Brian Bamford on Jim Petty

Seventy people or more attended the

Remembrance Service of James Petty

at Saint Alban the Martyr Anglican

Catholic Church in Salford, last Saturday.

I have reason to be eternally grateful  to Jim Petty, for over a decade ago he rendered a great service to me and my family, when he performed a funeral service for my Aunty Betty at Rochdale Crematorium. 

He did it as a 'Foreigner', as a job on the side or as the Spaniards say:  'Por Gratis!' or as some say 'A Thank you job'. 

That sums up the spirit of Jim Petty:  for whether we call Jim Petty an Anglican, or an Anglo-Catholic or the Father of Northern Anarchism, we haven't begun to describe his nature as a man and human being.  Radical anarchism and human decency grew in his soul as a remarkable human being.

 His early interest in politics was at one time  in the Labour Party, but he never voted Labour after the 1970s.  Though he later he joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP), and was active as a shop steward  in both textiles, where he worked as a stripper and grinder,  and later at Lucas as SHOP STEWARD in engineering.

 IN 2008, in an interview in NORTHERN VOICES,  I ASKED JIM PETTY 'WHY HE CAME TO DESPISE POLITICIANS?'   

JIM SAID IN 2008:

'I JOINED THE LABOUR PARTY IN 1947, WHEN I WAS 14.  THE WORKING-CLASS MEMBERS THEN ALL HAD VISION.  BUT THE PARTY COUNCILLORS & OFFICIALS

WERE ALL ON THE MAKE  NOT MONEY BUT POWER, THEY ALL WANTED TO BE BIG FISH  IN THE LITTLE POND OF THE BURNLEY PARTY..... IT WAS ALL ABOUT GETTING JOBS  & SAFE SEATS  & AT A MAYORS BALL  I SAW A MAN IN TEARS BECAUSE HE'D NOT BEEN MADE A  J.P.  

During this last twelve months Jim had been interested about the campaign of Tameside Trade Union Council in against the blacklist in the British building trade.  Particularly the Tameside TUC book 'Boys on the Blacklist'.  He told me only recently that when he'd been working at Lucas Aerospace that a bloke had come into the office and asked Jim if he could see the manager.  Jim had asked him why, and the bloke said:  'Do you know that you've got a man called Petty working here?' 

He then proceeded to outline a black-balling account of Jim's history as a trade union activist, not knowing who in fact he was talking to.   

But Jim had many interests, many causes to support, and wasn't just the bosses that wanted to to blacklist him for he had difficulties with his own unions;  the Transport & General Workers Union and earlier, in textiles, in the National Union of Textile & Allied Union.  Beyond that he was even ostracised by some of his own comrades in the Solidarity Federation and the Anarchist Federation. 

In 2003, Jim Petty was one of the people who went on to found the publication Northern Voices.  In the first issue of that journal that he wrote a six-page article entitled 'Labour's Unacceptable Architects of Urban Squalor'  about the Burnley riots of 2001; this was about the indefensible politics of race in Burnley. 

Then, in 2012, he enjoyed writing about the Burnley Liberal M.P., Philip Morel, who had bravely opposed the First World War in 1914.   Of the town itself, he wrote in Northern Voices in 2005:

'Burnley is decaying under the aegis of Burnley Labour Party's modern politics.'  And being asked by me in 2008 'How he reconciled being an anarchist with he religious convictions?' ,  Jim said: 'No problem!' and continued to say 'The basic idea of Christ was anarchism and to share all things in common.'  He then went on to describe the ideas of Gerrard Winstley from Wigan, where there is a Digger's Festival today!  Jim went on to refer me to the Bishop of Alba's ideas in Spain:  what some call the Holy Land of anarchism. 

When the Englishman Gerald Brenan wrote his book 'The Spanish Labyrith' he wrote about the attacks on the Roman Catholic Church by the anarchists and he wrote:

'In the eyes of the anarchists the Roman Catholic Church occupies the position of the anti-Christ in the Christian world.  They see the Roman Catholic priesthood as the fountain of all evil...'

And Brenan tells us to remember our own history  arguing 'one might describe anarchism as the Spanish protestant or protesting heresy which in the 16^th and 17^th centuries saved Spain.' 

And however violent these 'anarchists may be, Cromwell's independents were violent too, they speak the same language of love of liberty, of dependence upon the inner light that Englishmen used to do.'

This year, Jim Petty said that he didn't feel up to writing in the latest edition of Northern Voices.  He had written something in every other issue of the paper over the last dozen years or so. 

He was a very kind man and he told me shortly before he died that we ought to be very proud of Northern Voices.  I don't know about that, but I am proud to have known Jim Petty from Burnley; the Anarchist and Anglican.