From anarchism in Spain, to photo-journalism in Yemen, Pauline gives us a fantastic round up of what we’ve been reading and chatting about…
In this fascinating session (“brilliant” and “my favourite Story Cafe so far” were comments made afterwards), we looked at two journalists, Glasgow-born Ethel MacDonald, who was reporting from Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, and Amira Al-Sharif, a present-day Yemeni photo-journalist.
Ethel MacDonald, who has been one of my heroines ever since I saw the TV programme on her by Chris Dolan, was born in Bellshill in 1909. She was a committed Anarchist and became secretary to Guy Aldred of the United Socialist Movement and went to Spain with Guy Aldred’s wife, Jenny to report on the war. She was imprisoned twice but continued to engineer the escapes of others before finally escaping back to Scotland herself. Known as the Spanish Scarlet Pimpernel her exploits were widely reported at the time and there was an international search for Ethel when she disappeared. On her return she wrote and made speeches on her experiences in Spain and worked with Aldred on the Glasgow newspaper of the United Socialist Movement, The Word from 1939-1959. She died in 1960.
I read extracts from her biography The anarchist’s story by Chris Dolan telling of Ethel and Jenny’s early impressions of, and experiences in, Barcelona. The readings were followed by an animated discussion about how history is written and whose stories are chosen to be told. Like many women who do extraordinary things, Ethel has been largely forgotten now but in her day she was briefly famous.
There was great interest when Annabel circulated a newspaper of the time with the headline ‘SAVE SPAIN ACT! Radio Speeches by Ethel MacDonald’, Glasgow, 1st May 1937′ which she has now donated to the GWL archive and Christine passed round photographs of her daughter Lisa, when she was a journalist embedded with British forces during the Iraqi invasion.
After a break Wendy read from Our women on the ground: essays by Arab women reporting from the Arab world. She shared extracts from the essay by Yemeni Women with Fighting Spirit by Amira Al-Sharif where she tells of her own struggles, including within her family, to be recognised as a professional photo-journalist simply because she is a woman in a deeply conservative Muslim country. She made the choice to remain unmarried in order to carry on with her work.
Amira reports on pioneering and resilient women fighting their own wars despite the odds stacked against them, such as Saadiya, mother of seven who has just won the rights to the land she occupies on the Yemeni island of Socotra after years of struggle and physical attack. Wendy passed around copies of Amira’s photographs of Saadiya and her family. Such women shatter the stereotypical views of Arab women. Women such as the Palestinian/American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was shot and killed by an Israeli sniper in May 2022 while she was reporting on disturbances in Jeddah, highlight the very real dangers of reporting from the frontline.
Wendy and I had wanted to include something about the statue of La Passionara on the Broomielaw which was erected in 1974 by the The International Brigade of Scotland in memory of the ordinary men and women from Scotland who died in the Spanish Civil War. We looked for a poem to finish with but couldn’t find one so I wrote the following:-
LA PASSIONARA CLYDESIDE
She stands on the Broomielaw facing an alien river,
Arms raised, feet astride, defiant, determined.
The cry NO PASARAN! a symbol of those who
left these shores to fight and die defending liberty
and lie in alien soil.
But she was real, Dolores Ibarruri, a fierce, feisty
communist, an orator and writer, then an exile in
alien lands before a final return. Her words resound,
“Better to die on your feet than live forever on your
knees”. NO PASARAN!
The Ethel MacDonald collection is held by the Mitchell Library.
Both books we read from are available from GWL, as are the works of other women journalists such as Martha Geillhorn and Kate Adie.
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