Description
"I’ve just come across these long unseen negatives of my old friend Miguel García García (1908-1981) in the back garden of 123 Upper Tollington Park, c.1970-71. A CNT veteran of the Spanish Civil War and member of the anti-Francoist ‘Tallion’ urban guerrilla group, Miguel was arrested with 23 comrades in 1949, and sentenced to death in 1952 by a Francoist ‘Council of War’. The sentence was commuted to 30 years, but seven of his comrades were shot by firing squad at Barcelona’s Campo de la Bota; the others received long prison sentences. Miguel, whom I met and befriended in Madrid’s Carabanchel Prison in 1966 (as he describes in his prison memoir ‘Franco’s Prisoner’), was released in 1969 when he came to London to work as International Secretary of the Anarchist Black Cross. He and Albert Meltzer — with whom he shared a flat until he returned to Barcelona in the late 1970s were inseparable comrades and friends, travelling the length and breadth of Britain and Europe promoting the work of the Anarchist Black Cross. In fact it was one of Miguel’s ABC talks in London in 1970 that gave rise to the ‘Angry Brigade’. After Franco’s death, with the financial support of José Martín Artajo Miguel opened the renowned (in anarchist circles) bar ‘La Fragua’ in Barcelona’s calle Cadena, close to where CNT organiser Salvador Segui was murdered by government pistoleros in March 1923. In 1981 Miguel, suffering from advanced tuberculosis, returned to London for treatment. I’m sure he knew he was dying. One evening he rang me in Orkney where I was living and we had a particularly long and poignant conversation about old friends and common memories, which I thought strange at the time. Early next morning I had a phone call from the hospital to say he had passed away in the early hours of the morning. RIP, Miggers!"
Stuart Christie, 29 July 2011
