Stuart Christie
Christie Books, PO Box 35, Hastings
East Sussex, TN 34 2UX
pb, £34 from www.christiebooks.com
I really enjoyed this account of his childhood from Christie, Britain’s most famous anarchist and celebrated radical publisher. But I’m not sure how many other people would. I may have enjoyed it as much as I did because while Christie was growing up in the west of Scotland, I was growing up at the same time in Edinburgh; and, though two years younger than him, recognise much of his experience: we lived on similar streets, went to similar schools, we read the same comics, and hung-out in the early sixties with the same mix of lefties, folkies, beatniks and anarchists. When Christie describes a brilliant soapbox speaker from the old Socialist Party of Great Britain, I recall seeing one – maybe the same man – holding an audience of over 100 in the palm of his hand, in Edinburgh at the Mound on Princess St..
Christie has done a simple but brilliant thing. Using contemporary computer technology – scanning and page make-up – he has inserted into his text lots of pictures of the people, places and the culture of the time: from his parents, the street he lived in and the school he attended, to pictures to local rock bands and artefacts of the period. He has almost created a new kind of illustrated autobiography. For example, as I was, he was much taken with two comic characters: Alf Tupper, ‘the tough of the track’, a working-class track runner who would amble in from a day’s work as a plumber (?) and beat the toffs; and the Amazing Wilson, a mysterious runner who lived ‘in the hills’ and would descend now and then, dressed in black tights, to beat all-comers. I remember these characters – and Limp Along Leslie, the amazing disabled left-winger – better than I do the people I was at primary school with and it was a delight to see the illustrations of Wilson and Tupper from the comic they were in. But if you don’t know them, will it be of any interest?
The significant material here is the account of left/anarchist/anti-nuclear politics of the period, chiefly in the Glasgow area and a later in London: Spies for Peace, Committee of 100 – and the legendary group Scots Against War, whose campaign of sabotage against military installations in Scotland was the subject of much rumour-mongering in the teenage CND circles I was in at the time. Christie is hinting that he knows rather more about this than he tell us here.
Christie cruised the entire Glasgow left before he was 17 and plumped for anarchism. I carried a book by Bakunin around for a while. I couldn’t understand it but it felt hip to be seen with it. Christie, on the other hand, actually walked the walk. Inspired by tales of the Spanish anarchist anti-Franco resistance told by Spanish exiles, he volunteered to take explosives to the Spanish comrades who wanted to blow up Franco. The main narrative of the book ends with Christie, aged 18, packing his rucksack to go to Spain. It is an anticlimax, of course, but leaves the forthcoming second volume with the punchy opening of Christie getting busted by Franco’s police. Fascist goons strike!