John Fleming’s Weekly Diary No 33 – An anarchist’s death, baths and sleep

… CONTINUED FROM DIARY No 32 …

Another weekly diary blog that’s maybe more than a bit self-absorbed. Apologies.

(Photo by 21 swan via Unsplash)

SUNDAY 30th AUGUST

For the last 3 or 4 weeks, my legs have ached when climbing long flights of stairs eg at stations. Really tiring and aching.

I had a lot of trouble getting out of the bath this morning.

But things could be worse.

My eternally un-named friend commented: “It’s a good day when you don’t have a hand grenade thrown through your window.” Something with which I cannot disagree. We think it’s a reference to the 1942 movie Went The Day Well?

As if to prove the point, both in general and a propos hand grenades, later in the day, my friend Lynn told me that (alleged) Angry Brigade anarchist Stuart Christie,whom I blogged about in October last year, died, aged 74, on 15th August. I had not noticed any obituaries at the time.

MONDAY 31st AUGUST

A couple of weeks ago, at Euston station, I heard an announcement for Inspector Sands (a coded message which means that there is a major emergency in the building).

I arrived at St Pancras station tonight and there was another Inspector Sands announcement – this time in English AND in French.

Everyone ignored it. I am still alive to tell the tale. If this happens a third time, I will be forced to conclude that the railway companies have actually been foolhardy enough to employ someone genuinely called Inspector Sands.

My yellow chum bobs in turbulent waters…

TUESDAY 1st SEPTEMBER

I had a bath this morning.

Despite my age, I try to keep mostly clean.

Also, I enjoy farting in the bath and watching my yellow plastic duck bob around in the turbulent waters.

Anyway, I had trouble getting out of the bath again, but it was not as bad as on Sunday.

Later, Ariane Sherine‘s 9-year-old daughter – never to be underestimated – told me that my birthday (28th July) is appropriately National Milk Chocolate Day.

WEDNESDAY 2nd SEPTEMBER

I slept just over 10 hours last night and woke up 12 times needing to drink water.

Today is my mother’s 100th birthday. She is dead, of course.

Ariane Sherine’s 9 yo wished my dead mother a happy 100th

Ariane Sherine’s daughter sent me well-wishes and a design she had created to celebrate my mother’s birthday.

For some reason, she had my mother’s maiden name down as McHamilton instead of McLellan, but my mother is dead, so no harm there.

Not that there would have been any problem; she would have been very happy. Very honoured.

Perhaps Ariane’s daughter is writing a musical. I would not put it beyond her.

THURSDAY 3rd SEPTEMBER

I slept from 2200 last night to 2000 tonight with a couple of short periods awake to eat and a very large number of wakings-up to drink water.

When I woke up, l had a bath and still had some trouble getting out of it. The muscles in my legs or somesuch.

“It seems to have been a Thursday for at least eight days now.”

It seems to have been a Thursday for at least eight days now.

A friend commented on my ongoing sleeping problems: “It seems quite uncope-able with, no? Not much of a life? You seem to just have an existence of being asleep, merely waking to eat or gasping for a drink.”

But maybe that description covers a very large percentage of people’s lives.

FRIDAY 4th SEPTEMBER

July… August… September… It all merges into one…

Ah! The (in)efficiency of the NHS bureaucracy!

This morning (September 4th) I received a letter from the Kidney Man posted yesterday and written on July 29th about a July 6th chat referring to a future early August appointment. It was sent to my GP with a CC to me so I presume he also received it this morning.

In the afternoon, I had a shingles vaccination at my GP’s. Because of the COVID-19 outbreak, none of the GPs are there any more. They all work from home.

The nurse giving the injection CLAIMED it was OK for me to have, despite my recent problems – cause still unknown.

Apparently, the Shingles vaccination is not annual – it’s one in a lifetime. Of course, if it kills me next week, that would still be true.

I found out too late to celebrate that today is National Fish & Chip Day.

SATURDAY 5th SEPTEMBER

Easier to get out of the bath, Almost back to normal.

Well, as far as getting out of the bath is concerned…

Like I said at the beginning, this blog is maybe more than a bit self-absorbed. Apologies.

… CONTINUED HERE …

How the Angry Brigade’s anarchists helped create the UK’s Bomb Squad

Angry anarchist Stuart Christie

This morning, Stuart Christie (who knows about such things) commented on a 2015 blog of mine entitled The Angry Brigade, British anarchists – the real bombers were never arrested?

Stuart’s comment was:

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What complete and utter bollocks from your friend ‘Sam Taylor’. The four people arrested at 359 Amhurst Road had only recently moved there, in the spring of 1971, and were living quietly and clandestinely keeping off the radar, the identities of at least two of them having been discovered by the police and recently published in Hue and Cry. They were never a ‘collective’ in any sense of the word. ‘Sam’s’ account is a concoction of urban myths and befuddled memories.

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Stuart told me this afternoon he has “nothing really to add, just trying to put that little canard to bed”.

But he sent me a copy of Edward Heath Made Me Angry, the third party of his trilogy memoir, with permission to quote/extract from it.

For those who don’t or can’t quite remember that time, I think this section from Stuart’s book gives a good flavour.

Part 3 of Stuart’s fascinating memoir

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What was loosely called the ‘Angry Brigade’ had received its baptism on 22 May the previous year with the discovery of a bomb in the foundations of the new high security police station in Paddington. This had been followed on 30 August by a bomb at the Putney home of Sir John Waldron, the Commissioner of Police. 

Following the bomb attack on his home, Sir John had made it the top priority to capture those responsible and ordered a complete reorganisation of the Special Branch. Ferguson Smith, the head of Special Branch, was promoted to the rank of Deputy Assistant Commissioner and the heads of its three main sections – Operations, Ports and Administration – to Commander. For Waldron it was now something personal.

I now knew why Palmer-Hall had asked such apparently irrelevant questions when he was interviewing me about the First of May Group attacks on Iberia Airlines at Heathrow. He had mentioned Roehampton and the West End, places nowhere near Heathrow.

On 8 September, a week after Waldron’s house had been targeted, the Chelsea home of the new Conservative Attorney General, Sir Peter Rawlinson QC, had also been bombed. He, too, had been successful in suppressing the news. It was Rawlinson who had defined the Tory no-holds-barred policy on ‘law and order’ in a pre-election speech to the Society of Conservative Lawyers. His speech was the opening engagement of a new class war — the Tory equivalent of the Confederate forces firing on Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861.

One can understand why Robert Carr might have been bitter. This was where ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’ came in. They were the signatories on the letter claiming responsibility for the attack on his house. Rawlinson’s bomb had been claimed by the ‘Wild Bunch.’ Albert Meltzer had also been asked why people would use those names when carrying out ‘outrages.’ ‘What names should they use – their own?’ he replied.

Stuart was cleared in 1972 of being part of the Angry Brigade

Before Carr’s house was bombed, only the police and a few news editors had heard of the Angry Brigade. But the name had been used a month earlier in a note to the underground newspaper International Times (IT) claiming responsibility for a machine-gun attack on the Spanish Embassy on the night of 4 December. The machine-gun used, a Beretta M1938-42, was later shown to have been the same one used in the First of May Group attack on the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square three years earlier. Overnight, the ‘Angry Brigade’ had become headline news — and every pundit had his own explanation as to its origin.

How the name ‘The Angry Brigade’ came about, will probably never be known with certainty. It doesn’t really matter. Fiction writers and academics have tried to slot in the Angry Brigade with the student movement or middle-class dropout hippies. One writer wrote a fantasy novel called The Angry Brigade, which he claimed was written from taped interviews with them, which he later destroyed. He, too, portrayed the Angry Brigade as student dropouts – caricatures of the caricatures. On top of this, they were all on drugs.

The names ‘Angry Brigade,’ like ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,’ and the ‘Wild Bunch’ were intended to be light-heartedly ironic. They could equally have used ‘William Brown and the Outlaws.’ The names were chosen, presumably, in an attempt to avoid the quasi-military or political pretentiousness of those used by other action-oriented groups of the times. And although I was never present when any of the communiqués were written, I always imagined the surreal telegraphese of the language of the communiqués to have been inspired by the Jack the Ripper ‘Dear Boss’ letters, and written in surroundings similar to that depicted in Ilya Repin’s famous painting of the Zaporozhie Cossacks Writing a Mocking Letter to the Turkish Sultan.

The Carr bombing brought massive pressure to bear on Scotland Yard from the Cabinet Office. The investigation, led by Detective Chief Superintendent Roy Habershon under his regional senior officer, Commander Dace, was given top priority. With this new authority, Habershon immediately recruited a team of around 30 officers from the Flying Squad and the Special Branch, a group which soon became known as the ‘Bomb Squad.’

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Stuart Christie’s mugshots in General Franco’s Fascist Spain

BACKGROUND: Stuart Christie was accused of being part of the Angry Brigade but, in a 1972 trial, he was acquitted of related charges.

Before that, back in 1964, he had been arrested in Spain for possession of explosives, allegedly to assassinate Spain’s Fascist head of state General Franco. He faced a military trial and possible execution by garotte but was, instead, sentenced to twenty years in prison.

He was released after three years, according to the Spanish authorities, after a plea to them from his mother.

He has written about this time in his book Granny Made Me an Anarchist: General Franco, The Angry Brigade and Me. Back in 2010, investigative journalist Duncan Campbell and Republican novelist Ronan Bennett‘s screenplay based on the book was on ‘the Brit List’ – the prestigious annual list of “Best Unproduced Screenplays from the UK“.

There is currently a 72-minute documentary about The Angry Brigade on YouTube. I can’t guarantee the facts are true…