouble than they are worth.

And unlike the stock market, which a financial wizard can make more efficient by outweighing the foolish decisions of small traders, in the supermarket a single expert queuer has a limited effect on the distribution of queuing times.

I can advise you to steer clear of elderly ladies with vouchers, but more advice would be self-defeating. Too many of your rivals would read it.

First published at ft.com.

Many on the left, including some anarchists, would regard this focus on queuing as trivial. Yet the queue is central to most people's lives. In some cases in some countries it has led to riots.

Yet, Davd Graeber, the anarchist, has written: 'The truth is we probably can’t even imagine half the problems that will come up when we try to create a democratic society; still, we’re confident that, human ingenuity being what it is, such problems can always be solved, so long as it is in the spirit of our basic principles — which are, in the final analysis, simply the principles of fundamental human decency.'

* How NOT to Queue in Spain

If there was one thing that would set aside a Brit from say a Spaniard more than anything else it would probably be their attitude to queuing.

Whether a Brit examining the etiquette of queuing in Spain, or - worse still - a Brit berating a foreigner´s lack of understanding of queuing etiquette in the UK one thing is clear : Queuing etiquette is - or lack of it - is quite possibly the one thing that will drive a mild mannered granny into in a raving psychotic.

I was having a conversation on this subject with my intercambio language exchange partner the other day : What exactly is the etiquette with regards to queuing in Spain, and ditto with the UK ?

Juanjo explained to me that there wasn´t any etiquette when it came to queuing in general in Spain. In smaller Towns and Villages it may be considered polite to let the elder generation go first in certain circumstance, however, in shops it was usual practice to simply ask "¿ Quien es la Ultima ?" - which means " Who is last one [in the queue]? ".

It seem that this is time honoured tradition that has served generations of Spaniards perfectly well for generations, ensuring that the last person to enter a shop knows who the customer to be served in front of them is. That way everybody knows there place and is free to wander off or chat with friends etc...

The system only becomes problematic when in wanders clueless Guiri and either jumps his place, or fails to inform the person entering the shop behind him, where his place in the queuing system is.

As far as said Guiri is concerned, the fact that there is not a linear column of people stretching neatly away from the counter, means that there is in fact no queue.

And because said Guiri is both unaware of the existence of the etiquette he alone is responsible for the total collapse of law and order in the local Panaderia, and quite often leaves the shop frustrated at the "bunfight" that he has just caused (see what I did ? that Grammar school education wasn´t for nothing ...) and convinced that the very concept of queuing in Spain does not exist.

Juanjo conceded that as far as getting served in a bar, restaurant or market stall was concerned then queuing, as us Brits would know it, didn´t exist, and he just laughed when I asked about the etiquette of queuing for public transport.

(Have you ever wondered why you never see bus loads of Spaniards at Alton Towers ?)

On the subject of Public transport, Juanjo told me he was almost lynched once whilst on a business trip to the UK when he saw his bus approaching whilst walking with colleagues towards the Bus stop. Worried that the Bus wasn´t going to hang about longer than was necessary to let the passengers get off he sprinted down the pavement and leapt onto the Bus - seemingly ignoring the column of passengers waiting in the rain. His British colleagues did the decent thing and let him do so, casually joining the end of the queue, and letting each of the passengers shoot him their best icy glare in turn whilst waiting their turn in the queue.

I explained that I wouldn´t have been at all surprised to hear that there would have been queues of British women waiting quietly in a queue to take their place for a lifeboat on the deck of the Titanic.

Even when waiting in the Casualty department of A&E you still see some people at the triage station smiling sheepishly as the duty nurse decides that the 9" nail that they have embedded through their eyeball warrants them jumping further along the queue than the guy who just stubbed his toe.

It´s a disease we Brits are born with and will more than likely never be cured.

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

Lear, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and Orwell

The Play’s the Thing: Orwell and Drama (Last of Three)

by Richard Lance Keeble of the ORWELL SOCIETY

19th September 2020

Drama at the BBC: The next act

Orwell’s work for the BBC is not to end in November 1943. For through his friendship with Rayner Heppenstall, a producer at the corporation, he goes on to write two fine dramatic adaptations – of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, for the Home Service on 29 March 1946 (CWGO XIII: 179-201). The second, too often neglected, is of Little Red Riding Hood (ibid: 345-354). Just like the earlier adaptation of Andersen’s ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ for the BBC’s Eastern Service, this reflects Orwell’s deep interest in the fairy story genre – which finds its most famous flowering in Animal Farm – A Fairy Story, in 1945. And Orwell is to adapt his famous satire on the Russian revolution for the BBC in 1947. Crick describes it as ‘very stilted’ (1980: 493) while Orwell told his friend, Mamaine Paget: ‘I had the feeling that they had spoilt it but one nearly always does with anything one writes for the air’ (Lynskey 2019: 157).

ORWELL’s fascination with the theatre and Shakespeare in particular culminates in two remarkable ways. This first is his essay, ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’, published in Polemic, in March 1947. It has been strangely missed, or its significance downplayed, by the biographers.

There is no mention of the essay at all in either Shelden (1991) or Meyers (2000) while D. J. Taylor (2003) and Bowker (2003) only comment on it en passant. Crick (op cit: 438, 520, 522) first focuses on Orwell’s critique of anarchism and pacifism; in the third reference he points out Orwell’s ‘tempered pessimism’; only in the second reference is there any mention of Shakespeare as he describes it as ‘a profound comparison of the didacticism of Tolstoy with the tolerant humanism of Shakespeare’.

From British Library’s blog on Tolstoy and Orwell

Orwell bases his critique of Tolstoy on an obscure pamphlet in which he has damned King Lear as ‘stupid, verbose, unnatural, unintelligible, bombastic, vulgar, tedious’ etc. (1980 [1947]: 793). Tolstoy fails to consider Shakespeare as a poet. ‘Those who care most for Shakespeare value him in the first place for his use of language, the “verbal music” which even Bernard Shaw, another hostile critic, admits to be “irresistible”’ (ibid: 796). Tolstoy sees no justification for the presence of the Fool. But for Orwell it’s crucial. ‘He acts not only as a sort of chorus, making the central situation clearer by commenting on it more intelligently than the other characters, but as a foil to Lear’s frenzies. His jokes, riddles and scraps of rhyme, and his endless digs at Lear’s high-minded folly … are like a trickle of sanity running through the play….'

But Tolstoy’s essential ‘anti-human’ stance draws Orwell’s special venom. Indeed, what Tolstoy probably most dislikes about Shakespeare ‘is a sort of exuberance, a tendency to take – not so much a pleasure as simply an interest in the actual process of life’ (ibid). In other words, it’s a ‘quarrel between the religious and humanist attitudes towards life’.

An early English language edition of Tolstoy’s essay.

The plot of King Lear, Orwell argues, is essentially about renunciation. And this clearly resonates with Tolstoy’s own history. ‘In his old age he renounced his estate, his title and his copyrights and made an attempt – a sincere attempt though it was not successful – to escape from his privileged position and live the life of a peasant. … Ultimately, therefore, Tolstoy renounced the world under the expectation that this would make him happier. But there is one thing certain about his later years, it is that he was not happy’ (ibid: 799, italics in the original). Indeed, one of the morals of the play is that ‘to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack’. Moreover, all of Shakespeare’s later tragedies ‘start out with the humanist assumption that life, although full of sorrow, is worth living and that Man is a noble animal – a belief which Tolstoy in his old age did not share’. Against Tolstoy’s ‘other-worldliness’, Orwell celebrates Shakespeare’s worldly vitality, his love of life which he conveys, above all, in the ‘music of language’.

Orwell next moves on to Tolstoy’s pacifism – criticising it, along with anarchism, for being intolerant. ‘For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves you are in the right? And the more you are in the right, the more natural that everyone should be bullied into thinking likewise’ (ibid: 802).

In many respects, Orwell is presenting a very slanted view of Tolstoy. For instance, Peter Marshall offers a totally different picture of him in his monumental history of anarchism: ‘Although Tolstoy condemned the passions of greed, anger and lust as vigorously as any tub-thumping Puritan, he was no other-worldly moralist. He recommended the happiness which is to be found in a life close to nature, voluntary work, family, friendship and a painless death.’ Moreover, Tolstoy’s promotion of anarchistic pacifism stresses its impact on people’s well-being here and now. ‘He rejects the charge that without government there will be chaos or a foreign invasion. His experience of Cossack communities in the Urals had shown him that order and well-being are possible without the organized violence of government’ (Marshall 2008 [1992]: 370, 374).

Yet Orwell is using his picture of Tolstoy for essential rhetorical purposes – and as a foil against which he can deliver his wonderfully profound celebration of life – and the music of words of his hero, William Shakespeare.

Shakespeare not forgotten in Nineteen Eighty-Four

In Orwell’s last novel, the dystopian masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four (2000 [1949]), women are represented as both highly sexualised or the complete opposite – desexualised madonnas. In her essay, ‘Desire is Thoughtcrime’, Jenny Taylor highlights the novel’s ‘dichotomy between lust and utopian desire, between woman as Madonna and whore’ (1983: 28). Julia, the ‘girl from the Fiction Department’ – though perhaps also a Party spy engaged in a honeytrap operation – conducts a passionate, secret affair with Winston Smith. Yet in another crucial scene, Winston dreams of his mother, the good breast, as part of an Arcadian Golden age of plenitude. A girl comes towards him across the field. ‘With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside’ (op cit: 36). But her naked body arouses no desire in him. Rather ‘What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm. That too was a gesture belonging to an ancient time.’ And he concludes the scene triumphantly: ‘Winston woke up with the word “Shakespeare” on his lips’ (ibid).

This split in the representation of women, then, is highly problematic. Yet is it not significant that Orwell brings together the worlds of the unconscious, utopian desire and High Art with his final evocation of the name of Shakespeare?

Conclusions

Orwell’s love of the theatre begins in his childhood and remains constant throughout his life. It has been too often missed by biographers and Orwell scholars. Theatrical plot lines are dotted about – often wittily and imaginatively – A Clergyman’s Daughter. For instance, when Dorothy, while recovering from her breakdown, teaches at Mrs Creevy’s appalling school, Orwell has a great deal of fun describing the hoo-ha and parental protests that follow her class on Macbeth with its oh so controversial/shocking line ‘Macduff was from his mother’s womb/Untimely ripp’d’ (1976 [1935]: 387). ‘I do so adore Macbeth,’ he writes to his friend Eleanor Jaques, on 18 November 1932 and is keen to take her to see a production at the Old Vic (Orwell and Angus 1970, 1: 130-131).

Orwell does not particularly distinguish himself during his stint as drama critic (1940-1941) but many of his reviews capture his sense of humour, his love of bawdy, Max Miller-ish jokes and show him playing with ideas later to be taken up in longer essays. Then while working at the BBC, his drama interests inevitably spill over into his output. Along with all his often inventive and highly original arts feature programmes and political commentaries, he designs thirteen courses based on Calcutta and Bombay University syllabuses in English and American literature, science, medicine, agriculture and psychology and runs a series introducing drama and the mechanics of production, backed up with shortened versions of Indian plays. According to Peter Davison: ‘This had a direct effect in that two participants, Balraj and Damyanti Sahni, set up a travelling drama company in India on their return’ (1996: 117).

Interestingly, his fascination with fairy stories is reflected in two dramatic adaptions he writes for the BBC – of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’ and ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ while his own version of Animal Farm is broadcast in 1947.

Moreover, the work of dramatists such as Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde and William Shakespeare is constantly reflected upon during his writing career (though D. H. Lawrence’s short stories and poems especially interest him rather than the plays). The Collected Works, edited by Peter Davison (1998), indicates more than 120 references to Shakespeare, 96 to Shaw, around 30 to Wilde and 11 to Chekhov. Even while fighting in the trenches alongside Republican militiamen during the Spanish civil war in 1937, Orwell is reported by his comrade, Douglas Moyle, to find time to read his favourite dramatist: ‘I was surprised to find him sitting quietly by himself, sheltering from the cold wind, reading a little volume of Shakespeare’s plays. He didn’t speak, and I realized he would rather be left alone’ (quoted in Wadhams 1984: 80).

From British Library’s blog on Olivier and Leigh’s Macbeth

Davison even suggests that the concept of ‘Doublethink’ (the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time) of Nineteen Eighty-Four could have been drawn from Macbeth. In this play, the Porter refers satirically to equivocation. Standing at the Door of Hell, the Porter asks who knocks: ‘Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale, who committed treason enough for God’s sake, yet could not equivocate to Heaven: O come in [to Hell] equivocator’ (Davison 1996: 132). An intriguing idea.

One thing is certain, however: for it’s the Bard’s sexiness and love of life that Orwell, the theatre man, celebrates so movingly and memorably in his essay ‘Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool’.

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

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

Stuart Christie: an insider's study of an authentic classical anarchist by Brian Bamford - Part Two

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

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

Narcissism is not a Third Gender

             by Arthur Brick & friends 

                  

Editorial Note:  We publish the report below after

some consideration.  It raises some serious questions

about the standards of debate on the libertarian left.

We have long been aware of a deficiency among the
British left with regard to addressing truth to power,
but we would have expected the anarchists to hold to
a better quality of journalistic standards.  Yet, our
experience has been that the anarchist media blog put 
out under the title 'Freedom News' has a sadly depressing
tone in the way that it has become a mere megaphone for
a 'trans' tendency, and is too fashionably trendy 
for its own good.  The small 'Solidarity Federation' grouping 
has become yet another addict to this politics of the absurd,
its members Ron Marsden and Phil Dickens are mentioned below 
in dispatches: we know nothing of Mr Dickens but Mr Marsden
was in attendance when 'Arthur Brick' was roughly removed by a gang from a  meeting discussing blacklisting at the Liverpool Anarchist Bookfair on the 7 April, 2018.  

Knowing Ron Marsden we are not surprised to learn that he was cagey and even furtive about supplying help to this victim of discrimination & blacklisting.  

Sitting next to the passive Mr. Marsden someone tried hard to get 
the exclusion of 'Mr Brick' discussed, but to no avail.

This silencing of free debate is becoming a cancer that lies at the
heart of the politics of the far left in the UK.

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

Open letter to Sol Fed’s Keyboard Warrior from 'Arthur Brick'& friends:

Phil Dickens: 'The conflicted tax collector'?

THIS article is in relation to the use of abusive terms adopted by some left wing and anarchist political groups to put down anyone who does not take their opinions on the subject of transgender seriously.  The name calling and abuse of socialists, anarchists, activists etc. living outside their freaky social scenes is a way of them avoiding debate, through fear of their claims being scrutinised.
The article also deals with a pretty insignificant group called ‘Sol Fed’.  We are not sure what they are federated to, as they are almost invisible on a street level, yet they do a great job of discrediting class politics with their absurd adoption of transgender identity politics.  So here we will shed a light on the keyboard warrior.

I was recently asked by a feminist friend of mine if I knew an individual named Phil Dickens. I should point out that Phil Dickens is already a somewhat conflicted individual and I found it amusing to discover that whilst being an
‘anarchist’ he also works at the tax office!   On the one hand ‘smashing the state’ for purely theatrical effect but on the other being a servile state functionary.  I think we can safely call that contradiction and hypocrisy, but it does reveal the level of insincerity regarding the bogus claims of this keyboard warrior.

2. Response to my question.

I was sent a link to his social media outpourings and decided to challenge
him. No sooner had I done so, Phil Dickens blocked me and backed out of answering my question.  After further investigation it would appear that
SolfFed has no platform in which to redress the behaviour of its members.
For example there are no positions in the group such as regional or
national secretary in which you can voice your concerns.

Ron Marsden of Manchester Sol Fed was asked about this when people wanted to address the behaviour of Liverpool SolFed member Pablo who disrupted a blacklisted workers meeting, as it was considered somebody attending did not hold the correct opinions on gender self identification (such was the outrage he saw fit to disrupt the meeting).  This is covered in depth in the booklet 'Shit Wigs and Steroids'.

1. Phil Dickens post and my question.  This makes any external or internal grievance of Sol Fed members go unanswered or conveniently ignored.  Any ‘difficult issue’ is swept under the carpet with the hope it will not raise its ‘ugly head’.  So when we see these ‘members’ (scuse phallic pun!!) advertise ‘women’s meetings’ but are also calling women TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists) in public, how are we to take that?

It could be said the SolFed is nothing more than an obscure social group with
a supposed ’workerist’ base. Its older members seem happy with its utter failure to grow into anything meaningful but lets put that comical issue to one side.

However, the issue here is that the term TERF is aimed at women, which is an
affront to working class women who have suffered at the hands of men.  What we are seeing displayed by Liverpool SolFed who perhaps number four people is crude bullying of those not towing a line that is being widely scrutinised elsewhere.  Another example of bullying in full effect is when Liverpool SolFed recently ousted one of their own members who sought discussion on the issue. Members of Sol Fed are clearly cowardly on this issue.

It really does show SolFed’s absurd contradiction on women’s rights. It shows the complete denial of women’s voices over their concerns of men identifying as women and, comically, as lesbians.  The use of TERF as a slur by tax official Dickson shows his contempt for those of us not falling into line with the male
perspective that transgender activists peddle.  It looks like Liverpool
SolFed / Mersey SolFed (all four of them) are sinking in the mire of their own introverted identity politics bullshit. The adoption of a pro trans narrative does not seem to be swelling the ranks of their “disorganisation”.  When we see SolFed publishing articles on class and women, we really are left scratching our heads to the clear contradiction and absurdity of their “politics”.

Will Phil Dickens answer this question:

What names have you got for us Northern Working Class blokes who do not swallow the idea that our fathers, brothers, sons can miraculously be ‘actual women’ through the power of thought, medicine, body modification etc.? What you are holding up as transgender, Phil Dickens, as you insult women (with critical opinions), is transvestism,  Autogynephilia* and a whole set of other
issues.  But you are good at calling people things they are not.  If you had a grasp of radical feminism you would see the people you are abusing are not ‘radical feminists’ merely people with the capacity to consider issues well outside of your narrow field of understanding on issues whilst working for the state in your little tax office.

Ron Marsden:  'Hay que malalingua!'

I see you have had 4 views on your Youtube videos.  I think we can help boost that for you.  Being angry on behalf of others, whilst not looking at the issues, leaves people open to responses like ours.  We politely suggest that the 'toxic tax worker' has a read of this:  https://uncommongroundmedia.com/as-a-transsexual-i-support-dr-eva-poen/ the trans activists.

It is easy to overlook the significance of the arguments adopted by these fringe groups, but tomboys are now pushed into identifying as male, effeminate men are getting swept along with the idea they are female, straight men who identify as women claim to be lesbians.  All kinds of absurd ideas and contradictory thinking are marketed as ‘transgender’.  There is a considerable backlash from
many people in wider society against the absurdity of claims from the trans activists.


There has been a substantial ground shift against the claim of transgender activists because what is actually happening is that many of the young people and significantly young women over the last number of years are detransitioning.  The publicity this is rightly receiving are collapsing the arguments that ‘trans activists’ put forward.  Many young people leaving the ‘trans cult’ are left physically and emotionally scarred by the process of conditioning that led them to consider themselves ‘trapped in the wrong body’.  The physical impact on some has had a catastrophic effect.

When we look at the small groups of individuals who claim to be ‘anarchists/ socialists’ etc. who promote the transgender narrative, what we are seeing is the very clear closing down of actual debate on the subject.  One facet of opinion (they want to personally profit from) is ridiculously over emphasized by them, but any challenging opinion of that one facet is shut out.  How can you claim
to support issues around gender but then do all you can to keep the debate massively reduced.

This is done by abusing people who are a part of that debate, dehumanising intelligent people with insults and shutting down supposedly public events like bookfairs, conferences etc.  What we have seen are people like Phil Dickens, Ian Bone, Freedom Press, Simon Saunders, Alice Flebotte, Dave Downes etc. promoting the idea they are concerned about an issue, ‘gender identity politics’,
but under scrutiny, and without doubt, they are showing no compassion or empathy for those who struggle with gender identity issues.

To use 'TERF' to put critics down is beyond sloppy.  It is weak and derogatory.  You have got to hand it to them that they arrogantly believe they can avoid being pulled up on their contradiction and lack of sincerity.  When people take such an abusive line by calling strangers TERFs or bigots etc. they will be in for a shock when their words are drawn into public debate.  We hope to add to this article and we will by looking at particular individuals who hope to avoid any personal responsibility and publicity for the farcical ideology they push from behind their
keyboards.


* autogynephilia

A sexuality that consists of someone being aroused by the idea of themselves being the opposite sex. Not to be confused with transsexualism, which is a medical condition defined by sex dysphoria.

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This was written before Covid 19 happened.  As in all negative situations we are seeing positive initiatives come from the chaos:
LGB Alliance https://lgballiance.org.uk/
LGB activists standing up to the transgender nonsense
Boxer Ceiling https://www.facebook.com/BoxerCeili

From whence did social welfare come?

 State Control or Social Initiatives?

 by Brian Bamford

LES MAY engaging with Carl Faulkner's comment and considering the founding of the NHS, writes:

'As my Libertarian friends endlessly remind me there were other schemes in operation even before the NHS was a gleam in anyone’s eye.

'Bevan would have been familiar with the Tredegar Medical Aid Society as he was the local MP. In return for contributions from its members it provided health care free at the point of use. (my emphasis)

'This model of funding was rejected by Bevan.'


Les clearly admires the Attlee government of 1945, which formed the first Labour majority government and in particular he favours its Keynesian approach to economic management aimed to maintain full employment, a mixed economy and a greatly enlarged system of social services provided by the state.  This amounts to a supreme faith in what in the 20th century amounted to Fabian managerialism.  It is a view that after the Second World War prevailed in which it was considered that as George Orwell observed in 1946:  'For quite fifty years past the general drift has almost certainly been towards oligarchy'*   (James Burnham & the Managerial Revolution [1946]).

At that time after the war it must have seemed that big government was onto a winner, and Orwell then felt able to write:  'The ever increasing concentration of industrial and financial power; the diminishing importance of the individual capitalist or shareholder, and the growth of the "managerial" class of scientists, technicians, and bureaucrats; the weakness of the proletariat against the centralized state; the increasing helplessness of small countries against big ones; the decay of representative institutions and the importance of one-party regimes...'

The problem with this approach is that it represented a shift from the capitalist and the dividend grabbers to a 'new boss class' of the technical elite functionaries blessed with cushy jobs and all on a generous state stipend.  As Orwell observed above it became 'the weakness of the proletariat against the centralized state'.  There was still the spirit of entitlement of the elite and the dependency of the working-class.

The difficulty is still that this analysis is too mechanical as well as managerial and top-down.  It lacks an evolutionary grasp of how the concept of social welfare entered and developed inside our culture.

Colin Ward described how the social concepts permeated sociologically:  'Anarchists are frequently told that their antipathy to the state is historically outmoded, since a main function of the modern state is the provision of social welfare.  They respond by stressing that social welfare in Britain did not originate from government, nor from the post-war National Insurance laws, nor with the the initiation of the National Health Service in 1948.'   **
 

Rather as Mr Ward argues:  'It evolved from the vast network of friendly societies and mutual aid organizations that sprung up through working-class self-help in the 19th century.'

This is what is implied by Carl Faulkner in his perceptive comment on this Blog:  'It could be argued that is was predictable that the NHS was established by a Labour government due to it being elected in 1945 - when plans for what was to be called the NHS were well advanced but lost in the mists of time.'

Indeed it was 'lost in the midst of time', as the anarchist Mr Ward explains:
'The founding father of the NHS was the then member of parliament for Tredegar in South Wales, Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Government's Minister of Health.  His constituency was the home of the Tredegar Medical Aid Society, founded in1870 and surviving until 1995.'

It gave medical care for the local employed workers, who were mostly miners and steelworkers, but also (unlike the pre-1948 National Health Insurance) for the needs of dependents, children, the old, the non-employed: everyone living in the district.

A retired miner told Peter Hennessey that when Bevan initiated the National Health Service, 'We thought he was turning the country into one big Tredegar.'  Alas, it was not to be, and as Mr. Ward observes in his brief book:  'In practice the Health Service has been in a state of continuous reorganization ever since its foundation, but has never submitted to a local and federalized approach to medical care.'

More seriously Ward argues 'ever since full employment and the system of PAYE (automatic deduction of tax as a duty of employers) was introduced during the Second World War, the central government's Treasury has creamed off the cash that once supported local initiatives.' 

Furthermore, in keeping with the spirit of local spontaneity Colin Ward suggests:   
'If the pattern of local self-taxation on the Tredegar model had become the general pattern for health provision, this permanent daily need would not have become the plaything of central government financial policy.'

There is a price to pay for the pattern of State funding medical care applied by Nye Bevan and approved by Les May, and it now being played out as different governments enact various outsourcing schemes promote what Ward called 'the virtues of profit-making private enterprise.'


What follows from this debate is what will be the consequences of the pandemic for the psychology of the general population?  Will people look to the state for salvation in fear of a repeat performance of another potential pandemic threat or second wave?  If so, I suspect it will represent a reactionary response to the politics of the pandemic.




* Oligarchy, government by the few, especially despotic power exercised by a small and privileged group for corrupt or selfish purposes. Oligarchies in which members of the ruling group are wealthy or exercise their power through their wealth are known as plutocracies.

**  'ANARCHISM: A Very Short Introduction' by Colin Ward (Oxford) 2004.

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José Netto Gibraltarian syndicalist & Jack Jones

José Netto at the Casa de la Memoria in Jimena de la Frontera

by Brian Bamford

Editorial note:  I first met José Netto in 
March 1964, when I, my wife and baby 
6-month-old son (born in Denia, Alicante
had to leave Spain where we had been living 
and working for 12 month, and crossed the 
frontier in order to to comply with the then 
Spanish law. 

We had a 'letter of introduction' when we 
arrived at his council house in a working-
class area on the Rock.  He was living with 
his own young family and then worked on the 
tools in the Her Majesties Dockyard, but being 
an anarcho-syndicalist who had joined the 
then Syndicalist Worker's Federation 
while working in London in the 1950s.  
He and his mates helped to find me a job 
working as an electrician at the airport for
the Ministry of Defence repairing the landing 
lights on the airstrip.

One of José's close mates was Navarro, who was an 
anarchist supporter of the CNT, and had fought
for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War in
following the military insurrection in July 1936.  

Although José was an anarcho-syndicalist in Gibraltar
the syndicalists were not sectarian and had close working
relations with historic labour leaders like Albert Risso*, 
who became the first president of the Gibraltar Confederation 
of Labour which, in 1963, merged with the  
Transport and General Workers' Union, now Unite.



* Albert Risso was one of the first political activists in the British territory of Gibraltar. at a very young age, he was one of the campaigners for the involvement of the Gibraltarian civilian population (and especially its working class) in governing the colony. In 1919, he was one of the members of a so-called "deputation of working men" who went to London to meet the Secretary of State for the Colonies and ask for the creation of a representative body that could succeed the Sanitary Commission, an unelected body whose members, usually belonging to the upper class, were nominated by the Governor. The campaign, driven by the trade unions, brought about the creation of the Gibraltar City Council in 1921.^{[2] 
By the start of World War II,[1] Risso was a foreman mechanic and a City Council employee. When most of Gibraltar's civilian population was evacuated, Risso was one of the few Gibraltarians that remained on The Rock.
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José Netto, the historic syndicalist anarchist trade union leader in Gibraltar in the last half of the 20th Century, visited the Casa de la Memoria in Jimena de la Frontera (Cádiz), on the 28th, January 2019, a few months after the donation of a library of this entidad of five volumes of the encyclopedia El hombre y la Tierra, a history of humanity written by Eliseo Reclus in 1905.  Reclus was a French scientist and creator of the Geografía Social, being one of the first theoreticians of anarchism and a man of action who participated in the Paris Commune, together with other famous historic activists.

These five volumes of El hombre y la tierra were edited in Barcelona en 1933. The translation is by Anselmo Lorenzo, the principle great leader of Spanish anarchism and its representative in the First International.

These volumes form part of the particular library of José Netto, and they were offered up from the hands of a syndicalist of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) when the Campo de Gibraltar had suffered in 1936, and  Spaniards in the area had struggled with death at the hands of the military coup that rose against the Second Republic.

José Netto received the books from a man who had been an exile since the 1950s and a few days after learning that that anarchist had committed suicide. The donation to the Casa de la Memoria was effected months later during the last session of the seminar of the Cursos de Verano de la Universidad de Cádiz in San Roque, the son of José Netto, Michael Netto, in Gibraltar, and was received by the President of the Foro for the Memoria del Campo de Gibraltar, Andrés Rebolledo, to deposit in the Casa de la Memoria La Sauceda.

In his visit to the Casa, José Netto, who now lives in Atajate (Málaga), had also donated two poster images of the Second Spanish Republic. 

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The donación to the Casa de la Memoria took effect during the last session of the seminar

la efectuó meses atrás, durante la última sesión del seminario de memoria histórica de los Cursos de Verano de la Universidad de Cádiz en San Roque, the son of José Netto, Michael Netto, in Gibraltar, and was received by the President of the Foro for the Memoria del Campo de Gibraltar, Andrés Rebolledo, to deposit in the Casa de la Memoria La Sauceda.

El histórico sindicalista de Gibraltar José Netto visita la Casa de la Memoria tras donar a la Biblioteca la enciclopedia de Eliseo Reclus

14/02/2019

Biblioteca para la Memoria, Libro de la semana

José Netto wrote the following obituary for Jack Jones of the T&G:

My relation with Jack stretches back to the late 60s early 70s when I was appointed District Officer in 1972, and he was the TGWU General Secretary.  He has always been my mentor, as we shared common ideology, and has been a tremendous influence in my professional development as a trade unionist.  He was responsible for financing the construction of our premises in Town Range, which at the beginning we used to call?  La Casa del Pueblo?  He played a very leading role in supporting our fight for parity of wages and salaries, against the MOD.  As the British and local government had rejected this claim, on the grounds that it could not be sustained economically, a fact that was later proved wrong.

The intention of the fascist forces in Spain, during the Franco regime, to strangle the economy, with its restrictions and the closure of the land frontier, was defeated by the contribution of the labour movement in Gibraltar, of which I feel very proud of.

I wish to pay tribute on behalf of the working class of Gibraltar, to this comrade, so that we never forget how much we owe to him.

Rest in peace, Bro. Jack.

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