Stuart.

      The latest rendering from The Kate Sharpley Library, as usual interesting stuff, always fascinating and informative.

       From our comrades at the Stuart Christie Memorial Archive (now open!)
KSL: Bulletin of the Kate Sharpley Library No. 106, September 2022 has just been posted on our site.

Contents:
         Union-Bashing Economics [1975] by Albert Meltzer "It is the language of myth called in to justify power – an economic myth to replace the patriotic myth, but in this case using the same ‘national necessity’ ploy as in war."
         Remembering Stuart, two years on "Copies of A Life for Anarchy: A Stuart Christie Reader arrived in the UK at the very end of June 2022... We’d like to see copies in libraries: have you asked your local library to get one?"
         A ‘good example’: A Life For Anarchy: A Stuart Christie Reader [Book review] by Mark R. "There is undoubtedly, a new world waiting to be built, and from those members of that ‘strange, unknown, unappreciated tribe’ who came before us, and in whose ranks Stuart Christie now stands, we can find the inspiration to fight on; for as another of those fighters once said; ‘we are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that.’"
         A living book : 'A Life For Anarchy: A Stuart Christie Reader' [book review] by Richard Warren "A life for anarchy is a proper reader – not a dry memorial, not a dusty headstone, but a living book to keep handy, to dip into repeatedly and to relish."
        Immense enthusiasm and optimism : 'A Life For Anarchy: A Stuart Christie Reader' [book review] by Chris Ealham "I was impressed by his literary references, which ranged from obscure Scottish poetry to popular culture; this was always very natural, lightly worn, in no way jarring or artificial. He also displayed immense enthusiasm and optimism. Many of these admirable traits are attested to in the final section, which consists of tributes paid to Stuart by his comrades, friends and loved ones, although the frontiers between these categories were very fluid."
        The use and need for a union by Léa Wullschleger "Certainly, if they cannot fight against the bosses with the same weapons as them, capital, since they don’t own any, they can achieve anything through numbers and organisation; since we are no doubt the more numerous."
         Joe Thomas [obituary] by Albert Meltzer "he was (to the surprise of his many friends in the trade union movement) a good friend to revolutionary anarchism and to the practicalities of anarcho-syndicalism (to the dismay of his Marxist friends)."
         Audrey Beecham [1915-89] by Albert Meltzer "She was a good friend to Miguel Garcia and myself. I took back from Barcelona this October many messages of greetings from Spanish friends both of the ‘thirties and ‘sixties, which will never now be delivered."

Anarchist history roundup Aug. 2022
          Advice to My Anarchist Comrades (1901) by Élisée Reclus (and Stuart Christie) "What then should we do to maintain our intellectual vigor, our moral energy, and our faith in the good fight?"
          You can read the bulletin via https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/dv43bp The PDF is up at https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/xpnxzt

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info  

Anarchy.

        It is approximately a year since Stuart Christie died and the tributes still come in, this is a tribute to Stuart Christie from Kate Sharpley Library and AK Press. I'm sure comrades will be eager to place their order.

A Life For Anarchy 

 

       Over the last year have edited (and written an introduction for) A Life for Anarchy: A Stuart Christie Reader. The book contains a selection of Stuart’s writings (shorter political pieces and biographical tributes he wrote) and some of the tributes his friends and comrades paid to him.
      ‘We hope this book will give you a sense of the richness and complexity of his life. We also hope it will act as a memorial, given that we haven’t been able to meet up and celebrate his life. […]
       ‘We know that this is not the final word on Stuart’s life. Seeing the materials that people are sharing with us and the Stuart Christie Memorial Archive, we feel as though we are constantly learning more. We hope this reader gives you a sense of the breadth of his experiences, and celebrates his humanity, his morality and his intuitive grasp of anarchism.’ (from the introduction)
        Published by AK Press, it’s 280 pages long and copies will be available later in the year. Money from each copy sold will go to Stuart’s daughter, Branwen. We’ll share more information when we have it.

Salud, comrade!

Kate Sharpley Library Collective

[Top photo: Stuart working on Sanday]

Visit ann arky's home at https://spiritofrevolt.info   

  

       Stuart Christie, who dead recently was a remarkable man, an anarchist, with incredible  skills, resilience, and a remarkable history, it is wonderful that his family and friends are creating an archive of his life and work. We must always remember and record our own, the society we live under would rather such people were erased from history, we must never let that happen, we have a rich and remarkable history we should be very proud of, Stuart Christie made it that bit richer. 

The following from Kate Sharpley Library.

Stuart Christie

The Stuart Christie Memorial Archive

       Friends, family and comrades of Stuart Christie have come up with a plan to commemorate his life by creating an archive at London’s Mayday Rooms and online.
      “Stuart’s life may have been plastered with headlines, Britain’s most famous anarchist was the usual description, but the small print of it was what was important. His courage, imagination, his loyalty, not just to what he believed in, but to his friends and family, his remarkable intelligence, his self-deprecating, droll and spiky humour. He was a man of parts, each one of them remarkable.
     “To reveal the richness of Stuart’s life and the many histories he was a part of, we intend to establish a memorial archive in his name. The Stuart Christie Memorial Archive will be housed at the MayDay Rooms in Fleet Street in London.”
      Read more about the project (and donate!) at
https://www.gofundme.com/f/stuart-christie-memorial-archive

 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk    

Our Kate.

          As usual the people at Kate Sharpley Library do a magnificent job in preserving and making available anarchist info and history, we at Spirit of Revolt, Archives of Dissent, take our hats off to them, as I'm sure lots of others will do likewise.  This latest bulletin is no exception, packed full of interesting info. Take a wee look.

2020

          Quite a lot has gone up on the website (and gone on in the world) since our last KSL Bulletin in September. We are not even thinking of trying to sum up our year. But we send you our good wishes and some anarchist history you might have missed.

Stuart Christie 1946-2020

Four months on, we’re still coming to terms with the fact it’s no good thinking ‘I must ask Stuart…’ John Barker, his friend and fellow defendant in the Stoke Newington Eight trial, has written a tribute: ‘I couldn’t stomach Bakunin and he Marx but when it came to the politics of the prison we acted as one. And something else, the great thing about Stuart as comrade and friend is that he was always cheerful and ready to make things both happen, and to work. […] With Stuart there was never any need to say, Don’t Let The Bastards Grind You Down.’
Read the rest of the tribute at https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/vhhpd8
 

Bob D’Attilio tribute from the KSL

For many years Robert (Bob) D’Atillio was an inexhaustible source of material on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. His loss is a tremendous one to those of us interested in the nuances of anarchist history. See https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/6wwrds
There’s a longer obituary by Luigi Botta at https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/vmcx9h
 

Other Anarchist Lives

Thoughts on Francesco Ghezzi
Francesco Ghezzi was an anarchist militant from Milan who was also active in France, Switzerland, Germany and Russia (and was imprisoned in the last three countries)…
On the 5 November 1937 Ghezzi was arrested for the final time. His case file records his frank replies to the secret police ‘I declare that I was and remain an anarchist, and that no one will change my convictions.’… (from the Gulag Anarchists blog) https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/fttgj8

Much more HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk    

Inspiration.

       The tributes to Stuart Christie, who died on the 15th August, still pour in, proof that the strands of this man's life are woven through a vast fabric that is the continuing world wide struggle for a system of justice, peace and freedom. A life of unstinting effort and sacrifice to that one cause, the better world for all, deserves to be honoured and remembered. His life should be an inspiration to all of us, young and old, who hold those same desires.

Stuart Christie, Luis Edo, Albert Meltzer, Doris Ensinger, Barcelona.

 The following from 325:

     ‘Stuart Christie, comrade, friend’ by Octavio Alberola
Stuart Christie, el compañero, el amigo
      The news of the death of Stuart Christie was communicated to me by telephone, the day before yesterday in the afternoon, by my comrade René after asking me if I was aware of the new bad news and after answering him abruptly: who has died? Well, from the tone of his voice, I immediately sensed that it must be the death of someone close to me.
       His answer left me stunned, because although Stuart had confirmed to me a week earlier that he was still suffering from cancer and that the results of the medical examinations were not very encouraging, at no time had I thought of such a quick end for him. Close to me are several comrades -more or less my age- who are not in very good health, and the “normal” thing, at my age (soon ninety-three years old), is to think that it is you that time is counting down on.
      So, in Stuart’s case, how can I think about it when he’s eighteen years younger? Besides, we were both in common projects and determined to continue participating in the fight against the world of power and exploitation.
      For me, his death is not only the loss of a comrade, of a friend; it is the end of a collaboration of many years in common actions and initiatives to denounce the injustices of the world in which we live and to fight for a more just and free world. A world that is possible and for everyone, which we have not ceased to long for and to try to build through the consistent practice of active revolutionary and internationalist solidarity.
     We had many years of a fraternal relationship since our first meeting, in that month of August 1964, until this one of 2020. More than half a century of our lives being linked, in one way or another, in a common cause in spite of the borders… Since, in spite of being focused on the political and social ups-and-downs of the Spanish people, first under Franco’s dictatorship and then under that false democracy born from the Transition/Transaction, that struggle was always framed in a revolutionary internationalist perspective.
      The proof, for him, is his prison experiences in Spain and England, and for Brenda, his companion, in Germany, and for Ariane and me in Belgium and France. These experiences bear witness to those struggles without frontiers, being aware that the condition of freedom is for everyone and for everything.
      How, then, can we not feel the need to remember this at this time when this comradeship with Stuart ends with his death. And also because of the death a few days ago of our German companion Doris Ensinger, the companion of Luis Andrés Edo, with whom Stuart also shared prison experiences and fraternization in the struggles; since it is obvious that Doris’s disappearance also meant for me, in a certain way, the definitive end point of my fraternization in the struggles with Luis. An end that began a few years before with his death.
       The fact is that with Doris I was also left in a state of shock, surprised by the news of her death that Manel communicated to me; since it was barely a week ago that she had sent us, Tomás and me, a mail to announce that she had been called to the hospital suddenly and had had a transplant… And that she was already at home and was feeling well…
        So once again I am confronted with the temporariness of our existence and the need to preserve the memory of what we have tried to be and do until death.

Perpignan, 17 August 2020
Octavio Alberola

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Obituary.

 

     I know a lot has been posted about Stuart Christie since his death the other day, but as an anarchist of such stature and a friend of Spirit of Revolt, we believe that it is only fitting that we should re-post the obituary by John Paton published on the Kate Sharpley Library website. 

Stuart Christie 1946-2020,

Anarchist activist, writer and publisher

John Patten

      Stuart Christie, founder of the Anarchist Black Cross and Cienfuegos Press and co-author of The floodgates of anarchy has died peacefully after a battle with lung cancer.

    Born in Glasgow and brought up in Blantyre, Christie credited his grandmother for shaping his political outlook, giving him a clear moral map and ethical code. His determination to follow his conscience led him to anarchism: “Without freedom there would be no equality and without equality no freedom, and without struggle there would be neither.” It also led him from the campaign against nuclear weapons to joining the struggle against the Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco (1892-1975).

     He moved to London and got in touch with the clandestine Spanish anarchist organisation Defensa Interior (Interior Defence). He was arrested in Madrid in 1964 carrying explosives to be used in an assassination attempt on Franco. To cover the fact that there was an informer inside the group, the police proclaimed they had agents operating in Britain – and (falsely) that Christie had drawn attention to himself by wearing a kilt.

       The threat of the garotte and his twenty year sentence drew international attention to the resistance to the Franco regime. In prison Christie formed lasting friendships with anarchist militants of his and earlier generations. He returned from Spain in 1967, older and wiser, but equally determined to continue the struggle and use his notoriety to aid the comrades he left behind.

      In London he met Brenda Earl who would become his political and emotional life partner. He also met Albert Meltzer, and the two would refound the Anarchist Black Cross to promote solidarity with anarchist prisoners in Spain, and the resistance more broadly. Their book, The floodgates of anarchy promoted a revolutionary anarchism at odds with the attitudes of some who had come into anarchism from the sixties peace movement. At the Carrara anarchist conference of 1968 Christie got in touch with a new generation of anarchist militants who shared his ideas and approach to action.

        Christie’s political commitment and international connections made him a target for the British Special Branch. He was acquitted of conspiracy to cause explosions in the “Stoke Newington Eight” trial of 1972, claiming the jury could understand why someone would want to blow up Franco, and why that would make him a target for “conservative-minded policemen”.

     Free but apparently unemployable, Christie launched Cienfuegos Press which would produce a large number of anarchist books and the encyclopedic Cienfuegos Press Anarchist Review. Briefly Orkney became a centre of anarchist publishing before lack of cashflow ended the project. Christie would continue publishing, and investigating new ways of doing so including ebooks and the internet. His christiebooks.com site contains numerous films on anarchism and biographies of anarchists. He used facebook to create an archive of anarchist history not available anywhere else as he recounted memories and events from his own and other people’s lives.

      Christie wrote The investigative researcher’s handbook (1983), sharing skills that he put to use in an exposé of fascist Italian terrorist Stefano delle Chiaie (1984). In 1996 he published the first version of his historical study We the anarchists : a study of the Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI), 1927-1937.

       Short-run printing enabled him to produced three illustrated volumes of his life story (My granny made me an anarchist, General Franco made me a ‘terrorist’ and Edward Heath made me angry 2002-2004) which were condensed into a single volume as Granny made me an anarchist : General Franco, the angry brigade and me (2004). His final books were the three volumes of ¡Pistoleros! The Chronicles of Farquhar McHarg, his tales of a Glaswegian anarchist who joins the Spanish anarchist defence groups in the years 1918-1924.

      Committed to anarchism and publishing, Christie appeared at many bookfairs and film festivals, but scorned any suggestion he had come to ‘lead’ anyone anywhere.

        Christie’s partner Brenda died in June 2019. He slipped away peacefully, listening to “Pennies From Heaven” (Brenda’s favourite song) in the company of his daughter Branwen.

Stuart Christie, 10 July 1946-15 August 2020

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Stuart Christie.

       Shattered today, just heard of the death of friend and comrade Stuart Christie, deepest and sincere condolences to all his family. Apart from Stuart's many activities I suppose he is best know to most through Christie Books. Massive as Christie Books is, it is only a fraction of the man and his activities. There is a world of anarchism wrapped up in his life that the anarchists across the world can be proud of.

 From Twitter:

Philip Ruff

@RuffPhilip

·

Devastated to report the passing of my old friend & comrade Stuart Christie (pictured here with Albert Meltzer in 1976), who died peacefully today after a brave battle with lung cancer. RIP amigo!

He will be sadly missed by so many.

A Farewell

Another comrade leaves the field of battle

Another comrade who always stood tall

Another of our warriors has left the field

Another brick has fallen from our wall

Who will step forward to take their place

Who among us will rise to their just call

Who will step forward to fill the gap

Who has the courage to replace their fall

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

Remembering Our Own, Albert Meltzer.

       We should always remember our own, those who stood up and fought on the side of the ordinary people against the injustices and inequalities of this repugnant capitalist system.

     January 7th. marks the 100th. anniversary of the birth of staunch anarcho-communist, conscientious objector, Albert Meltzer who died almost five years ago on the 7th. May 1996.

      This extract is from the Kate Sharpley Library and is by his friend and comrade Stuart Christie:

 Albert Meltzer with Stuart Christie

Albert Meltzer, anarchist

Stuart Christie

         Albert Meltzer was one of the most enduring and respected torchbearers of the international anarchist movement in the second half of the twentieth century. His sixty-year commitment to the vision and practice of anarchism survived both the collapse of the Revolution and Civil War in Spain and the Second World War; he helped fuel the libertarian impetus of the 1960s and 1970s and steer it through the reactionary challenges of the Thatcherite 1980s and post-Cold War 1990s.
      Fortunately, before he died, Albert managed to finish his autobiography, I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels, a pungent, no-punches pulled, Schvejkian account of a radical twentieth century enemy of humbug and injustice. A life-long trade union activist, he fought Mosley's Blackshirts in the battle of Cable Street, played an active role in supporting the anarchist communes and militias in the Spanish Revolution and the pre-war German anti-Nazi resistance, was a key player in the Cairo Mutiny [after] the Second World War, helped rebuild the post-war anti-Franco resistance in Spain and the international anarchist movement. His achievements include Cuddon's Cosmopolitan Review, an occasional satirical review first published in 1965 and named after Ambrose Cuddon, possibly the first consciously anarchist publisher in the modern sense, the founding of the Anarchist Black Cross, a prisoners' aid and ginger group and the paper which grew out of it - Black Flag.
        However, perhaps Albert's most enduring legacy is the Kate Sharpley Library, probably the most comprehensive anarchist archive in Britain. 

Read the full article HERE: 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk