Ethel Macdonald: An Anarchist’s Story

"I went to Spain full of hopes and dreams. It promised the utopia realised. I return full of sadness, dulled by the tragedy I have seen."

At the time of our story Ethel is 27 years old. She is determined - almost to the point of obsession. She is confident of her values and her abilities and is completely fearless. As an anarchist she is politically aware and has a burning desire for social justice.

Born in 1909 to a working-class family in Motherwell she worked for the United Socialist Movement who sent her to Barcelona to report back for the organisation. There, she became the English-speaking propagandist for an anarchist radio station and was behind some of the first reports on the 1937 May Riots, when leftists turned against each other, resulting in death squads of Stalinists assassinating prominent anarchists and 400 people being killed in street fights in Barcelona.

The film narrates how MacDonald often endangered her life in support of her cause. When anarchists in the independent Marxist party, POUM, were rounded up in June 1937, she visited them in prison, smuggling in letters and food and helping some escape in borrowed clothes and on foreign ships. She was imprisoned by Stalin's secret police, but while the world fretted about her disappearance, she organised hunger strikes among the anarchist prisoners and smuggled out letters. After questions about her absence in the Houses of Parliament and an American newspaper campaign, supporters formed the Ethel MacDonald Defence Committee. International pressure was applied and she was deported to France, eventually returning to Glasgow disillusioned.

The screening is followed by a talk by the film's producer and director, Mark Littlewood, starting at 2.15pm.