THE ANARCHISTS IN LONDON. A Personal Memoir, Albert Meltzer (ISBN 978-0-904564-12-9), £2.03, ChristieBooks. PO Box 35, Hastings, East Sussex, TN341ZS. First published by Cienfuegos Press, Over the Water, Sanday, Orkney, in 1976. This fully revised ChristieBooks (Kindle eBook) edition published 2013. LOOK INSIDE
UK : £2.03 ; USA : $3.09 ; Germany : €2,41 ; France : €2,41 ; Spain: €2,41 ; Italy : €2,41 ; Japan : ¥ 283 ; Canada : CDN$ 3.05 ; Brazil : R$ 6,07
Albert Meltzer was one of the most enduring and respected torchbearers of the international anarchist movement in the second half of the twentieth century. His sixty-year commitment to the vision and practice of anarchism survived both the collapse of the Revolution and Civil War in Spain and The Second World War; he helped fuel the libertarian impetus of the 1960s and 1970s and steer it through the reactionary challenges of the Thatcherite 1980s and post-Cold War 1990s.
Albert Meltzer, anarchist, born London, January 7,1920; died, Weston-Super-Mare, North Somerset, May 7, 1996.
Fortunately, before he died, Albert managed to finish his autobiography, I Couldn’t Paint Golden Angels, * a pungent, no-punches pulled, Schvejkian account of a radical twentieth century enemy of humbug and injustice. A life-long trade union activist, he fought Mosley’s Blackshirts in the battle of Cable Street, played an active role in supporting the anarchist communes and militias in the Spanish Revolution and the pre-war German anti-Nazi resistance, was a key player in the Cairo Mutiny during WWII, helped rebuild the post-war anti-Franco resistance in Spain and the international anarchist movement. His achievements include Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review, an occasional satirical review first published in 1965 and named after Ambrose Cuddon, possibly the first consciously anarchist publisher in the modern sense, the founding of the Anarchist Black Cross, a prisoners’ aid and ginger group and the paper which grew out of it Black Flag.
