TIMES PAST Stuart Christie
HISTORY PEOPLE FIVE FACTS ABOUT
1He was the working class Glasgow teenager who became known as Britain’s ‘ most famous anarchist’. Stuart Christie, who died aged 74 last week, was an internationallyrenowned activist who, at the age of 18, went to Spain to try and blow up the dictator Franco in August 1964.
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Christie was born in Partick, the son of Albert, a trawlerman from Aberdeenshire, and Olive ( nee Ring), a hairdresser. When he was six his father left home, and he was brought up in part by his grandparents in Blantyre, where he attended Calder Street school.
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He worked briefly as an apprentice in a Glasgow dental laboratory, where he became the union representative and in the early 1960s he joined the Glasgow Federation of Anarchists. With increasing reports that Franco’s anarchist opponents were being jailed, tortured and killed in Spain, he signed up to help smuggle explosives to Madrid for an assassination plot.
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Telling his parents he was going grape- picking in France, Christie instead hitch- hiked to Spain wearing the plastic explosives taped to his body. The mission had been infiltrated, however, and when Christie handed them over, he was arrested.
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Christie escaped a sentence of death- by- garotte and was sent to Franco’s Carabanchel Prison for 20 years. He was released after just less than four following an appeal by his mother. Several years later in Britain, he was in jail again, after being accused of being a member of the Angry Brigade, a group responsible for a series of explosions in London in the early 1970s. On that occasion he was acquitted. He became a leading writer and publisher of anarchist literature, and wrote a memoir, Granny Made Me an Anarchist.