The Christie File part 3, 1967-75
Stuart Christie
p/back, £34 (inc. p and p)
from <www.christiebooks.com>
Like the first, reviewed in Lobster 44, this third volume (300 pages, indexed) in Christie’s autobiography is done on A4 pages with the central text bordered with photographs of the people and incidents concerned, newspaper clippings, posters, cartoons etc. With scanners and computers Christie has devised a new kind of illustrated history book.
This covers the period from 1967 to 1975 and centres on the Angry Brigade events. Thanks to the publicity surrounding Christie’s trial and imprisonment in Franco’s Spain for smuggling explosives to an anarchist group (unfortunately penetrated by Franco’s agents), upon his return to the UK in 1967, not surprisingly, he became a major focus of attention for the British security services, especially Special Branch. (How many explosive-toting anarchists did they have in the UK at the time?) There is much on Christie’s encounters with the boys in blue, all of whom, with one exception, an SB officer called Cremer, are portrayed as idiots. Christie’s harassment by SB only got worse when he set-up a European-wide anarchist support network, Anarchist Black Cross; and worse again when bombs began going off in London and elsewhere in Europe. The British state appeared to believe that Christie was at the heart of it. But since they had him under surveillance much of the time, they must have known this wasn’t true. For much of this period he was working long hours as a gas fitter, being followed about by SB officers. Or was it just that he was the only anarchist with international connections they knew of? Follow Christie and hope somebody interesting turns up?
This is a kind of history of the 1960s and early 70s from an activist’s view-point: the European anarchists and the ‘new left’ against the bourgeois state – which begins acting rough when challenged. Because of Christie’s international connections – pretty unusual in the 1960s and early 70s when travelling the continent wasn’t as easy as it is now – there are lots of European parapolitics of the time in this volume.(1) There are also chunks of anarchist history and theory; and chunks of UK parapolitics, centrally an account of the rise of the ‘strong state’ in UK. Christie was one of its first chroniclers. When I got interested in this field in the late 1970s he was one of those who had ploughed it already.
Although the Angry Brigade people don’t appear until p.116, it is those events, and the trial – the longest in British history – which dominates my recollection of the book. Some of this we know already but Christie’s is the first detailed insider account.
Christie knew a couple of the AB people slightly, his circle butted onto theirs at a couple of places, and you can imagine how the SB/MI5 mind viewed that. Just to make sure, they planted the detonators ‘found’ in his car. It appears, indeed, that, with the exception of Christie (who was acquitted) while the Crown forces did get the right people – none of those convicted have ever appeared to deny it and begin campaigns to have their convictions quashed – they did plant most, if not all, of the evidence which helped get the convictions.
Occasionally he overstates things. For example on p.163 he says that the late David Stirling became a ‘key player’ in various right-wing intrigues, ‘including a plot to overthrow British democracy – GB75.’ This isn’t true, I think. Christie doesn’t seem to have revisited the events of the mid 1970s since he first wrote about them and, with the extra knowledge we have acquired since, the picture has become more nuanced than it seemed then.(2)
This is fascinating stuff to me. But I remember some of the events described here and became politically conscious around the time the book’s narrative ends. How this would seem to someone under 30, I have no idea.
How much Christie’s innovative illustrated format adds is demonstrated by the non-illustrated compendium, extracts of his three volumes, Granny made me an anarchist (London: Scribner, 2004) . Recommended.
Notes
1 Christie knew enough about Italian politics to write the biography of Italian terrorist and intelligence asset, Delle Chiaie. This is available from <www.christiebooks.com>
2 There is one historical irony worth pointing out. Edward Heath, who made the British left (and Christie) angry with his perceived attack on the trade unions, was trying to convert British industrial relations into the German model, with the unions as integrated members of a quasi-corporate state. But as Heath wouldn’t acknowledge this is what he was doing, the leaders of the unions – messieurs Jones and Scanlon et al – never had a chance of selling it to their members. Chances are the plans would have been rejected any way ……but still. Mrs Thatcher’s onslaught on the post-war settlement might just have been avoided.