The life and times of an ANARCHIST'S APPRENTICE

is the subject of a new book. IAN SUTHERLAND talks to its author.

JOHN TAYLOR CALDWELL found out about man's inhumanity to man the hard

way. Pantry boys on Anchor Line steamers from Glasgow to New York in the

1920s knew, like Kipling's punctured toad, precisely where each point of

the harrow went. Pantry boys had no meal-times or even actual formal

provision for food. They just gathered round the pantry doors, deep in

the bowels of liners like the Transylvania and the Cameronia -- and

hoped.

When food did appear, there weren't even knives and forks. John

Caldwell's basic Christian faith -- already severely dented from

witnessing vicious sectarian practices during a Belfast childhood --

went for a Burton.

Oppressed seafarers displayed little class solidarity. Anchor Lines

steamers contained little of the rebellion of the Battleship Potemkin.

John Caldwell learned a grim lesson -- economic hardship rotted the

human spirit. ''People were horrible to each other,'' he recalls. Even

if indignity was suffered long enough and a pantry boy reached the giddy

height of waiter (third class), matters weren't helped much. Waiters

earned #1 a week. ''How men kept families on that, I'll never know.''

John Caldwell already suspected there was another side to life. ''Born

with an introspective mind,'' he had begun to read the humanist

philosophies of Voltaire and Rousseau. Ashore, the pantry boys started

touring political meetings. There was plenty of choice on the street

corners for an inquirer in the early 1930s.

The Communist Party of Great Britain told of a veritable workers'

paradise in the Soviet Union. The Labour Party promised proletarian

Nirvana if only enough people used their votes. The remnants of John

MacLean's Scottish Workers Republican Party offered a socialist national

republic, en route to a European workers' republic, en route to a world

workers' republic. The Socialist Party of Great Britain urged utter

purity -- MRA style -- with socialism only obtainable if 633 socialist

MPs were returned simultaneously to Westminster.

John Caldwell found them all as credible as a nine-bob note. They

sounded like secularised versions of the heaven he had begun to doubt

existed.

Execution corridors

One Glasgow Green orator purveyed a different message. Guy Alfred

Aldred, a stout figure, habitually dressed in Norfolk jacket and

knickerbockers, told his audiences bluntly that, in the Soviet toilers'

paradise, genuine socialists had long been in for a one-way trip to the

execution corridors of the Lubianka. John Caldwell began to hear things

he wanted to hear, preached from the back of a horse-drawn lorry.

True socialism's watchwords were independence, regard for truth,

personal honesty, individual and collective responsibility, scientific

logic, disregard for race and sex -- and, above all, respect for every

form of human autonomy. Comrade Aldred also pointed out that human

beings had souls. There was more to life than endless struggles for an

extra penny an hour. It didn't take the young seafarer long to get

hooked. He still is.

Guy Aldred was a very determined man. Soon after the First World War,

he was approached by a covert emissary of the new Soviet State -- with a

proposition seemingly irresistible to the poverty-stricken editor of a

small, left-wing newspaper. If Aldred and The Spur published articles

favourable to the Bolshevik cause, debts would be cleared and Aldred

maintained in no small comfort.

The Spur's editor might not know where his next meal was coming from,

but political corruption was never to his taste. The approach was firmly

rejected. Recalling the incident, Guy Aldred summed up the principle

that governed his life. ''I simply will not be forced to do anything.''

Not for nothing was he regularly billed as ''Minister of the Gospel of

Revolt.'' He practised what he preached. In attempting to suborn him,

the Cominterm's Central Committee might have borne in mind that his

birthday was November the Fifth.

The British Government already knew that nothing on earth would induce

Guy Aldred to defy his ''indwelling urge.'' Awaiting court-martial in

1916, Aldred wrote: ''Let truth, and truth alone, be my mistress, and

that I bring witness to her integrity for all lands and climes. May no

worldly ambition, no temptation in this wilderness of understanding,

lead me to serve the enemy of man, the principle of power and

domination.''

Like most atheists, he had his period of religious fervour -- as a boy

preacher in London's myriad non-conformist halls. His time in the pulpit

didn't last long. He preached his last sermon in 1903. By 1905, he fell

in with a group of Scots anarchists in London. They were in contact with

like-minded continental exiles.

Edwardian revolutionaries gathered in the Club Autonomie. According to

legend, men wore sombreros and scarlet neckties: short-haired women

sported ''red rosettes on mannish coats'' and marched in ''stout

business-like boots.'' The legendary Peter Kropotkin -- author of

Fields, Farms, and Factories and Mutual Aid, once exiled by the Czar to

Siberia -- turned up to the lecture. Anarchist newspapers flourished.

An anarchist defined

Freedom, founded in 1886, the year of Aldred's birth, defined the

quintessential anarchist. It might also have been sketching the future

Guy Aldred. ''The genuine anarchist looks with sheer horror upon every

destruction, every mutilation, of a human being, physical or moral. He

loathes wars, executions, and imprisonments, the crippling and poisoning

of human nature by the preventable cruelty and injustice of man to man

in every shape and form.''

Aldred was from the outset up to his neck in trouble. The first

customer for his ancient press -- cost, ten bob, ink thrown in -- was

none other than Aleister Crowley, also known as Beast 666. His first

brush with the law came when he took over printing of The Indian

Sociologist, suppressed after an Indian nationalist shot a colonial

official. In print or on the platform, Guy Aldred's fame was beginning

to spread.

In Glasgow, a golden age of socialist agitation was in full flower.

Inevitably, the redoubtable Aldred headed for Clydeside. Socialism was

still a spirited movement -- a vibrant prelude to ossification within

the party system.

The Clarion Scouts -- a subversive version of the B-P creation --

packed theatres for socialist rallies. Robert Blatchford's book Merrie

England (despite its title) sold over 10,000 copies in the Second City.

Clarion Scouts fanned out all over Scotland, by bicycle, train, and

steamer. Before Stalinist conformity claimed him, Willie Gallacher

chaired Clarion meetings.

Anarchism was a potent force in Scotland. Kropotkin and Red Emma

Goldman were regular visitors. It was an anarchist who secured the right

of free speech at Edinburgh's Mound. Aldred spoke throughout Scotland

between 1912 and 1913. Perhaps, then as now, England seemed unpromising

territory for radical endeavour.

In 1914, with war clouds looming, he spoke at the May Day rally on

Glasgow Green. Organised labour across Europe pledged to resist

mobilisation. That determination vanished with the first whiff of

cordite. Those who regarded solemn pledges as binding promises not to be

broken were soon en route to jail.

Aldred had never been called up, but was enlisted into the 9th London

Regiment -- and court-martialled for refusing orders. In jail, he led

hunger strikes and work stoppages.

Officially, Rifleman 392492 Guy Aldred was discharged for

''misconduct.''

By 1919, he was permanently in Glasgow -- dreaming with a poet's soul.

''As I walk across the Glasgow streets again and reflect on the many

hours I have spent in jail, I plan my revenge -- a brave, bold,

enlightening anarchist press. I plan the creation of a pantheon in which

Marx, Jesus, Bakunin and Tolstoy shall have their place, together with

Socrates, Plato, Ibsen and Wilde . . . I forget the Cat and Mouse. I

forget my debts. I see the coming press achievements and immediately the

world created anew thereby.''

The grand design's HQ was Bakunin House in Glasgow's West End -- now

demolished. It became Aldred's home, office, and printing works --

shared with his companion Jenny Patrick, one of the most remarkable

women to emerge from the largely chauvinist saga of Scotland's Left.

While the infant Communist Party -- under instructions from Moscow --

began to contest parliamentary elections, Aldred moved in the opposite

direction. His Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation (also known as

the ''Anti-Panties'') firmly held that elections were only useful as

episodic platforms for propaganda. Aldred continued to fight

parliamentary seats until 1962 -- usually promising to resign the seat

if 10 electors called for this.

In 1921, the police raided Bakunin House. The ensuing charges now seem

ludicrous. Nary a bomb was found -- but the group was charged with

inciting popular disaffection, commotion, and violence to popular

authority.

Aldred was sentenced to a year by Glasgow High Court -- served, though

he was a model prisoner, without remission.

Corruptor of morals

The dirty tricks brigade were soon in action again. In 1922 Bakunin

Press published birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger's book Family

Limitation. Police officers wrote in for copies -- posing as desperate

women trying to avoid repeated child-bearing. Aldred was promptly

indicted for conspiring to corrupt public morals.

As the 1930s dawned, the Anti-Panties merged with dissident ILP

members to form the United Socialist Movement. John Caldwell signed up

for the duration. The USM was harried by the right and abused on the

left. But they had wit, verve -- and style. While the Labour Party ended

metings with sonorous renderings of ''The Red Flag'' (once described by

Shaw as the funeral dirge for a snail) and Communists went into frenzies

with ditties about ''Keeping Propellors Turning -- Defending the USSR,''

Bakunin House's May Day tea parties -- accompanied by the Nitshill

Socialist Choir -- were distinctly more creative affairs:

By the early 30s the redoubtable Ethel MacDonald had joined Aldred as

his secretary. When John Caldwell finally forsook the sea he became the

fourth member of a revolutionary quarter producing papers and pamphlets

on an ancient press housed in tottering buildings in Glasgow's George

Street. The four -- Aldred, Jenny Patrick, Ethel MacDonald, and John

Caldwell -- lived as a family, sharing meagre resources and endless

work.

By the time he died in 1963, Guy Aldred had owned and edited 10

newspapers and produced hundreds of pamphlets.

Poor people from surrounding streets were never out of the shambolic

George Street premises -- asking Aldred to write to councillors, H-P

firms, landlords, and the courts.

Unpaid social work produced one unlikely admirer, Chief Constable

Percy Sillito, another of Clydeside's legendary anti-corruption

campaigners.

In 1936 Francisco Franco and other disloyal officers -- backed by

Hitler and Mussolini -- attacked the democratically elected Spanish

Republic. Ethel MacDonald and Jenny Patrick set off for Spain. Linking

up with Spanish anarchists of the FAI-CNT, they laboured night and day

to alert the world to what was happening. As an English-language

broadcaster for a Barcelona anarchist station, Ethel MacDonald also

denounced communist complicity in the ugly death of Iberian democracy.

Like Scots ILP organiser Bob Smillie (whose fate at the hands of the

republic's communist-controlled secret police has never been

established), she ended up under arrest in a Stalinist purge. A young

writer called George Orwell barely escaped with his life. Ethel

MacDonald -- headlined as ''The Scottish Scarlet Pimpernel'' -- helped

other victims to escape before finally smuggling herself out.

In 1938 Aldred brought out his last and best-known paper, The Word. It

ran until 1968. During the Second World War he rallied again to the

defence of conscientious objectors. If the war was not about the right

of individuals to dissent, it was about nothing at all. He was not a

pacifist in the simple sense of the term. He just loathed war.

Knowing that National Socialism could only be defeated by force of

arms, Aldred and Caldwell demanded democratisation of the army -- and

advocated mass-scale civilian resistance, Gandhi-style, in the event of

invasion.

Call for internment

His old adversaries in the CP -- recovered from the mental gymnastics

of trying to justify the Nazi-Soviet Pact between 1939 and 1941 --

lashed out. The USM was denounced as ''objectively pro-fascist.'' CP

speakers demanded Aldred's internment. They might have had a problem --

Percy Sillito was, by now, the head of MI5. Winston Spencer Churchill,

that other uncompromising individualist, knew how to pick men -- and he

didn't need Stalin's satraps to tell him who his real enemies were.

In 1945 Labour shot to power, and interest in the libertarian variety

of socialism waned. John Caldwell saw meetings fade as people were moved

away from the city centre. Guy Aldred was notoriously anti-motor car --

the more so as crowded highways finally put paid to street corner

assemblies.

By the early 1960s Guy Aldred knew that not even the most defiant

spirit could go on forever. In July, 1963, he told one of his last

audiences: ''All the realities around us, all the differences in our

lives from that of our forefathers, the development of man from the

brute animal, is due to the faculty of vision -- as opposed to the

observation of reality. In the beginning man possessed no soul -- and

that does not mean some supernatural manifestation of something that has

descended into man. It is an expression of man reaching upward.''

John Taylor Caldwell is an intensely shy and private man. He does not

readily talk of his life as an anarchist's apprentice. Finding a

publisher for his life of Guy Aldred has been in itself an epic

struggle. He has honoured a forgotten prophet -- his own dedication

should not pass unmarked.

There were no official eulogies when Guy Aldred died in 1963 -- with

ten pence in his pocket. Scotland's journalists mourned the passing of

an exemplary practitioner of their art. His death knocked a Cabinet

crisis off the front page. Outside Queen Street station, an old

newsvendor turned to his mate and said: ''That's my auld china gone. Guy

Aldred -- he's deid.'' Hundreds of ordinary people did their own private

mourning.

Come Dungeons Dark -- The Life and Times of Guy Aldred, Glasgow

Anarchist, by John Taylor Caldwell, is published by the Luath Press at

#6.95.