One of the most brilliant anarchist intellectuals in the north of England died in March. James Pinkerton, secretary of the Syndicalist Workers' Federation (SWF) until 1963, had been involved in anarchism when he came out of the army not long after the Second World War. He'd stumbled on some anarchist speakers at London's Speakers' Corner while on a visit to the opera. After that, he and his friend Jack McPhearson set up the Dukinfield Anarchist Group north of Manchester.
Although they were both opera lovers and played musical instruments - Jack was an excellent pianist and Jim played the cello - they were unimpressed by English middle class pretensions. Ken Hawkes, the leading figure in the SWF, called them 'the musical anarchists'.
Both lived in council houses up to the end of their lives and both considered it best to belong to the working class. When, in recent times, a friend of Jim's who'd become middle class said 'there's nowt better than being working class', Jim said he understood perfectly how he felt. 'The English middle class live in a no-man's land', he said. There was a paradox, of course. Here was a man living in a council house, playing the cello and deafening the neighbours with his treasured collection of records, which he blasted out daily from powerful speakers, his pantry full of the best Burgundy and clarets and a library of books to rival the contents of the Hay-on-Wye literary festival. Many's the day he'd insist on playing Caruso, Nelly Melba, Alfredo Kraus or a Zarzuela from Spain, before we went down to the Trades Council meeting in Ashton town centre.
This paradox of the English social classes in the north was brought home to us when Jim was on his deathbed and unable to talk. A Manchester book dealer, who'd befriended Jim in his later years, left his business card with a neighbour. For an anarchist this would be unseemly. But a business card has a certain magic it would take a Balzac to explain.
The book dealer was given the key and, while creaming off the first editions, noticed letters written by Brian Bamford from Franco's Spain. It looks like the main body of anarchist archive material went to the tip with Jim's prize collection of records, simply because English working class people don't understand these things.
Competing with the bourgeoisie
Brian remembers that in the 1960s his mother was donkey-stoning the doorstep when an anarchist friend turned up and, because of that and his middle class accent, she took an instant dislike to him. Even when Jim was best man at Brian's wedding, he said he felt uncomfortable with Brian's father and left early. Brian reckons his father thought Jim was leading him astray, sending him to Spain to fight the Franco regime.
Stuart Christie said that, at the time of his trial in Madrid, his mother turned up and bumped into fellow anarchist prisoner Fernando Carballo. 'I introduced my mother to Fernando, who was handcuffed to my wrist. I could not help but feel that she believed he was the evil monster who had lured her boy into this mess'.
It was the same at Jim's funeral. His relatives were polite, but there was an air of distrust about the anarchist contingent, the healthy distrust all English people have for politicians of all kinds. The irony of it all would have tickled Jim.
Once, when asked at a wine tasting if he was 'in the trade', Jim responded typically. 'No', he said. 'I'm that rare thing, a working class wine drinker'. And even in his drinking, he had a contempt for the English middle classes, saying he was reluctant to buy his wine from supermarkets 'because the middle class have a cut-off price of about £9 a bottle'.
That was about ten years ago, but as he poured a glass for Brian in the 1960s he said, 'you know, we're not aping the bourgeoisie, we're competing with them'. Anyone who could wean former Dukinfield refuse collector and Trades Council anarchist Derek Pattison from beer and savoury ducks to fine wines, pheasant, partridge and wood pigeon must be quite remarkable.
Despite his love of the English working class, on one occasion Brian mentioned that Vernon Richards, former editor of Freedom and another music lover, was Italian. Jim replied that he would most liked to have been a member of the Italian middle class. That was the class he most envied, and this comment was obviously associated with his passion for Verdi and Italian opera. When he was lying on his deathbed, Derek and Brian went with Harold Sculthorpe to put headphones on Jim to play him Verdi and Puccini.
Politically he identified with the Spaniards and the Anarchist Federation of Britain, which later became the SWF. At the time of the split within the British anarchist movement, he sided with them against the then Freedom Press Group. His feeling, as we understood it, was that Freedom Press was too remote and aloof from ordinary people.
He thought that Freedom in the 1960s had a good position on civil liberties and that, under Vernon Richards's editorship, it was 'a good bedside read'. But he felt it lacked a grasp of the economic and social conditions of everyday life. For him, it was never a paper that could become part of a movement as the Spanish anarchist papers had become.
He admired the Spanish anarchists politically and socially, even if he was drawn to the Italians culturally. In June last year, after we'd had some Spaniards from the CGT round to his house, he remarked that 'we English are like shrivelled-up prunes compared to the Spaniards'. He clearly took a dim view of the English anarchist movement.
Jim resigned as national secretary of the SWF in 1963, at a time when the peace movement was in ferment. Many young people were joining the anarchist movement, and some had gone into the SWF. While he was happy to see the numbers increase, he said that not many of the newcomers were workers.
In the 1950s he'd translated the SWF pamphlet Communist Terror in Bulgaria from French and, with Jack McPhearson from Dukinfield and Julian Pilling from Burnley, had gone on to reproduce Direct Action as a propaganda sheet on a flat-bed duplicator. He'd been treasurer of Northern Industrial Action, a group of libertarians including anarcho-syndicalists from the SWF, people from the old Solidarity Group, the Independent Labour Party and miscellaneous anarchists. This group, formed in Manchester around 1962, was the North's answer to the National Rank and File Movement. He attended meetings of the reformed Manchester Anarchist Group from 1964, as well as the 1965 SWF conference. He also wrote for Freedom on the anarchist movement in Manchester.
Adviser to apprentices
He was an adviser to the engineering apprentices in Rochdale when they put out their paper, Progress, in 1960. This was in the wake of the national apprentices' strike for improvements in wages and conditions in May that year. He also assisted with the production of Industrial Youth (IY), which came out during the engineering apprentices' strikes of 1964 and 1965. This paper was supported by the Manchester Apprentice Wages & Conditions Committee during the dispute, and continued as a publication for apprentices until late 1966.
Jim was named at the time by the Economic League, an organisation of bosses' informers, as someone implicated in the apprentice's paper. One employer circularised the Economic League's findings to its apprentices, warning them of anarchist involvement.
In 1970, Jim attended the trials that followed the Arrow Mill strike at Rochdale, where the police had been brought in to break up a sit-down strike of Asian workers. An anarchist had been arrested for actions that took place on the premises during the dispute. After the strike and the trials, he backed the Campaign for Shop Stewards in Textiles in Oldham, Shaw and Rochdale, which had Asian and anarchist involvement. It was during this campaign that he first met then mill operative Bob Lees.
Later in the 1970s, he was involved with the North West Workers' Alliance which used to meet in Oldham. This was an anarcho-syndicalist body which was associated with the SWF. A copytaker on several newspapers in Manchester, he was an active trade unionist in NATSOPA and SOGAT and Father of the Chapel on the Daily Herald and the Sunday People.
Most people outside the North West won't have heard of Jimmy Pinkerton. That's because he was never a prolific writer or regular public speaker. He despised oratory. He was really a Socrates of the north of England, who stimulated those with whom he came into contact. Not just with wine and music, but with his intellectual rigour and the breadth of his ideas.
He'd left school at 14 and was near enough self-taught but we, who've done our stints on the treadmills of the universities, have seldom found anyone to compare for clarity of vision and thought with Jimmy Pinkerton.
When he attended the Marseilles Conference of the AIT as an SWF delegate in the late 1950s, he later said the French delegates had considered him an 'opportunist'. He spoke fluent French and was always determined to discover practical solutions for the presentation of an anarchist programme.
He'd often upset people, such as when he supported the 1999 NATO action in Kosovo. He considered the action necessary to stop Serbian ethnic cleansing, and quoted the historical example of the Roman legion that had done a detour to put down a case of child sacrifice in the empire. 'Sometimes', he said, 'the big battalions do the decent thing'.
He was critical of Chomsky's line over the Balkan conflict, which he saw as worn-out anti-Americanism. Many of our discussions in recent years centred on Chomsky, following the criticisms of Chomsky's linguistics and philosophy in a recently published journal, Chomsky and his Critics.
Jim was puzzled by Chomsky's hostility to the late novels of George Orwell, and he said some of Chomsky's comments were 'intelligent'. He took the view that Chomsky was jealous of Orwell because he was a creative writer and a novelist, while Chomsky - for all his brilliance was simply a 'functional writer'.
With Jim Pinkerton's loss, there will be a gap in the lives of so many of us who looked to him for intellectual stimulation, moral guidance and friendship. A couple of years ago, referring to his regular talks with some of the northern anarchists, he told us 'you lads keep me going'. Jim was the father of northern anarchism and we are his children.
Brian Bamford, Bob Lees and Derek Pattison
A shorter obituary by Brian Bamford for the Guardian, can be read here.
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