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Title: Review: Ethel MacDonald Author: Anarchist Communist Federation Date: 1998 Language: en Topics: Ethel MacDonald, book review, Organise! Source: Retrieved on May 14, 2013 from https://web.archive.org/web/20130514051453/http://www.afed.org.uk/org/issue49/reviews.html Notes: Published in Organise! Issue 49 — Summer-Autumn 1998.
Ethel MacDonald was born in Motherwell in 1909, into a large working
class family. Politically active from a very early age, she was
intensely opposed to the political and economic domination of women. She
joined the Independent Labour Party at 16. In 1931 she joined the
Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation (see Organise! 42 for account of
the A-PCF). When the A-PCF split in 1934, she left with Guy Aldred to
form a new group, the Workers Open Forum. This subsequently merged with
a branch of the ILP to form the United Socialist Movement.
In 1936 the USM sent MacDonald to Barcelona with Jenny Patrick,
representing the A-PCF, by hitchhiking across France. In Barcelona she
became the English speaking propagandist for the Anarchist radio
station. As John Taylor Caldwell wrote: “Her Scottish voice was a
special attraction, and her broadcasts aroused comment as far afield as
the USA”. She continued these broadcasts until May 1937 when the
Stalinist attack on the Telephone Exchange in Barcelona controlled by
members of the Anarcho-syndicalist union the CNT led to street fighting
and subsequent repression of the POUM(independent Marxist party) and the
Anarchists. Whilst Jenny Patrick returned to Glasgow on May 24, Ethel
remained in Spain until November. On June 16^(th) POUM members and
foreign activists were rounded up. She visited comrades in prison,
smuggling in food and letters. She helped several foreign Anarchists
escape from Spain, borrowing clothes for their disguise and getting them
on board foreign ships. She was finally captured and imprisoned herself.
In prison she helped organise a hunger strike in every prison where
there were anarchist prisoners. Released in July 1937 she remained in
Barcelona underground until September, when she was deported to France.
Back in Scotland, she spoke out consistently against the Stalinist
attacks on the POUM and Anarchists, working up to her death in 1960 with
Aldred, Patrick, and Caldwell on the USM paper The Word. This pamphlet
tells her story and in particular her role during the May Days of
Barcelona.