Nothing much was happening on that warm August morning in Madrid in 1964, and that was just how the dictatorship liked it. Pretty girls, daring to wear skirts above the knee – it was the sixties – sat at café tables with boys daring to let their hair grow over their collars. Traffic moved through the wide boulevards, the sun climbed over the city, and General Francisco Franco remained alive. For the moment.
Into this agreeable summer day arrived a Scottish lad of 18 named Stuart Christie. Dark-haired, dark-eyes intense with passion, he wore a distinctive kilt with a packet of plastic explosives hidden beneath the swaying tartan. It was not an especially subtle disguise. Not many people were wearing kilts in Madrid that summer morning – but then, perhaps subtlety was not the point.
Christie had hitchhiked south across Europe with the cheerful determination of a young man who believed history could be bent on to a new course, preferably one compatible with the revolutionary zeal of the sixties. Bob Dylan had just released Masters of War, the track inspired by President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 Farewell Address, in which he warned the American public to guard against the ‘unwarranted influence’ of the military-industrial complex – the dangerous alliance between the military establishment and the massive, profit-driven arms industry. Many believed such combinations could lead to fascism.
Christie had set out to turn words into action and had volunteered – as had many Scots who had travelled to Spain to fight against Franco during the Spanish Civil War – to help an underground anarchist resistance movement assassinate the dictator. The proposed method was spectacularly simple: explosives, a public occasion, and the dictator somewhere in the vicinity.
The Generalissimo was expected to watch a football match at the Santiago Bernabéu Stadium. The plan was to pass the explosives to his local contact, Fernando Carballo Blanco, a 40-year-old carpenter, who would detonate the bomb in the presidential balcony or VIP parking areas during the game.
The young Scot from Glasgow, an apprentice dental technician and member of the Anarchist Federation, had been contacted by Octavio Alberola of the underground Spanish anarchist group Defensa Interior. They needed a foreign fellow traveller who could cross into Franco’s Spain without immediately attracting the sort of attention usually associated with arriving in a foreign country carrying explosives.
Christie had told his family he was going off to pick grapes in France and, in Paris, met his first contact, who supplied the explosives. Some say the story of the kilt is a myth, but whether he carried the package beneath the tartan or under the woolly jumper knitted by his gran is, in the end, beside the point. He was following his passion to strike a blow against fascism.
What he did not know was that the anarchist resistance network had been infiltrated by undercover Spanish agents.
On 11 August 1964, when Christie went to the American Express office on the Carrera de San Jerónimo to collect his instructions, he realised he was being watched. He calmly walked out, but undercover police followed him down Calle Cedaceros and arrested him on the spot. Within hours, Fernando Carballo Blanco was also captured.
The great revolutionary adventure ended not with an explosion but with handcuffs, paperwork and a journey to prison. History, on this occasion, had declined the invitation to be bent.
The Last Word
The regime initially sought the death penalty. Christie faced execution by garrotte, the medieval apparatus by which Franco’s Spain disposed of certain inconvenient human beings. Instead, he received what Franco probably considered a lenient 20 years behind bars.
Christie spent a little more than three years in Carabanchel prison. It was his university. He taught himself Spanish, working through books with the stubborn concentration of a man determined not to let prison have the final word. The language came slowly, but in time the young Scot was reading Spanish literature and turning the prison courtyard into an unlikely classroom.
His eventual release in 1967 followed an international campaign involving prominent intellectuals, among them Jean-Paul Sartre and Bertrand Russell.
Britain supplied the next chapter. In 1971 Christie was arrested in connection with the Angry Brigade, an underground group responsible for a series of bomb attacks. He was subsequently acquitted and exchanged explosives for printing presses. He became an anarchist publisher, writer and historian, producing books, pamphlets and, eventually, his memoir, Granny Made Me an Anarchist.
His life became less about killing dictators and more about documenting the people who opposed them. The young Glaswegian who had once journeyed secretly with explosives under a kilt eventually spent decades making sure that political memory could not be quietly buried.
Spain sighed with relief when Franco died in his bed in 1975. Christie died in 2020. The dictator got to see the football match. The anarchist got the last word.
Many thanks Clifford – another fascinating Spanish (Scottish?) tale. I have a certain Australian media mogul in the role of anti-christ in my narrative but why not two?
Great story – sounds like Christie went on an amazing (and free!) course in further education, he hadn’t planned on….
Stuart was a friend & a most remarkable and fascinating man. We connected over some of my journalism when I was covering the Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall. But his tales were far more compelling & are well told in Granny Made Me an Anarchist–a copy of which he gave to me and prize to this day. Thanks for mentioning Stuart, more people should know about him and his passion for democracy.