(A Book Review by Christopher Draper)
Do you remember those wooden rulers on
sale at Woolworths with the names and dates of all the British Kings and Queens on the back? That was the kind of history I learnt
at school. Regrettably, a lot of alternative history isn’t much better with a
similar emphasis on London-based leaders. I’ve always preferred to read about radical
lives and politics away from the metropolitan bubble and Andrew Lee’s new
history of Sheffield ’s pioneering socialists
and anarchists is a perfect paradigm of “people’s history”.
Andrew Lee’s book embodies the ideals it chronicles with a beautiful cover designed by libertarian socialist Walter Crane. The text is printed on decent quality paper and it’s lavishly illustrated with numerous portraits and political posters. Computer screens might usefully churn out dry facts but Andrew Lee appreciates that wisdom is more surely gained through a slow, aesthetically pleasing book-read and there is a lot to mull over in “The Red Flag of Anarchy”.
Focussed
on the Sheffield scene from 1874 to 1900 the author depicts a rich political
culture created by predominantly working class activists of every flavour. He
doesn’t push any political line but the book is suffused throughout its 178
pages with an inspiringly libertarian spirit. Lee’s achievement is to conjure
up a vivid picture of a welcoming, inclusive yet militant socialist milieu.
Activists who for an all too brief moment managed to create the germ of a new society
within the shell of the old. An alternative society that created communist
colonies, embraced gay lifestyles, published a regular anarchist newspaper, operated
a “Commonwealth Café”, organised picnics and ran raffles with books by Bellamy
and Thoreau as prizes or alternately “A Handsomely Framed Portrait of
Ravachol”!
“The Red Flag of
Anarchy”
is invaluable not just for its contents but as an inspiration and model for socialists
all around Britain to get your shovel out and start digging down into your own
local libertarian past. I know from my own researches that there’s always been
far more going on out of London than our erstwhile chroniclers would have us
believe.
I
have just two criticisms which I hope Andrew might address in future editions. The
first is the absence of an index. This isn’t so much of a handicap as it would be
in a text-only volume as the extensive contents list and numerous illustrations
facilitate navigation but digitisation makes compiling an index simple and speedy.
Secondly I would like some analysis of why Sheffield’s socialist oasis became
barren. At the end of the book Lee observes, “It was the end of an era,
everything was going to change…Parliamentary politics was to become the order
of the day” but it wasn’t inevitable, what exactly occurred in Sheffield? My own
research, for example, shows that in Leicester all manner of socialists
cooperated for years until the foundation of the ILP in 1893. Thereafter Leicester
ILP refused to have any truck with local anarchists whose direct-action was thought
detrimental to attracting votes. ILP sectarianism thus transformed Leicester’s
lively socialism into bureaucratic electoralism. Were the same forces at work
in Sheffield?
If
we are ever to regain the radicalism and comradeship of early socialism it’s
crucial that we identify what went wrong last time. Andrew Lee reminds us of an
era when Labour Clubs were far more than dreary drinking dens. Available from
Amazon for £10.00, in my opinion “The
Red Flag of Anarchism” is the most valuable and entertaining study of
grass-roots, pioneering Anarchy in the UK since John Quail’s classic “Slow
Burning Fuse”.
