The Blasted Heath

One of the great pleasures of sauntering through London is looking upwards. That is, at buildings beyond ground floor. Many interesting and bizarre ornaments and features can be discovered. The number of animal features, for example, is manifold. One particular feature that has intrigued me for years are the Beavers of Oxford Street. If you stand on the north side of Oxford Street outside the 100 Club and look over the road to the left, you will see a number of effigies of beavers, four in all,complete with flat tails, mounted on a tall building, on its pinnacle and further down on window tops. I always surmised that the beavers were a symbol of industry and that the building, 105-109 Oxford Street, housed some sort of society connected either with industry or labour. But in fact that building, which for a time was occupied by Burton's, was once the emporium for Henry Heath the Hatters, and of course, the unfortunate beavers were once used to make hats! The uppermost beaver holds a shield with H - for Heath- marked on it in gold.The building was built for Henry Heath's in 1887 by the architects Christopher & White and once featured a frieze of people engaged in hat-making activities by Benjamin Geswick, a disciple of John Ruskin.

Further along Oxford Street, you can turn south into a parallel road to find the Henry Heath Hat factory. I once had a photo taken of me in a Henry Heath hat outide here- Heath in a Heath outside Heath's. Must post it up here sometime.

Labels: Beavers, Hats, Henry Heath, Oxford Street

This last weekend I attended a meeting of the International of Anarchist Federations held in the Tuscan town of Carrara, long a stronghold of anarchism. The anarchist Alberto Meschi did some first class work among the marble quarry workers as well as the miners in the region and after a bitter struggle a 6 hour day (including the long hike to the quarries) was won for quarry workers and miners. Ever since then anarchism has maintained its deep roots in the area. The marble workers have maintained an allegiance to anarchism. When the fascists attempted to hold a public meeting in Carrara in the last decade, the marble workers poured down from the quarries and blocked all roads and railtracks into Carrara with their trucks, stopping the meeting taking place. The Carrara area was pretty much a no-go area for the fascists even under the fascist/Nazi regimes, and large numbers of anarchist partisans operated in the surrounding Apuan Alps.The printshop of the Italian Anarchist Federation(FAI), printing the weekly Umanita Nova is there, as well as a bookshop/discussion circle named after the Carrarese anarchist Gogliardo Fiaschi, who fought with the post-war Spanish resistance and then spent many years in Spanish jails before secretly being transferred to an Italian one! ( a campaign eventually secured his release) In the main square a building that looks like the town hall houses the meeting rooms of the local group of the Italian Federation. This includes a huge hall decorated with Renaissance style frescos. Outside the red and black flag flies above a large sign announcing the FAI offices.This building was wrested from the hands of the fascists in 1945 and has remained in anarchist hands. It was in Carrara that the FAI was founded in 1945 and part of the meeting included the 60th birthday celebrations.
Part of the weekend included a visit to the cemetery to visit the graves of Meschi, Fiaschi, Giuseppe Pinelli, the anarchist railwayworker thrown from a poice station window ( as in "Accidental Death of an Anarchist) and Lucetti and Valtorrano, who attempted to kill Mussolini.
The successful meeting was attended by French, Spanish , German, Bielorussian, Brasilian and Argentian comrades as well as the Italian and British delegates. Czech and Slovak and Russian comrades sent their apologies.
The weekend ended with a meeting attended by hundreds to celebrate the 60th anniversary and addressed by the foreign delegates, including yours truly.. All in all an inspiring and encouraging weekend.

I once saw the word "Journaputes" scrawled on a wall in Toulouse in SW France, alluding to the whore-like nature of journalists. Now, I have considerably more respect for prostitutes than I have for the race of hacks. Particularly odious are the ex-lefties turned fawning Blairites. Chief among these are, of course, the appalling David" I Was a Teenage Stalinist" Aaronovitch and the equally abysmal Nick Cohen.
The veteran anarchist Albert Meltzer mentioned one of this breed in his book "I Couldn't Paint Golden Angels" when he refers to one time anarchist Wynford Hicks, then at the start of his career as a journalist. "As I half expected would happen, one of my least favourite people, Wynford Hicks (whose father-in-law subsequently wrote the rubbishy book saying I was a secret member of the IRA who had hidden in the Common Wealth party to emulate the feats of the Spanish anarchists in sabotaging their own war effort), an acolyte of professional secularist Nicolas Walter, then going through the usual stage of radical alternative journalist as a preliminary to becoming a mainstream one, the minute he got the chance, did not fail to smear and sneer, implying I was ratting. Had he been taken seriously and the allegations glibly made in his circle been true, it could have been a death sentence. He retracted saying he was joking. "
Wynford Hicks taught Paul Anderson sub-editing at the London College of Printing. Anderson, after a similar trawl through the libertarian movement, has himself ended up in the same position as Aaronovitch and Cohen. Like Cohen , he called for support for Oona King in the constituency in which I live.
Recently, he ladled out copious praise for Chris Pallis, one of the founders of Solidarity. Anderson had been a member of that grouping in the 80s. Unlike me, he did not attend Pallis's funeral, considering his paeans of praise. That's probably because he knew he would have got short shrift from many of those attending. Chris Pallis, whose razor-sharp mind cut through bullshit like a laser, would have been disgusted by Anderson's politics. And he has the nerve to have as a sub-title "Democratic Socialism with a libertarian punch"for his blog Gauche. And what sort of punch might that be? The dab administered by a week-old kitten to a skein of wool, perhaps. Plenty of apologies for Labour there, precious little libertarian politics.
I used to think Anderson was Aaronovitch with a smile. But when it comes down to it, Anderson can be as dismissively nasty to his opponents as the Jabba the Hutt of journalism. Insults like "cretino-leftists" are casually thrown about. But what is most appalling about this "libertarian"is the way he sells his "There is No Alternative to Labour- Give Up."
Oh, and if you ever read this, Mr. Anderson, I have as little time for the smug toad Galloway or the different variety of leftist as you claim to have. But I haven't turned into something as equally obnoxious as them.
Paul Anderson's "libertarian" blog Gauche can be read here http://libsoc.blogspot.com/