aggravating José’s leg condition, so he moved to a glass factory, which had the benefit of being closed to the elements. The work was no less dangerous: injuries and burns were common and apprentices faced violence from foremen and adult workers. Aged just ten, José gained direct experience of this: when he committed a tired error at the end of a night shift, he was punched and left unconscious by an adult co-worker. Once revived by his workmates, he was enraged, vowing to his aggressor he would find him when he was older and settle scores. (In his unpublished memoirs, he related how he kept track of his assailant in the barrio and, as a young man, returned to his workplace to confront him, only to discover his nemesis had died a few weeks earlier.78 We can only speculate what might have occurred had he found the aggressor.)
While factory life work was anything but a gymnasium for the young, José’s experience of manual labour saw him develop into a strong teenager. His childhood illness notwithstanding, he was an able-bodied young man – about 1.60 metres, an average height for his generation – and more than capable of defending himself. Yet, perhaps more tellingly, in 1918, soon after the aggression, José sought redress through collective channels in what was his initiation in labour struggle. This was no conventional industrial conflict for better wages, but a local and generational struggle of the apprentices in the glass sector, who sought better treatment inside the factories both from employers and their adult co-workers – a demand that directly reflected José’s experience of workplace violence. Although I have been unable to find any information about this dispute, it is possible to make certain observations. In a conflict spearheaded by what were still children, there was a strong element of play. For youths very much captivated by news of the world war, they now had the chance to participate in their own ‘war’. Accordingly, José and his fellow strikers armed themselves with sticks and obliged apprentices in two nearby factories to stop work: ‘We waited for the recalcitrant ones when they left work and we gave it to them.’ While years later he would intervene in major CNT conflicts armed with pistols and sometimes explosives, his baptism in social struggle was, ironically, directed against the confederation, in which the adult glass workers were, for the most part, unionised. Without union backing and facing the hostility of their elders, the strike of the young discontents ended when they were forced back to work by their parents.79 Nevertheless, this early and fleeting experience of struggle had a lasting impact on Peirats, and his unwavering trust in the rebellious energies of youth would remain a constant feature of his lifelong activism.
After the failed strike in the glass sector, José returned to work as a brickmaker, where wages were slightly higher to compensate for the tougher work involved.80 In the twenty-year period from 1916–36, he worked in several of the many brickworks scattered around the southern part of Barcelona, in Sants, Collblanc, and in Les Corts, on the site of what is today the Barcelona Football Club stadium.81 This was the profession with which he identified most and which shaped his identity as a worker and his writing. Years later, when he was a renowned anarchist journalist, historian, and translated author, his printed calling cards proudly stated his profession as ‘brickmaker’.82
He was undoubtedly the world’s most published brickmaker. As a rule, the brickmakers exhibited a rough working-class culture and, as a young adult, José himself was very much part of this:
At the time of the morning break, with the heat of the ovens if it was winter, everyone spoke and screamed loudly. Obviously the conversations were far from academic. Obscenities were common currency.
Popular topics were gambling, the voluptuous dancers of Paral.lel cabarets, and the sex workers from the brothels near the port, where many apprentices, including Peirats himself years later, became sexually initiated. There was also much talk of football, of which José described himself as a devoted fan and of ‘el Barça’.83 When weather permitted, the workers organised impromptu football matches during their breaks.84 Despite his limp, Peirats enjoyed the ludic aspects of the game and revelled in the physical challenge.85
Unskilled and underpaid, the brickmakers were perceived negatively in much of working-class society, especially among the more skilled, who looked down on them as the rogues of industry. Yet for José, brickmaking was a means of earning an ‘honest’ living.86 Moreover, his sympathy with the brickmakers was very much in keeping with his growing compassion for the underdog – sentiments that were deepened after his family installed itself in Collblanc, among Barcelona’s growing migrant sub-proletariat.
1.3 Collblanc
With the family economy suffering due to the economic downturn, and the ongoing fall-out of José’s medical bills, in 1918 the Peirats moved from Sants to Collblanc Street, the main street in the neighbouring barrio of Collblanc. This decision again reflected Teresa’s mastery of the family’s destiny. She appreciated that for a lower rent, the family would benefit from more spacious accommodation in Collblanc and, moreover, she could take in lodgers to improve the family finances. Their new top floor flat afforded an uninterrupted view of the Mediterranean coasts of Garraf, the mountains of Montjuïc and Tibidabo, and the chimneys of the nearby brickworks.87 José’s parents found work in an espadrille shop owned by a valldeuxense, while he and Dolores worked in nearby factories. In the early difficult years in Collblanc, the Peirats shared their residence with up to three lodgers at a time.88 Yet the new flat became the family home where José’s parents lived out the rest of their lives: decades later they, like Dolores, would die in the house. José would remain there for eighteen years, until he was twenty-eight, when the course of his life changed irrevocably with the revolution and civil war of 1936. We might reasonably conclude that Peirats felt a strong sense of duty to his parents after they had become impoverished by his medical expenses. He was always concerned they perceived him as a ‘good’ son; nevertheless, along with his sister, the Peirats constituted a compact and functional family unit.
In their quest for cheaper rents, the Peirats had unconsciously followed Barcelona’s shifting topography of revolution, from the first industrialised barrios (Poble Sec, Sants) to the marginal slums (Collblanc).89 While an administrative part of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, Collblanc was wedded to Barcelona’s rapidly expanded urban periphery and, in the 1920s, it attracted legions of migrant workers, the shock troops of Catalonia’s industrial and urban growth.90 L’Hospitalet experienced vertiginous population growth (over 450 per cent in the 1920s alone) and by the early 1930s it was the second largest population centre in Catalonia, with around 40,000 inhabitants, over 27 per cent of whom were Valencian.91 Most of the new arrivals settled in Collblanc and the neighbouring district of La Torrassa, whose combined population grew from 3,810 in 1920 to 21,185 in just ten years.92 For the most part unskilled construction workers, the migrants of Collblanc-La Torrassa were the lowest of the low – isolated, spatially and socially, from the rest of L’Hospitalet, eking out an existence on the margins of Catalan ‘civilisation’. As Peirats put it, the area was ‘almost disregarded… We saw ourselves then as second-class Barcelonans.’93
Urban conditions were among some of the most abysmal in the Barcelona area. This rapidly developed space had little or no infrastructure, and some houses lacked water, drainage, and electricity. Streets were often unpaved and many thousands lived in shanty houses. Nevertheless, like in La Vall, the community faced material hardships with mutual aid and reciprocity: if people were in financial trouble, neighbours would help out as best they could, whereas rough justice was meted out to those who abused this solidarity.94
The first years in Collblanc were beset by tragedy. Peirats later defined 1918–20 as a time of ‘crisis’.95 Their arrival coincided with the influenza pandemic that ravaged Europe in the winter of 1918, which claimed perhaps as many as 300,000 lives from all social classes across Spain.96 In Collblanc, the bodies of the dead were carted away under cover of darkness in the hope of stalling popular hysteria. The Peirats family was seriously affected; the entire family being bedridden apart from José senior and Dolores. Although José fell ill, he was outside the most endangered age group of 20- to 40-year-olds and made a full recovery. Uncle Nelo was less fortunate, and his death was a heavy blow for the family, particularly José. The following year, Cisquet, José’s younger
