‘Robbing Banks Is An Honour For Me’

An Audience With Lucio Urtubia

As a tasty hors d'oeuvre to Bristol Radical History Week 2008 we are extremely pleased to present Lucio Urtubia, anarchist, bank robber, forger, fugitive and above all bricklayer. Lucio’s life is the stuff of legend. As an activist in 1950s Paris he counted André Breton and Albert Camus amongst his friends, worked with anarchist guerrilla Francisco Sabate in attempting to bring down Franco’s fascist regime and carried out numerous bank robberies to fund the struggle to free Spain. In 1977, after […]

The Given Day

By Dennis Lehane
Italian Anarchist, Galleanists, Latvian revolutionaries, Bolsheviks, communists, NAACP, Irish cops and gangsters thrown together into a mix with immigration, racism, corruption, strikes, riot and class warfare as a city goes into meltdown leading up to the Boston police strike of 1919. Two main characters are Danny Coughlin, Irish and son of one of Boston’s most powerful police captains and Luther Lawrence, poor and black, and on the run from racism and the mob. While Danny wrestles with his […]

Anarchism in Bristol and the West Country to 1950

Firstly some firsts. Bristol M.P. Edmund Burke was the author of what was perhaps the first anarchist tract; Westcountryman Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt first pioneered the use of the mass platform for ‘rabblerousing’ against the establishment; Bristol was the home of the first avowedly atheistic journal. This is a survey of home-grown anarchism, with its roots in a tradition of West Country radicalism. By the end of the Nineteenth Century explicitly anarchist sensibilities had already emerged as […]