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Title: Albert Meltzer Obituary Author: Stuart Christie Date: June 1996 Language: en Topics: obituary, Albert Meltzer, Black Flag Source: Retrieved on 22nd September 2020 from https://libcom.org/library/albert-meltzer-obituary Notes: This obituary originally appeared in Black Flag #208
Albert Meltzer, anarchist, born London, January 7,1920;
died, Weston-Super-Mare, North Somerset, May 7, 1996.
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.
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 The Second World War, 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.
However, perhaps Albert’s most enduring legacy is the Kate Sharpley
Library, probably the most comprehensive anarchist archive in Britain.
Born in 1920 into a mixed marriage in the London of Orwell’s Down and
Out in which there were few homes for heroes, but many heroes fit only
for homes, Albert was soon enrolled into political life as a private in
the awkward squad. His decision to go down the road of revolutionary
politics came, he claimed, in 1935 at the age of 15 — as a direct result
of taking boxing lessons. Boxing was considered a “common” sport,
frowned upon by the governors of his Edmonton school and the prospective
Labour MP for the area, the virulently anti-boxing Dr Edith Summerskill.
Perhaps it was the boxer’s legs and footwork he acquired as a youth
which gave him his lifelong ability to bear his considerable bulk. It
certainly induced a lifetime’s habit of shrewd assessment of his own and
opponents’ respective strengths and weaknesses.
The streetwise, pugilistic but bookish schoolboy attended his first
anarchist meeting in 1935 where he first drew attention to himself by
contradicting the speaker, Emma Goldman, by his defence of boxing. He
soon made friends with the ageing anarchist militants of a previous
generation and became a regular and dynamic participant in public
meetings.
The anarchist-led resistance to the Franco uprising in Spain in 1936
gave a major boost to the movement in Britain and Albert’s activities
ranged from organising solidarity appeals, to producing propaganda,
working with Captain J R White to organise illegal arms shipments from
Hamburg to the CNT in Spain and acting as a contact for the Spanish
anarchist intelligence services in Britain.
Albert’s early working career ranged from fairground promoter, a
theatre-hand and occasional film extra. Albert appeared briefly in
Leslie Howard’s Pimpernel Smith, an anti-Nazi film that did not follow
the line of victory but rather of revolution in Europe. The plot called
for communist prisoners, but by the time Howard came to make it, in
1940, Stalin had invaded Finland, and the script was changed to
anarchist prisoners. Howard decided that none of the actors playing the
anarchists seemed real and insisted that real anarchists, including
Albert, be used as extras in the concentration camp scenes.
One consequence of this meeting was Howard’s introduction to Hilda
Monte, a prominent but unsung hero of the German anarchist resistance to
Hitler, which may have contributed to his subsequent death en route to
Lisbon.
Albert’s later working years were spent mainly as a second-hand
bookseller and, finally, as a Fleet Street copytaker. His last employer
was, strangely enough, The Daily Telegraph.
While by nature a remarkably gentle, generous and gracious soul,
Albert’s championship of anarchism as a revolutionary working class
movement brought him into direct and sustained conflict with the
neo-liberals who came to dominate the movement in the late 1940s. Just
as people are drawn to totalitarian movements like fascism and communism
because of their implicit violence and ideological certainties, many
otherwise politically incompatible people were drawn to anarchism
because of its militant tolerance. Albert was vehemently opposed to the
re-packaging and marketing of anarchism as a broad church for
academia-oriented quietists and single-issue pressure groups. It was
ironical that one of this group, the late Professor George Woodcock,
should publicly dismiss anarchism as a spent historical force in 1962,
blissfully unaware of the post-Butskellite storm which was about to
break and the influence anarchist and libertarian ideas would have on
this and generations yet to come.
It was his championship of class-struggle anarchism, coupled with his
scepticism of the student-led New Left in the 1960s which earned Albert
his reputation for sectarianism. Paradoxically, as friend and Black Flag
cartoonist Phil Ruff points out in his introduction to Albert’s
autobiography, it was the discovery of class struggle anarchism through
the “sectarianism” of Black Flag under Albert’s editorship that
convinced so many anarchists of his and subsequent generations to become
active in the movement’. The dynamic and logic of Albert’s so-called
sectarianism continued to bring countless young people into the
anarchist movement then and for a further thirty years until his
untimely stroke in April 1996.
It is difficult to write a public appreciation of such an inscrutably
private man. Albert Meltzer seemed often like a member of a tug-of-war
team; you never quite knew if he was there simply to make up numbers or
if he was the anchor-man of the whole operation. To Albert, all
privilege was the enemy of human freedom; not just the privileges of
capitalists, kings, bureaucrats and politicians but also the petty
aspirations of opportunists and careerists among the rebels themselves.
Much of what he contributed to the lives of those who knew him must go
unrecorded, but he will be remembered and talked about fondly for many
years to come by those of us whose lives he touched.