Communist Party nights out in London, 1930s

From the pages of the Daily Worker, newspaper of the Communist Party of Great Britain, some dances and other social events in the 1930s.

Daily Worker Carnival Dance at Hoxton Baths with 'Real Red Band', December 1931:

Also from 1931, 'Great Boxing Night Revels' at New Greenwich Baths with 'South East London's Finest Dance Floor' and 'the Varsity Revels Band'. Plus Hackney National Unemployed Workers Movement social and dance at Holcroft Road school; Woodcraft Dance at Savoy Ballrooms in Dalston (presumably liked to radical scouting alternative the Woodcraft Folk) [source Daily Worker, 12 December 1931)

From 1934 - Young Communist League Flannel Dance at Bermondsey Library, Spa Road; Relief Committee for the Victims of German Fascism dance at Conway Hall; League Against Imperialism and Negro Welfare Association Social and Dance at the Pindar of Wakefield in Grays Inn Road. Plus some Eisenstein film nights. Also an advert for Nanking Chinese Restaurant at 4 Denmark Street, off Charing Cross Road 'the place for internationalists'

See also: Anarchist Dances in London, 1890s-1910s

 

1937: Police raid Harworth Striking Miners' Dance

In 1936/37 there was a long and bitter miners’ strike in Nottinghamshire centred on Harworth colliery, sparked by the refusal of mine owners to recognise the miners’ trade union of choice. The incident described here took place at a dance the night after a conflict between strikers on the one hand and police and strike breakers on the other. 36 people were arrested over the week, with 12 people eventually jailed for up to two years for ‘riotous assembly’ (these charges related to the picket line clashes rather than the dance hall incident).

‘The audience at the Harworth cinema was locked in last night prior to a police raid on the miners’ dance in the Market Hall a few doors away. Police went to the dance hall, arrested a number of men and then ordered the MC to get on with the dance.

Reinforcements of police then entered the small Town Hall, women dancers were separated from their partners, and what amounted to a pitched battle took place, the police freely using their batons. Men and women fought their way out into the narrow road way where the struggle continued for over 20 minutes.

Eye-witnesses report that injured men were lying all over the place. Women were crying, the whole village was in an uproar and the audience unable to leave the cinema. A call was sent out for Doctors to come to the village and attend to the scores of injured men. A number had to be taken by ambulance to the nearest hospital in Doncaster, nearly 10 miles away.

The five men arrested at the dance were charged at midnight last night before a special sitting of the Worksop (Notts) magistrates. They were Michael Kane, President of the Harworth branch of the Notts Miners Association, James Mould, Cornelius Fergusson, Frank Jobson and Samuel McCoombe and all were remanded in custody until Monday...

It is understood that warrants have been issued for the arrest of a number of other men, who are stated to be moving freely around the village but no attempt has yet been made to take any of them. Saturday night’s incident is the culmination to a very tense situation in Harworth during the past few days.

Following the national miners ballot declaration in support of the Harworth miners who have been out on strike 24 weeks in defence of the right to join the Notts Miners Association, the men remaining at work have adopted a very provocative attitude. Strikers pickets have been very small in number and members of the “chain gang” being escorted to the pit by the police have stepped out of the ranks and challenged individual members of the picket to a stand-up fight.

On Friday night a busload of scabs from Dinnington, Yorkshire were very provocative at the pit gates. Stone-throwing took place and every window in the bus was smashed. The police endeavoured to disperse the picket calling blacklegs who were off duty from the colliery company welfare club to their assistance.

The blacklegs brought with them billiard cues with which they struck at the strikers. A pitched battle ensued and the police and black legs retreated.

No arrests were made. On Saturday morning strong reinforcements of police were brought into Harworth by bus and cars... Everything was quiet during the day and the arrest of men at the dance, after they have been walking openly about the village all day long is regarded as particularly provocative. It will be recalled that the Council of civil liberties has already issued a report strongly critical of the police methods employed in this dispute, a state of terror having reigned in the village for nearly 24 weeks.

Women have been forbidden to go to the shops to make purchases, strikers attacked by scabs in their own gardens and young strikers waylaid and beaten up by gangs on the way home from neighbouring towns at the weekends’ [source: Daily Worker, 26 April 1937]

Mick Kane, arrested in the dance hall raid, was released from prison in August 1938 - marked by a demonstration in Sheffield (source: Daily Worker, 3 September 1938)

International Workers Music Olympiad 1935

In 1935 the International Workers' Music Olympiad, an anti-fascist festival, was held at Strasbourg in France close to the German border. The composer Hanns Eisler helped organise it, and one of the songs he wrote with Bertolt Brecht, the 'Einheitfrontslied' (United Front Song) was 'premièred by a chorus of 5,000 members of the workers song movement'. Also present was the British composer Michael Tippett (1905-1998), who wrote an account of it in 'Comradeship and the Wheatsheaf',  a publication of the Royal Arsenal Co-operative Society in August 1935 (Tippett worked with the RACS choirs).  This was later republished in 'Music of the Angels: essays and sketchbooks of Michael Tippett' (Eulenburg Books, 1980). Here's an extract:

'Over the Whitsun week-end an English choir of fifty voices went, under the conductorship of Comrade Alan Bush, to take part in the first international festival for working-class music organisations at Strasburg. The membership was drawn mostly from the London Labour Choral Union and Co-operative choirs (in particular the Federation Operatic at Abbey Wood). There was a competition piece to sing as well as music for the concerts and demonstrations.

The most numerous entries to the festival were workers' brass bands. Choral singing has not so strong a tradition in France as wind bands. There were choirs from various parts of France and Switzerland. Russian and Dutch choirs were, unfortunately, refused permits to enter the country by the French government. The Czecho-Slovakian contingent was unable to come, and all workers' organisations in Germany, Austria, or Italy only carry on illegally underground under the stress of the three forms of the fascist terror.

The festival was organised principally by the Strasburg Workers' Music League, with the help of other Alsatian music organisations. These musical and sports unions are very strong in Alsace and Lorraine, in Switzerland and France proper. The membership often runs into thousands. Benefits similar to those of our friendly societies are paid to members, and concerts, practices,and gymnastics are organised. All the unions have a political basis and join together for public demonstrations under the name of the United Front against Fascism, which the various socialist and communist parties of France have laboriously built as a weapon in their struggle...

Strasburg is an ideal town for an international festival of this kind. The older men fought in the German army and navy, their sons are conscripted into the French army. The president of the Strasburg Music League fought in the Kiel Mutiny in the German Revolution of 1918. Formerly a communist worker in Germany, he is now a communist worker in France. Working-class international solidarity has been forced on him by blood and war and revolution...

Michael Tippett

At the festival itself one could not help being struck by the delightful air of equality and informality. Everyone was a comrade, whatever language he might speak. It was like a foretaste of a free classless society but for the police ban on street music and the clashes that arose because of it. Over thirty bands marched onto the big festival ground played 'The International' while thousands of  voices sang it in various languages. The children were as free as the grown-ups. They walked onto the the microphone platform, they talked to whom they liked. No one was ordered about. Occasionally someone called for space round the microphone so that we might sing there, or a telegram of greetings be read from a sympathetic groups of workers'

A note in the book states that the London Labour Choral Union shared first prize in the Mixed Choir competition with the Chorale Populaire de Paris.

For more on 'Einheitfrontslied' (United Front Song) see Marxist Theory of Art:

'Und weil der Mensch ein Mensch ist,
drum hat er Stiefel im Gesicht nicht gern.
Er will unter sich keinen Sklaven sehn
und über sich keinen Herrn'

'And because humans are human,
they don't like a boot in the face.
They want to see no slaves under them
And no master over them'

Public Dance Halls Act 1935 in Ireland

Excellent Dublin newspaper/blog Rabble has an interesting piece on the Public Dance Halls Act 1935 in Ireland, which remains in force to this day. The Act requires a licence from the state for any dancing 'which is open to the public and in which persons present are entitled to participate actively' and applies broadly not just to pubs and clubs but to any 'place' defined as 'a building (including part of a building), yard, garden, or other enclosed place, whether roofed or not roofed and whether the enclosure and the roofing (if any) are permanent or temporary'. In practice, the police have historically used this even to apply to private houses in some cases.

As Rabble points out, the Act was originally passed on the back of a moral panic about jazz undermining traditional Irish culture - but ironically its implementation undermined that very culture as it was used to stop country dances too.

The future regulation of drinking and dancing in Ireland is a live political subject, with a Sale of Alcohol Bill currently under discussion (see Rabble article).

1930s: Workers Film and Photo League

The Workers Film and Photo League  (sometimes just 'The Film and Photo League') was a 1930s organisation associated with the Communist Party. I came across an article about them recently: 'England: the (Workers) Film and Photo League' by Terry Dennett, published in Photography/Politics: One' - a journal/book published by Photography Workshop in 1979.

A League document quoted in the article set out its mission as being: 'to provide and popularize film and photos of working class interest, giving a true picture of the industrial and social conditions of the workers today and of their organized struggle to improve their conditions'. Another text states: 'There are thousands of workers in this country who own cameras, but who only use them for taking an occasional snapshot. If even a number of them were to photograph the conditions around the - in the factories, workshops, railways and countryside, in their streets - we should have an invaluable record of working class life'.

The League held regular film schools with lectures and film shows. No doubt there was some dreadful Stalinist propaganda - the 1933 advert below mentions a lecture by Stephen Harrison 'just back from Moscow'. But some of the films from that time sound interesting - a 1936 advert mentions 'Tenants in Revolt! - 'A Stirring Record of the Struggle of the Stepney Tenants' made by the British Film Unit with the Stepney Tenants League and featuring music by the Unity Theatre orchestra.

1933

 A film school was held in July 1933 in the garden of the Studio Theatre (59 Finchley Road, London NW8), followed by 'Flannel Dance in the Ballroom' attended by 'stars' including Elli Tompuri (Finnish dancer and actress), Fritz Kortner (Austrian Jewish film actor) and Mabel Constanduros (famous at the time for her radio show The Buggins Family).

A 1936 London Film School held at the Veterans' Hall in High Holborn was also followed by a dance, while a four day film school in 1938 included a Saturday night 'Grand Social and Dance - The Highspot of the rally! Bring all your friends! Any costume... carnival and fun'.

'1936:  The Film is a weapon. Use it'

1938 Film School programme - note also Session on 'The Place of Sound' including 'Disc-records to be made by members'

(Sorry for poor quality images)

HMV 1932: Radio-Gramophone Demonstration

The latest news on threatened record shop chain HMV is that administrators Deloitte have announced that 66 of the 220 shops will close when stocks run out - with no clear rescue plan for the remaining shops.

Here's a document from an earlier period in the company's history. The first His Master's Voice shop opened in London's Oxford Street in 1921, but seemingly in the early 1930s many people still needed persuading that recorded music was worth buying. The 'Programme of His Masters Voice Record and Radio-Gramophone Demonstration' is from a November 1932 event at the YWCA in London.

Seemingly the programme consisted of playing records by among others Gracie Fields, Yehudi Menuhin and the Masses Bands of the National Band Festival at Crystal Palace (as it happens I came across this programme in Haynes Lane market in Crystal Palace last week).

'Recorded music gives entertainment which is obtainable by no other means, for the programme can be made entirely to one's own taste and mood'.

Hobsbawm on Jazz, Dance and Class

The historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) died yesterday at the age of 95.  There's plenty to criticise in his political judgement  as he aligned himself with  the various phases of the Communist Party of Great Britain from its outright Stalinism to its proto-New Labour 'Marxism Today' period - even if it's not hard to understand why somebody who spent some of his teenage years in Berlin during the rise of Hitler joined the KPD. But his history writing on class and culture was often very nuanced and non-dogmatic. He also wrote extensively on jazz.

One of my favourite short essays of his looks at the early days of jazz in Europe, reflecting on how its popularity related to changing class cultural practices. 'On the Reception of Jazz in Europe'  was originally published in 1994 and then republished as 'Jazz Comes to Europe' in the excellent collection 'Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz' (1998). Here's a few extracts:

'The speed of transatlantic transport was such that ideas, notes and people could already cross the ocean very rapidly indeed. Will Marion Cook's Clorindy: The Origin of the Cakewalk - Cook was later to bring Sidney Bechet to Britain - was performed in 1898 in both New York and London. The foxtrot, the basic dance routine associated with jazz, first appeared in Britain in the summer of 1914. a few months after its first appearance in the USA , and in Belgium in 1915. Jazz had hardly been baptized in the USA when groups under that name already toured Europe. They were there from the middle of 1917.

  ...the interesting thing about this diffusion is what was being diffused. It was one of several kinds of novel cultural and artistic creation that emerged, in the late nineteenth century, from the plebeian, mainly urban, milieu of Western industrial society, most probably in the specialized lumpenproletarian environments of the entertainment quarter in the big cities, with their specific subcultures, male and female stereotypes, costumes - and music. The Buenos Aires tango which secured for Latin American music a permanent but minor place on the international dance floor at the same time as jazz did, is one example. Cuban music is another...jazz was both novel and, in origin, an art belonging to an autonomous subculture...

  ...Jazz made its way and triumphed , not as a music for intellectuals but as a music for dancing, and specifically for a transformed, revolutionized social dance of the British middle and upper classes, but also. and almost Simultaneously, the British working-class dance. During the 1900s the upper-crust dance was transformed in two ways. (An expert contemporary witness dates the major change precisely to the season 1910-11.) First urban dancing had already ceased t be a seasonal occupation linked to special occasions. and was being practised all the year round as a regular social and leisure activity. To some extent it was practised privately, but special dancing clubs developed - there were three in Edwardian Hampstead alone - and it occurred in hotels and what were not yet called 'nightclubs' . The tea-dance and the restaurant-dance appeared on a modest scale. Second, the dance lost its formality and ordered succession. At the same time it became simpler, more easily learned and less demanding and exhausting. The crucial change here was that from the turning dance (for example. the waltz) to the walking dance, such as the Boston. a sort of rectilinear waltz, in the early 1900s. It seems clear that these developments reflected a substantial loosening of aristocratic and middle-class conventions, and they are a striking and neglected symptom of the notable emancipation of women in these classes before 1914. The link between the dance revolution, even specifically between the new primacy of rhythm in social dancing, and the emancipation of women, did not pass unperceived. It is noted in the most intelligent or the early jazz books, Paul Bernhard's Jazz: Eine musikalische Zeitfrage (1927)...  

...British jazz had a broad popular base, because its uniquely large working class had developed a, for Europe, uniquely recognizable, urbanized, non-traditional lifestyle. Even before 1914 huge popular dance halls had already been built for the holiday demand of specifically proletarian seaside resorts like Blackpool, Morecambe, Margate and Douglas on the Isle of Man. The post-war mania for dancing was immediately met by the new institution of the so-called Palais de Danse, of which the Hammersmith Palais. the first . immediately became a jazz venue by booking the Original Dixieland Jazz Band in 1919. No doubt the music to which the plebs danced would not always be considered jazz today. Indeed, the central tradition of British mass dancing moved away from jazz towards a curious phenomenon called 'strict tempo' dancing, which was to become a competitive sport on British television. Nevertheless, jazz made its mark as a name, an idea, a novel and demotic sound.

The massive dance mania produced an unusually large body of dance-band musicians, mainly of proletarian origin, or at least raised in the environment of the brass-band movement, much appreciated in the industrial areas. These formed the original core of the jazz public... Socially speaking. dance-band musicians, who did  rather better in the 1920s than in the depressed 1930s, were on the borders between the skilled workers and the lower-middle classes. It was in the higherparts of this zone that the bulk of British jazz evangelists were to be found before 1945. They were typically self-made intellectuals. In London we find 'Rhythm Clubs' (ninety-eight of which sprang up in Britain between 1933 and 1935) not in middle-class quarters like
Chelsea, Kensington or even Hampstead, but in the outlying districts like Croydon, Forest Gate, Barking or Edmonton...

We can leave aside the reaction of high society and its associated intellectuals. In Britain this was of no great importance though doubtless it pleased Duke Ellington to have the future King Edward VII sit in on drums at a party for his band in London. Much more important, as has been suggested, was the democratic and populist character of the music, which made the Melody Maker state approvingly: [It appeals not only to the fauteuils but to the gallery also. It considers no class distinction.'

...[what Britain] did develop, however, probably in close association with American New Deal radicalism ,was a powerful bonding of jazz, blues, folk and the extreme left, mainly communist but also, marginally, anarchist. For such people jazz and blues were essentially 'people's music' in three senses: a music with folk roots and capable of appealing to the masses, a do-it-yourself music which could be practised by ordinary people, as distinct from those with technical training, and lastly a music for protest, demonstration and collective celebration. Revivalist or Dixieland jazz lent itself unusually well to all these purposes. So much so that at its peak in the 1950s it came closer to turning jazz from the art of a coterie into a mass music than has been achieved anywhere else, except perhaps, for a moment, during the swing boom of the later 1930s in the USA. It is no accident that a typical anthem of the 'trad' jazz fans also became the typical song of the football fans on the terraces : 'When the Saints Go Marching In'. However, it should be noticed that, while revivalist jazz became de facto the music of an age-group in which students, and particularly art students, became prominent for the first time. it was neither consciously nor militantly a youth music... The 'trad' boom prepared the triumph of rock, but only rock turned itself into a conscious manifesto of immaturity'.

Kaleidakon: 1930s light show

The centre piece of the 1939 Ideal Home exhibition in London was the Kaleidakon, what sounds like a proto-psychedelic light show.

'One of the many sights of the Ideal Home Exhibition now drawing to a close at Earls Court is the huge Kaleidakon, a white and silver tower which raises its head almost a hundred feet above a pool of rippling water. Here, with the aid of Quentin Maclean, at the console of a Compton organ, and an expert on a light console, duets in sound and light are given daily. As the sound of music emerges so the tower is lit by an ever changing harmony in colour in bright and pastel shades closely allied to the humour' (Gramophone magazine, May 1939)

Advert from South London Advertiser, April 21st 1939
'The Kaleidakon, world's greatest musical instrument combining sound and colour'

There's some further technical information at the Strand lighting archive (from where photograph below was sourced): 'The Kaleidakon: 70 feet, 230kW tower in the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition, Earl's Court with a 72-way Light Console and Compton Organ for Colour Music'

Mona's San Francisco: 1940s lesbian club

'After 1920 women who occasionally wore men's clothing and those who passed as men began to socialize more openly in cafes and night clubs. In Chicago two night clubs, the Roselle Club, run by Eleanor Shelly, and the Twelve-thirty Club, run by Becky Blumfield, were closed by the police during the 1930s because "women in male attire were nightly patrons of the places". Many of the couples who frequented these clubs had been married to each other by a black minister on Chicago's South Side. In San Francisco, lesbians met at Mona's, where, it was said "Girls will be Boys"'.

Source: San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project 'She Even Chewed Tobacco: A pictorial narrative of passing women in America' in 'Hidden from history: reclaiming the gay and lesbian past' by Martin B. Duberman, Martha Vicinus, George Chauncey (Meridian Books, 1989).

This advert for Mona's Club 440 (440 Broadway, San Francisco) comes from San Francisco Life 1942:



This advert mentions Gladys Bentley, described as "Brown Bomber of Sophisticated Songs" and "America's Greatest Sepia Piano Artist."

In his A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem, Eric Garber mentions Bentley's appearances in New York in the 1920s/30s:

'Perhaps the most famous gay-oriented club of the era was Harry Hansberry's Clam House, a narrow, smoky speakeasy on 133rd Street. The Clam House featured Gladys Bentley, a 250- pound, masculine, darkskinned lesbian, who performed all night long in a white tuxedo and top hat. Bentley, a talented pianist with a magnificent, growling voice, was celebrated for inventing obscene Iyrics to popular contemporary melodies. Langston Hughes called her "an amazing exhibition of musical energy." Eslanda Robeson, wife of actor Paul Robeson, gushed to a friend, "Gladys Bentley is grand. I've heard her three nights, and will never be the same!" Schoolteacher Harold Jackman wrote to his friend Countee Cullen, "When Gladys sings 'St. James Infirmary,' it makes you weep your heart out."

In the 1950s she appeared on Groucho Marx's TV show:

In remembrance of Ali Höhler

At this time of year it is customary to raise a glass to one of Germany's finest music critics: Albrecht (Ali) Höhler (1898-1933).

His exemplary practical critique was directed againt Horst Wessel, a musician, song writer and founder of a Nazi stormtrooper Schalmeienkapelle (shawm band - the shawn being a kind of oboe). Wessel was a leading Nazi party organiser in Berlin. Among other things he organised an attack on the local headquarters of the Communist Party in Friedrichshain, Berlin, during which four workers sustained serious injuries.

In January 1930 Wessel was shot in the head by Ali Höhler, seemingly at the instigation of members of the communist Roter Frontkämpferbund (Red Front Fighters League). Wessel died from his injuries a few weeks later and was buried on 23 February 1930 in a public funeral stage managed by Goebbels. Unfortunately one of his songs survived and became known as the "Horst Wessel Lied" and the official anthem of the Nazi Party.

When the Nazis came to power they killed Höhler and elevated Wessel to the rank of a holy martyr (one magazine wrote: 'How high Horst Wessel towers over that Jesus of Nazareth').

So here's to Ali Höhler - he had some fine tattoos too:

There's a Hamburg based punk band called Kommando Ali Höhler.

The Nighttime's Mine

All I need in this creation

Is 3 months work, 9 vacation

Tell the boss, any old time

The daytime is his, but the nighttime's mine

Photo: Saturday night juke joint outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi Delta, November 1939 - taken by Marion Post Wolcott; Lyric: Green Corn, from the singing of Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival, 1960s - (not sure of exact date).

Paris by Night - Brassaï (1933)

In 1933, the photographer Brassaï (real name Gyula Halász, 1899–1984) published Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night), a remarkable photographic record of his wanderings through the night time city in the company of, among others, Henry Miller, Raymond Queneau and Jacques Prevert. The book was reprinted with the photographer's commentary in 1976, in which he sets out his perspective on the nocturnal underground of the city:

'Just as night birds and nocturnal animals bring a forest to life when its daytime fauna fall silent and go to ground, so night in a large city brings out of its den an entire population that lives its life completely under cover of darkness. Some once-familiar figures in the army of night workers have disappeared…

The real night people, however, live at night not out of necessity, but because they want to. They belong to the world of pleasure, of love, vice, crime, drugs. A secret, suspicious world, closed to the uninitiated. Go at random into one of those seemingly ordinary bars in Montmartre, or into a dive in the Goutte d’Or neighbourhood. Nothing to show they are owned by clans of pimps, that they are often the scenes of bloody reckonings. Conversation ceases. The owner looks you over with a friendly glance. The clientele sizes you up: this intruder, this newcomer – is he an informer, a stool pigeon? Has he come in to blow the gig, to squeal? You may not be served, you may even be asked to leave, especially if you try to take pictures…

And yet, drawn by the beauty of evil, the magic of the lower depths, having taken pictures for my ‘voyage to the end of the night’ from the outside, I wanted to know what went on inside, behind the walls, behind the facades , in the wings: bars, dives, night clubs, one-night hotels, bordellos, opium dens. I was eager to penetrate the other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colourful faces of its underworld there had been preserved, from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its most remote past’

The book includes photos and descriptions of people socialising and dancing in bars, shows and lesbian and gay clubs - I will feature some more of this later.

These photos were taken at La Bastoche, a bar in Rue de Lappe, in 1932. Gotta love those kiss curls.

I believe the book is still in print, at least it's available from all the usual book sites. If you are interested in nightlife, dancing, photography, social history and alternative cultures you should take a look - and let's face it if you are looking at this site you must be interested in at least a couple of these...

May Day Song and Dance - Elizabeth Gurley Flynn

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1890-1964), lived to see many May Days as a key figure in the US workers movement for more than 50 years. In 1939, she looked back on some of the May Days she had taken part in, in an article called Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory which evokes the songs and dancing on the parades:

'Thirty-three May Days have come and gone since my activities in the American labor movement began. In memory I view them – an endless procession of red banners, flying high and wide, in the eager hands of marching, cheering, singing workers. Banners of local unions and AFL central labor councils; three-starred IWW banners; banners of Amalgamated, of International Ladies Garment Workers, furriers, pioneers of unionism for the “immigrants and revolutionists"; banners of craft unions, independent unions, industrial unions, and at lone last the CIO. Many were tasseled banners, sold and black, silver and blue, with the names, numbers and places beautifully embroidered; clean, unwrinkled banners, preciously guarded in locked glass cases in dingy halls, throughout the year – liberated to fly proudly on May Day...

Where have I been on May Day? Once it was Newark, N. J. James Connolly, leader of the Irish Easter rebellion in 1916, and I spoke from an old wagon in Washington Park. He was a poor and struggling worker, sad and serious. His daughter told me how, years later in Ireland, he smiled and sang a little song Easter morning, 1916, when he went out to die for his country’s right to be free...

In 1912, I was in Lawrence and Lowell, Mass. on May Day. Textile workers, twenty-five different nationalities speaking forty-five different dialects, celebrated their victories after the fierce strikes of the preceding winter. Banners demanded the freedom of the imprisoned leaders, Ettor and Giovannitti. After the parades came the dancing, the different sorts of music – yellow-haired Northern girls dancing in raven-haired Italians – the laughter and gayety of one race trying to learn the songs, the dances of another. I can see Big Bill Haywood in the Syrian Hall in Lawrence surrounded by workers. Smoking their strange pipe, which stood on the floor, the smoke cooled through a fancy water bowl, decorated in spring flowers in honor of Bill.

May Day, 1913, was in the midst of the Paterson silk strike. Jack Reed taught the strikers many grand songs, old French revolutionary airs and English labor songs, Solidarity Forever – the Red Flag – the Carmagnole. The bosses were trying the now hackneyed “Back to work under the American flag” gag. The strikers carried high on May Day their singing retort, “We refuse to scab under the flag!"

... After that a long period of illness, when I read longingly of May Day parades and heard in memory the songs, the cheers, the music of bands and marching feet. I thought I had seen May Days, but nothing excelled in fact or memory the May Day of 1937, when I returned to New York City. Now we marched on the West Side; and the Irish bagpipes joined the music makers. Now the James Connolly Club and the unions of Irish workers paraded. I waited long to see the happy day the Irish were not all in the ranks of the police, Irish on the marching side, shamrocks, harps, Irish songs, Kevin Barry, Soldiers of Erin – Jim Connolly, I wish you were alive to see that grand sight!

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was the model for the Rebel Girl, celebrated in the song by Joe Hill

Dancing at the Peckham Experiment

Here's an interesting chapter in London dancing history - a dancehall in a groundbreaking health centre in South London. The Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham, South London (1935-50) has been seen by many as a precursor of the National Health Service. Some have argued though that it was in fact more radical than the NHS, including the anarchist Colin Ward who sadly died last month. He reviewed the main book about the Centre (Being Me and Also Us: Lessons from the Peckham Experiment by Allison Stallibrass) in New Statesman and Society, September 29th 1989, and indeed recalled his own visit there for a meeting of the London Anarchist Group. For him the Peckham Experiment was an exercise in mutual aid and self-help preferable to the top-down bureaucratic model of the NHS. The building still stand in St Marys Road, but has been converted to flats. Here's his review:

Kenneth Clarke expostulated to a radio interviewer the other day: ‘We’ve never run the health service as some kind of workers’ cooperative.’ More’s the pity, I would say. But the real tragedy is that we have never run a health service, only an illness service. By stressing the word health, I don’t mean preventive medicine. I mean the pursuit of the conditions for personal, family and social well-being. There was one unforgettable experiment in this direction, and it died with the foundation of the NHS. This was the Pioneer Health Centre at Peckham.

For people like me, curious about the preconditions for resourcefulness and independence, it was a verification of our deepest convictions. The founders were a husband-and-wife pair of doctors, Innes Pearse and George Scoot Williamson. In 1938, they wrote about their Family Health Club: ‘It seems that ‘a sort of anarchy’ is the first condition in any experiment in human applied biology. This condition is also that to which our members most readily respond…’

It began much earlier, in 1926, when after welfare work in south London they concluded that most urban dwellers were so ‘de-vitalised’ that babies were born deficient in health. To study the characteristics of health they devised the idea of a family club, to be joined on two conditions, first, that the whole family must join; and second, that families must agree to a periodic medical examination.They started in a small house run as a club until 1929. The next step was to raise the money from charitable trusts to move to a purpose-built family club big enough to be self-supporting from subscriptions. By 1935 they had raised the cash and built the Pioneer Health Centre, designed by Sir Owen Williams. It was glass-walled inside and out, as the Peckham biologists needed to observe what members actually did. The centre of the building was a swimming pool, and there was a theatre, a gymnasium and a children’s nursery on the ground floor, with dance halls, a cafeteria, a library and medical rooms.

It ran from 1935 to 1939, and after the war from 1946 to 1950. It ended in 1951 after all efforts to get it adopted by local authorities or the NHS had failed. Since ‘health centres’ had become part of official doctrine after the National Health Service Act of 1946, the directors approached the Ministry of Health to incorporate it into official provision.

They failed for five reasons: first, it was concerned exclusively with the study and cultivation of health, not with the treatment of disease; second, it was based exclusively on the integrated family, not on the individual; third, it was based exclusively on a locality, it had no ‘open door’; fourth, its basis was contributory (2s 6d – 12 and a half pence – per family per week), not free; and fifth, it was based on autonomous administration, and so didn’t conform to the NHS structure.

The centre died but the idea did not. Pioneer Health Centre Ltd still exists and in the past ten years has ensured the republication by the Scottish Academic Press of all the old Peckham reports. The same publishers have just brought out, at £7.95, a new study called Being Me and Also Us: Lessons from the Peckham experiment. The author is Allison Stallibrass, a Peckham veteran and author of that modern classic of child development, The Self-Respecting Child.Her book is fascinating from several points of view. First, she has sought out people who were members as children or young parents and gathered their recollections of what the place meant in their lives. It is an enormously impressive testimony. Second, she shows how ahead of their time the Peckham pioneers were.

They were founder members of the Soil Association and took on a farm to ensure that members could buy nutritious bread, milk and vegetables and to provide holidays in the sun. Fifty years later, old Peckham hands remember that delicious bread. Third, she demonstrates how the preoccupation with the family was not a limiting, but an enlarging, factor. Members gradually accepted all the children as part of the family, while children and adolescents related to all the adults.Finally, she asks and ventures answers to the question: could we replicate the experiences of Peckham today? The original building cost about a fifth of the typical super-cinema of the period, though it was expensive to run. A modern equivalent would be far more useful in any community than the standard local ‘leisure centre’ which caters for a narrow band of the population and has no links with the ideology of self-catering, health-counselling, personal and social autonomy.

I only went there once, in 1949. I listened to Scott Williamson wittily addressing a meeting of the London Anarchist Group, and I visited Innes Pearse when she retired to Argos Hill windmill in Sussex. I never realised until I read this book that they must be considered as the truly creative figures in 20th century social medicine.

See also: Anarchism and the welfare state: the Peckham Health Centre by David Goodway:

'A different age group had caused mayhem on the opening of the new Centre in 1935, when the building was still uncompleted and much of the equipment intended for the children had still to arrive. Each day after school there was an invasion by crowds of kids, aged from seven to sixteen, who ran along the long open spaces and up and down the staircases, screaming, committing minor vandalism and making thorough nuisances of themselves. All the adults urged strong disciplinary measures - all except Williamson, who insisted that order would eventually be implemented by the children themselves as they responded to stimuli provided for them.

To this end [Lucy H.] Crocker was taken on the staff with the brief to resolve the problem. She was to discover that unsupervised children were excluded from the two places in the building, the swimming-pool and the gym, they found most appealing. Her solution was to develop a 'ticket system' whereby children could gain access to a preferred activity on obtaining a signed chit on each occasion from a member of staff cognisant of their physical abilities. This necessitated the children's continual interaction with an orderly, rational adult society and was found to foster responsibility, apparatus being returned to its designated place without request. 'The child is quick to respond to a mutually sustained order in society', as Pearse and Crocker were to put it. Within eighteen months of the reopening the screaming and running were no more and 'there were at last signs of order', Crocker recalled: 'not the quietness due to external discipline but the hum of active children going about their own business'.

This handling of the rowdy schoolchildren exemplifies the fifth condition on which the 'Peckham Experiment' depended: the maintenance of autonomy, autonomy not just for the adults but for their children also. Williamson and Pearse had no doubt that as biologists studying the human organism they had to deal 'with free agents', for 'any imposed action or activity becomes a study of authority, discipline or instruction...not the study of free agents plus their self-created environment'. In 1938, possibly foolhardily, they spoke warmly of 'a sort of anarchy', believing that 'a very strict "anarchy"...will permit the emergence of order through spontaneous action...' But although Williamson spoke to the London Anarchist Group on several occasions during the 1940s - chaired by John Hewetson, the GP editor of Freedom - he objected vehemently to the paper's coverage in 1951 of the announcement of the winding-up of the Centre (articles for which Colin Ward was primarily responsible), and which pointed to its anarchist, indeed revolutionary, nature. Williamson proclaimed: 'I am not an anarchist, nor do I believe in anarchy - not even the Kropotkin type'.

In truth, Williamson seems like A.S. Neill, the progressive educationalist, to have been an anarchist in both theory and practice, while denying he was one. Frances Donaldson (whose husband Jack was to manage the social floors in the Centre until they were running smoothly) had this to say about his remarkable disposition:

"...his lack of paternalismas far as this is humanly possible, was complete. He was not interested in how people should behave, or in how they might be made to behave, but only in how they did behave in any given circumstance...this made for a kind of democracy in the Centre which I doubt has ever been seen anywhere else...He had a rooted objection to the leader in society, regarding him as someone who pushed around the human material he wished to study in spontaneous action, and who exerted the force of his personality to drive more ordinary people out of the true of their natural behaviour into activities unsuited to them and which they half-consciously disliked. "

So while the 'health overhauls' enabled individuals to learn what they might be suffering from, the doctors did not direct them what to do, allowing them to make informed, autonomous choices. A visitor, who learned from Williamson that a man had 'a most dreadful hernia', asked why then had it not been treated and was told: 'It's his hernia. It's up to him when he wants to get it fixed up'. The condition of autonomy goes far to explain why the people of Peckham regarded the Centre as their own, filling the building with their autonomous activity. Clubs were formed and run by their members for a great range of pastimes, including camping, badminton, boxing, fencing and tap-dancing, while skills would be shared in, for example, dressmaking, woodwork, first aid and choral singing.'

The Pioneer Health Foundation site, which has lots more information, states that the polished cork tiles covering the floors were ideal for dancing, and that 'Amongst the many who made the most of it were the teenagers, freed at last from the streets, using the whole building intensively, exploring the whole community, and visibly thriving on it. The whole edifice used to rock on Saturday nights when the Long Room was packed with dancers, of all ages, dancing to the strains of the Centre's own band, directed by a most energetic member, a bookmaker by profession' (Jack Donaldson).

Photos from Pioneer Health Foundation - not sure when they were taken, I am guessing 1940s. Cross-posted from Transpontine on account of the dance content.

We Must Refuse Boredom

Georges Bataille, The Sacred Conspiracy, 1936

'It is time to abandon the world of the civilized and its light. It is too late to want to be reasonable and learned, which has led to a life without attractions. Secretly or not, it is necessary to become other, or else cease to be.

The world to which we have belonged proposes nothing to love outside of each individual insufficiency: its existence is limited to its convenience. A world that can’t be loved to death – in the same way a man loves a woman – represents nothing but personal interest and the obligation to work. If it is compared with worlds that have disappeared it is hideous and seems the most failed of all of them.

In those disappeared worlds it was possible to lose oneself in ecstasy, which is impossible in the world of educated vulgarity. Civilization’s advantages are compensated for by the way men profit by it: men of today profit by it to become the most degraded of all beings who have ever existed.

Life always occurs in a tumult with no apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and reality in ecstasy and ecstatic love. He who wants to ignore or neglect ecstasy is a being whose thought has been reduced to analysis. Existence is not only an agitated void: it is a dance that forces us to dance fanatically. The idea that doesn’t have as object a dead fragment exists internally in the same way as does a flame.

One must become firm and unshakeable enough that the existence of the world of civilization finally appears uncertain. It is useless to respond to those who are able to believe in this world and find their authorization in it. If they speak it is possible to look at them without hearing them, and even if we look at them, to only “see” that which exists far behind them. We must refuse boredom and live only on that which fascinates'.

Dorothy Coonan Wellman (1913-2009)

'Dorothy Coonan was one of Busby Berkeley's principal chorus dancers who had performed in such films as Whoopee! (1930) and 42nd Street (1933) when she met the director William Wellman, who cast her as the female lead in his film Wild Boys of the Road (1933). She then became Wellman's fifth wife, and remained happily married to him for over 40 years until his death in 1975... Wellman cast Coonan as the female lead in his next film, Wild Boys of the Road (1933, titled Dangerous Days in the UK), a brilliantly effective drama of teenagers whose fathers have lost their jobs in the economic depression, hopping freight trains in their efforts to seek a better life. Coonan gave a superb performance as a tomboyish young girl who dons boys' clothing and a cap to ride the rails with a bunch of youths. Her appearance is uncannily similar to that of Louise Brooks in her earlier incarnation of a freight-hopper in Wellman's Beggars of Life (1928). Coonan also performs a lively tap routine near the film's end' (Full obituary in today's Independent)

The 1933 trailer for Wild Boys of the Night is great: 'the living truth about 500,000 wild boys... innocent girls... driven to vagrancy... crime... fates worse than death... Jolting facts about humanity's shame... the abandoned generation... as tender and human as it is startling and real... shocking enough to make the very earth tremble in terror' (Coonan is the character in the trailer who has her cap pulled off revealing she's a girl, also pictured left in the photo above)

There's a nice video put together by family members which includes some footage of her dancing:

Dorothy Coonan Wellman Memorial-The Last Busby Berkeley Dancer from Robert D. Lawe on Vimeo.

Homage (from a beach) in Catalonia

I'm not going to claim that I got any great insights into the local musical/political/social milieus whilst lazing round in the sun in Catalonia recently. The closest I got to radical politics - other than reading Planet of Slums by Mike Davis on the beach - was buying an Accio Antifeixista(anti-fascist action) t-shirt from Partisano, a militant ska punk emporium in Girona.


As for music, well let's just say that all I learned was that Swedish indie pop band I'm from Barcelona have reached the dizzy heights of having their epynomous theme song used in a TV advert for San Miguel lager.

Still I did come across some interesting stuff in Colm Toibin's book Homage to Barcelona (2002) about how the politics of war, revolution and dictatorship were played out musically in the 2Oth century.

The fascists in Spain sought not only to crush worker insurgency but to impose one unified Spanish state with one language (Castillian Spanish) and one Catholic culture. Under the 1920s military dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, not only the anarchist CNT union was banned but also the Orfeo Catala, the main Catalan language choir (there was a strong choral tradition among factory workers with 85 workers choirs in Catalonia by 1861). For a while Barcelona FC matches were stopped after the crowd booed the Spanish national anthem.

CNT sticker in Catalonia last week

Under Franco the Catalan anthem Els Segadors was banned along with the public use of the language and Sardanes, a popular Catalan circle dance. During the dying days of the dictatorship these elements became expressions of resistance, including songs from La Nova Canca folk movement. Lluis Llach's 'song L'Estaca became the battle hymn of Catalonia in the last years of the old regime. It was about a stake in the ground, and how if youi beat at it for long enough it would fall. The chorus repeated the word fall, and everybody who sang the sing wanted it to fall, fall, fall. On Sunday nights in the mid-1970s the sardana would be danced in the Placa de Saint Jaume, and afterwards they would join hands in the square and sing "L'Estaca". Sometimes the police would come in jeeps and attack people, but most of the time it was quiet and orderly, there was just the fervour of the chorus "Segur que tomba, tomba, tomba"' (Toibin).

Image from the Franco period (I found this on a 1975 Calendar)

Toibin also notes how a new political elite was waiting in the wings to take over from Franco. Interestingly, in view of earlier discussions at this site about dancing and class formation, he identifies a Barcelona nightclub situated by Santa Maria del Mar as the key location for the emergence of this elite.

Zeleste was set up in a former clothes shop in 1973 by Victor Jou to offer 'a venue to more marginal and left wing groups, to jazz bands, and to people who wanted something new and different' in a city whose nightlife was dominated by flamenco bars; 'Twice during the early years of Zeleste the police came in vans and arrested the entire bar - all three hundred clients - and took them in for interrogation'.

Increasingly, the club became where 'the new ruling class, the men and women who later came to run the city, used to meet in the years before they took power. Zeleste was the place where the young designers and architects, painters and writers, politicians and journalists had discussed matters of mutual importance late at night in the last years of the dictatorship'.

In the 1980s it was replaced by Zeleste Nou, a 2500 capacity converted warehouse with a dancefloor downstairs and passageways along the roof for those needing some fresh air. By this time some of Zeleste's former denizens, the Socialist politicians who now ran Barcelona, were working hand in glove with ex-Francoists like Juan Antonio Samaranch to plan for the 1992 Olympics. The latter had gone from running Barcelona under Franco to becoming President of the International Olympic Committee.

Poster in Girona last week promoting musical and other events 'per la Independencia i el Socialisme'

Tina Modotti

Tina Modotti (1896-1942) is best known as photographer, but her's was one of those lives that joined the dots between different radical and cultural scenes in the first half of the twentieth century. She was born in Udine, Italy, where her father was a militant worker and member of a banned socialist group. Tina had to drop out of school and earn a living as a silk worker in a sweatshop where 'the silk reelers were sometimes allowed to sing as they toiled. At first pianissimo and barely audible over the whirring of machinery, the juvenile voices would soar into the popular 'They call me Mimi' from La Boheme or 'ves doi voi che son dos stelis', a Friulian love song they had all been humming since childhood'.


In 1913, aged 16, she moved to San Francisco where she became an actress. She had a starring role in a Hollywood silent movie, The Tiger's Coat (1920), playing a Mexican servant who ended up heading a dance troupe.

After a period in Los Angeles bohemian circles she ended up in Mexico City in the aftermath of the revolution, living with the photographer Edward Weston, befriending Diego Riviera (who she modelled for while he worked on some of his murals), Frida Kahlo and B.Traven, and throwing herself into radical politics, including the unsuccessful campaign against the execution of the Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in the USA in 1927. Another of her lovers, the Cuban revolutionary Julio Antionio Mella was shot dead as the two of them walked together. In this period she was increasingly developing her practice as a photographer, with her work appearing in international radical publications such as El Machete, Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ), and New Masses.

She joined the Communist Party, and like many radicals of her generation was compromised by her links to Stalinist terror, particularly during the Spanish Revolution/Civil War where she worked alongside her lover Vittorio Vidali, a notorious henchman implicated in the death of many Poumistas, trotskyists and anarchists (including Alberto Besouchet, the first Brazilian to join the International Brigades, who disappeared after being denounced for Trotskyist sympathies - the evidence against him including an association with the Brazilian singer Elsie Houston, ex-wife of the surrealist Benjamin Peret who we have mentioned here before).

Leaving aside this terrible episode (in which the extent of her complicity is a bone of contention), I think we can still appreciate her photography and wonder what it would have been like to have gone to one of her legendary parties. Just after the First World War she lived with her lover Ricardo Gomez Robelo in LA:

'The most enduring memories of 313 South Lake Street are of boisterous parties in the studio, mobilizing Los Angeles's small bohemia, a provincial avant-garde striving for effect. "Intense, dreamy and vibrant", in Robelo's recollection, evenings throbbed "with the magic of art and congenial, exquisite friends and Saki!" Photographer Edward Weston noted of his fellow revelers: They were "well-read, worldly wise, clever in conversation,-could garnish with a smattering of French: they were parlor radicals. could sing IWW songs, quote Emma Goldman on freelove: they drank. smoked, had affairs .... "

The screen door slapping open and shut, Tina greeted her guests wearing something flowing and distinctive, her tie-dyed tunic perhaps, over a long skirt. She adored silk stockings and stacked jangling bracelets on her arm. Her eyes were rimmed in black, mouth painted into a ripe cherry, hands smoothed with her favorite honey-and-almond cream... As the evening heated up, the gregarious, streetwise Wobbly Roy Rosen might set the room on a roar with tales of the scoundrels he confronted as a "tough, tough baby" bill collector. Rosen hailed from New York, but many guests were refugees from San Francisco art circles: the painter Clarence Hinkle and his wife, Mabel, and the curly-haired Mexican Francisco Cornejo, who had created costumes and decor for Xochiquetzal, the "Toltec ballet" staged by the Denishawn modern dance troupe. An unruly sexual charge swept around the room, sending tall, tousled ex-barmaid Dorothea Childs reeling into somebody's arms as the lecherous and amusing old satyr Sadakichi Hartmann pranced from one woman to another. Jazz or Japanese music spinning on the Victrola, the studio dis:olved into a smoky, incense-fragrant maelstrom dotted with pools of colored lights from Tina's homemade Japanese lanterns. The crowd wrangled oveer aesthetics, got drunk on bootleg sake, and sucked on cigarette holders as they quoted Nietzsche and Wilde. Eyelids drooping, Robelo recited Swinburne while couples drifted out to the porch in a fever of kissing and groping.

Among the Richeys' guests was Ramiel McGehee, a baby-faced man with one glass eye and a pinched, disapproving mouth. Once a dancer who had toured Asia and was obsessed with Eastern mysticism, Ramiel metamorphosed into an undulating contortionist at the first sound of a sitar or daibyoshi'.

Living in Mexico City with Edward Weston, Modetti was once again at the centre of bohemian social life:

'New Year's Eve found the kitchen at 12 Lucerna in an uproar as Lupe Marin whipped up a spread of firecracker Mexican dishes, for which she had shopped, thus enabling a couple unable to scrape up January rent to throw a lavish party. Guests fox-trotted their way into 1924, pausing to quaff rum punch and smack their lips over the delicacies. So successful was the tertulia that Tina and Edward made it a weekly event, to be underwritten by passing the hat. "Because of grave conditions resulting from the revolution," the pair chortled, they kindled up the fabled Saturday nights, turning the Modotti-Weston household into the most dazzling light on the vanguard social circuit.

Virtually every well-known writer and artist in Mexico participated. Mexican-born, Texas-educated journalist Anita Brenner described how 'workers in paints drank tea and played the phonograph with union and non-union technical labour-scribes, musicians, architects, doctors, archaeologists, cabinet-ministers, generals, stenographers, deputies, and occasional sombreroed peasants."

....Invariably hungry, they dug into Tina's spaghetti with butter and cheese Anita's version of chongo, a traditional syrupy curd, which she served with cinnamon toast and tea, and a delicious curry and sweet rice prepared by an Indian revolutionist named Gupta. After dinner, the men heaped Colts on a table as tangos and the wicked Cuban rumba scratched their way our of the phonograph. On one memorable occasion, a guest stumbled upon her lover entwined with another woman and holloed him from room to room, popping at his feet with a small pistol. On another, Tina and Edward exchanged clothes, mimicking each other so convincingly that revelers were perplexed until Edward kicked up his pink-gartered legs and vamped outrageously. Edward loved to prance, but Tina, clumsy and uncomfortable on the dance floor, caught her breath on the parties' less frenetic edges, where talk gravitated to revolutionary art and politics'.

Quotes from Patricia Albers, Shadows, Fire, Snow – The Life of Tina Modotti, Clarkson Potter, 1999. See also this post at Museworthy.

Benjamin Péret: songs of the eternal rebels

Benjamin Péret (1899-1959) was active in the Surrealist movement from its formation until his death. Among other things he edited at one stage the journal 'La Révolution surréaliste'.

His most substantial prose work is the surrealist novel 'Mort aux Vaches et au champ d'honneur' - literally 'Death to the Cows and to the Field of Honour' but sometimes translated as Death to the Pigs (since Vaches was used as slang for cops).

To give one example of its striking imagery, it features a section where the sobs of cinema goers form a sea of tears that floods the world:

'Suddenly the sun yawned like a dog waking up, and breath reeking of garlic polluted the atmosphere. A kazoo came and fell in to the heap of barbed wire the broom-seller was tangled in. He grabbed it and blew into it. A long whine and several tears emerged, which burst and expelled lumps of foam all around, which floated on the sea of tears. Delighted, the broom­seller continued to blow into the kazoo, continuing to to produce teary fireworks which burst into foam and settled all about him... When the sea of tears was covered over with a thick rug of foam, circumstances changed rapidly for the broom-seller, who had the unfortunate notion of lying down on it. Barely had he stretched out when the kazoo's whimpering became extraordinarily loud. They were no longer whimpers but veritable roars which destroyed his eardrums and slowly dug a tunnel through his head'

Like other Surrealists, Péret used automatic writing as a technique to discover the marvelous in everyday life: 'The marvelous, I say again, is all around, at every time and in every age. It is, or should be, life itself, as long as that life is not made deliberately sordid as this society does so cleverly with its schools, religion, law courts, wars, occupations and liberations, concentration camps and horrible material and mental poverty'.

His experiences in the French army in the First World War made him a pronounced anti-militarist, as well as being vehemently anti-clerical - Mortes Aux Vaches includes images of 'A general trampled by reindeer' and dogs sniffing dead priests. The photograph here was originally published in La Révolution surréaliste (1926) with the caption 'Our colleague Benjamin Péret in the act of insulting a priest'.

Péret was one of the first of the Surrealists to break with Stalinism. In the early 1930s, living in Brazil (with his wife, the singer Elsie Houston) he joined the trotskyist Communist League. In the Spanish Civil War, he worked first with the independent socialist POUM and then an anarchist militia fighting on the Aragon front. Later he was part of a group called the Union Ouvriere Internationale which broke with the trotskyist movement over the latter's defence of the Soviet Union as a degenerate workers state (see this biography of Ngo Van Xuhat for more about this)

In a 1949 poem, A Lifetime, Péret looked back on his long association with Andre Breton and wrote of:

'the songs in raised fists of the eternal rebels thirsting for ever new wind
for whom freedom lives as an avalanche ravaging the vipers' nests of heaven and earth
the ones who shout their lungs out as they bury Pompeiis
Drop everything'.

Main source: Benjamin Péret, Death to the Pigs and Other Writings, translated by Rachel Stella and others (London: Atlas Press, 1988). The best source online is L'Association des amis de Benjamin Péret (in French)