Philip Sansom

Sansom was the son of John Sansom, lathe operator, and Lillian Sansom (née Underwood), occupation unknown, who lived in Hackney, London. He later lived in Wandsworth, London.^[3] After having been influenced by Education through art by Herbert Read, the art historian^[4], he trained as a commercial artist in West Ham Technical College. Sansom (1987) recalled that at the time, in 1936, Read

"was already established as England’s leading writer on modern art in all its facets’ and that his books, The meaning of art,^[5] Art and industry^[6] and Art and society,^[7] were almost required reading for my generation of art students".^[8]

In the 1930s, Sansom worked as a commercial artist.^[1]

During the Second World War Sansom worked on the land in Kent as a registered conscientious objector.^[3] By 1943 he had returned to London where he encountered anarchism in the form of Marie Louise Berneri. He recalled:

"Marie Louise Berneri was the first anarchist I ever met. The first convinced, dedicated, working-for-the-movement anarchist, I mean. For she it was who opened the door when I rang the bell of the Freedom Press office one day in 1943, when I set out to discover what anarchism was and who the anarchists were."^[9]

Subsequently Sansom met Simon Watson Taylor, who introduced him to the London Surrealist Group which met each Wednesday evening in the private upper room of the Barcelona Restaurant in 17 Beak Street, Soho.^[10] Sansom joined the Group in 1944.^[11]

In 1945, Sansom was living in what he called a "ramshackle studio" in Camden Town^[9], when he was invited to join the Anarchist Federation. Shortly after he had moved in, he was asked if he would mind if a comrade came to live with him.^[9] The comrade turned out to be John Olday, a brilliant idiosyncratic deserter from the Royal Pioneer Corps who was an anarchist activist, an author and, like Sansom, a cartoonist. Oldway was English. However, he had grown up in Germany, where he became German-speaking and where he was extremely politically active. He fled the country to avoid arrest by the Gestapo. Now in London, he was contributing articles and cartoons to the anarchist journal War Commentary. But more substantially he was surreptitiously producing on the kitchen table of the studio his monthly Forces Newsletter which he distributed to the network of two hundred soldiers, sailors and airmen of War Commentary.^[12]

By the beginning of October 1944, Sansom and peace activist Laurie Hislam set off on a tour to promote Oldway's collection of drawings, The March to Death^[13], which by the end of the war sold 10,000 copies.^[14] And, like Olday, he contributed articles and cartoons to War Commentary. However, Sansom also joined Berneri, her husband Vernon Richards, and John Hewetson to became one of its editors. After he did so, he served two prison sentences in the following year. Initially, he served a two-month sentence in Brixton Prison, having been charged with ‘being in possession of an army waterproof coat and for failing to notify a change of address’.^[15] Then, very shortly afterwards he, with the other editors of War Commentary, were arrested and tried at the Old Bailey, the Central Criminal Court, for the offence of "the dissemination of three seditious issues of War Commentary under Defence Regulation 39a", for which they were found guilty.^[16][17] Sansom was sentenced to nine months imprisonment, which he served in Wormwood Scrubs.

Sansom's problems with the state did not finish with his release from prison. On the day before his release he was served with a notice requiring him to attend at 9 o'clock the following morning, within an hour of his release, for a medical examination for the army. On 18 January 1946 the Freedom Press Defence Committee circulated a letter which was signed by George Orwell and twenty-five public figures requesting that the ministers responsible correct the injustice of his call-up for military service.^[18] The letter was published on 18 January 1946 in the Manchester Guardian, Peace News and Tribune, on 21 January by the Daily Herald, on 26 January by Freedom and in the February/March issue of the bulletin of the Freedom Press Defence Committee.

On 22 February 1946, Tribune published the following letter by Sansom:

"It has been said that the price of Freedom is eternal vigilance and it is certainly true that if ever vigilance was responsible for any man's freedom it is for mine at the present moment. For it is clearly as a direct result of the protest made by the Freedom Defence Committee in the form of a letter published by you (Jan. 18. 1946), that the Home Secretary ordered my immediate release from prison last week (Feb. 11).

I am therefore writing to thank you for giving space to the publication of the disturbing circumstances surrounding my prosecution and to be asked to be allowed to express through your columns my hearfelt gratitude to the Committtee and the twenty-six signatories of the letter for so willingly giving their support in my defence."^[19]

In 1946, with the help of Berneri, Sansom produced the surrealist review Free Unions/Unions Libres, the brainchild of Simon Watson Taylor, at Express Printers in Whitechapel.^[20]

In 1951, Sansom produced the pamphlet Syndicalism: The workers’ next step.^[21] He recalled that, within a "few weeks" of March 1952, The Anarchist-Syndicalist Committee, which comprised himself, Albert Meltzer, Rita Milton and Albert Grace, launched The Syndicalist. Sansom described it as "a small but brightly coloured little paper" and stated that it included contributions from various industries, including the docks, mining and engineering.^[22] The Syndicalist was short-lived; it only lasted a year. And it was not a Freedom Press publication. Nevertheless, it was published with its blessing.^[23]

By 1953, the London Anarchist Group concluded that it needed a club. Sansom took a leading role in advancing the idea. And in the following February, Freedom announced that "it has been decided to call the club the Malatesta Club", after Errico Malatesta, the Italian anarchist. A cellar was located in Holborn, London.^[24] Chairs and tables were purchased, a cooker was installed, a sink was plumbed in and the cellar was painted. The club opened on 1 May 1954.^[22][25]

Sansom was a charismatic orator at Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park, London, and elsewhere in the 1950s and 1960s.^[1]

In 1978, Sansom enabled Freedom Press to publish the pamphlet Surrealism The hinge of history by Conroy Maddox, Pauline Drayson and John Welson.^[26] And he helped to run the London Gallery of the Belgian surrealist E.L.T. Mesens.^[27]

• Barberis, Peter; McHugh, John; Tyldesley, Mike, eds. (2000). "418 Anarcho-Syndicalist Committee (ASC)". Encyclopedia of British and Irish Political Organizations. London: Pinter. ISBN 1-85567-264-2. Retrieved 19 June 2025.
• Graham, Robert (2009). Anarchism A documentary history Volume Two The emergence of the new anarchism (1939-1977). Montréal: Black Rose Books. ISBN 978-1-55164-311-3.
• Honeywell, Carissa (2015). "Anarchism and the British warfare state: The prosecution of the War Commentary Anarchists, 1945". International Review of Social History. 60 (2): 257–284. doi:10.1017/S0020859015000188. Retrieved 21 June 2024.
• Levy, Silvano (2003). The scandalous eye The surrealism of Conroy Maddox. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. ISBN 0-85323-559-7. Retrieved 13 June 2025.
• Olday, John (1995) [originally 1943]. The March to Death. London: Freedom Press. ISBN 0 900384 80 8. Retrieved 28 February 2026.
• Orwell, George (1998). Davison, Peter; Angus, Ian; Davison, Sheila (eds.). Smothered under journalism 1946. London: Secker & Warburg. ISBN 0-436-20556-4. Retrieved 14 May 2025.
• Read, Herbert (1931). The Meaning of Art. London: Faber & Faber.
• Read, Herbert (1934). Art and industry. London: Faber & Faber.
• Read, Herbert (1936). Art and society. London: Faber & Faber.
• Remy, Michael (2018) [originally 1999]. Surrealism in Britain. Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-367-14568-2. Retrieved 14 August 2025.
• Richards, Vernon (1977). "Recollections of the wartime years" (PDF). Freedom. 38 (17): 9–14. Retrieved 2 August 2025.
• Rooum, Donald (2016). Wildcat anarchist comics. Oakland, California: PM Press. ISBN 978-1-62963-1-271. Retrieved 2 September 2025.
• Rosemont, Franklin (2015). Joe Hill The IWW & the making of a revolutionary workingclass counterculture (Second ed.). Oakland, California: PM Press. ISBN 978-1-62963-119-6.
• Sansom, Philip (1986). "Freedom Press and the anarchist movement in the '50s and '60s". Freedom. 47 (9): 32-35.
• Sansom, Philip (1977). "Printing sedition" (PDF). Freedom. 38 (17): 15. Retrieved 27 February 2026.
• Sansom, Philip (1987). "Surprise, surprise! A curate's egg!" (PDF). The Raven Anarchist Quarterly. 1 (3): 267–279. Retrieved 27 February 2026.
• Ward, Colin (1995). "Witness for the Prosecution". The Raven: Anarchist Quarterly. 29 (8): 57–60. Retrieved 13 May 2025.
• Ward, Colin; Goodway, David (2014) [2003]. Talking anarchy. Oakland, California: PM Press. ISBN 978-1-60486-812-8.
• Watson Taylor, Simon (2002), Growing up with anarchists, surrealists and pataphysicians (PDF)