People :
Author : Constance Bantman
Author : John Quail
Author : Nick Heath
Text :
John Quail’s history of British anarchism was a groundbreaking document. It was one of the first books to address itself to the ‘lost history’ of the movement. Only Albert Meltzer had previously addressed the subject in any detail in his The Anarchists in London 1935–1955: A Personal Memoir which had appeared two years before in 1976. As Comrade Quail notes in his bibliography, E.P. Thompson’s book on William Morris had important information on anarchist activity in the Socialist League, though, as he warned, whilst it was sourced from primary sources it has a quite pronounced bias against anarchism.
Since then we have had Ken Weller’s Don’t Be A Soldier! The Radical Anti-war Movement in North London 1914–1918, containing much information on anarchists and libertarian socialists active in this period, which appeared in 1985; Sheila Rowbotham’s essay on The Sheffield Anarchists in the 1890s (1979), and some pieces on the history of the British movement in the magazine the Raven and in the Freedom Press Centenary edition book Freedom: A Hundred Years — October 1886 to October 1986.
In addition we have had the pamphlet Left-wing Communism in Britain 1917–1921 … An Infantile Disorder? by Bob Jones (1984), Mark Shipway’s book Anti-Parliamentary Communism: The Movement for Workers Councils in Britain 1917–1945 (1988) and the anthology produced by Wildcat, Class War on the Home Front: A History of the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation (1986), all of which gave details of anti-parliamentary and anarchist activity between the wars and filled a gap in Quail’s book.
Recently there has been a welter of new articles on the British movement thanks to the efforts of the Kate Sharpley Library, which reprinted important pamphlets by George Cores and Wilf McCartney, as well as providing much new information, and of the Libcom website, which has published many new biographies of British anarchist militants and histories of anarchist activities in Aberdeen, Brighton, Dundee, Manchester, Stockport, East London and the Welsh valleys.
Yet research on the history of the British movement still seems to be in its late infancy and much more work needs to be done in rediscovering individual anarchist activists and local movements hidden from history for too long. It is a sign of the renaissance of anarchism in general that the tempo of material being produced on the British anarchist movement is increasing. For too long both bourgeois historians and those allied to either the Communist Party or the various Trotskyist groups have, consciously or not, obscured or distorted the history of British anarchism and of broader movements into which anarchists had an important input. For example the anarchist origins of quite a few founding members of the British Communist Party, like Harry Pollitt, etc., are ignored by C.P. historians.
Quail’s book deals in great detail with the anarchist movement up until and during World War One, and then gives brief details of the movement in the interwar period, as well as a cursory look at the reemergence of anarchism after the Second World War. Some of his closing comments on the fate of the movement are still extremely cogent today, though I would take issue, as very much an organizational anarchist, with some of his comments on organization in his conclusion.
John Quail’s book remains an important one, a pioneering work in dragging the history of the British movement out of obscurity. Freedom Press should be congratulated on republishing it after so many years.
Nick Heath
From : TheAnarchistLibrary.org.
Chronology :
February 12, 2021 : Foreword -- Added.
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