for part of the journey.59
These ongoing physical problems, coupled with their faith in José’s obvious intelligence, encouraged his parents to find him a new school. After making enquiries among friends and neighbours, he was enrolled in the school of the Workers’ Rationalist Athenaeum in Sants.60 The athenaeum was a pivotal institution within the local community; its plays, for instance, were so well attended that sometimes spectators had to bring their own chairs.61 Apart from being a couple of minutes’ walk from the family home, the school appealed to Teresa as it rejected corporal punishment. The teacher, Juan Roigé, who came from a family of anarchists, was inspired by the pedagogical principles of Ferrer i Guàrdia’s Modern School movement, with its stress on non-hierarchical education.
The Sants Athenaeum was part of a network of alternative cultural centres in Barcelona that compensated for the underdeveloped welfare state by providing educational and leisure services, such as drama and choral associations, libraries, evening classes, and hiking groups. There was a transforming element to the athenaeum: they aimed to forge a countercultural vision of the world that would raise working-class consciousness and challenge capitalist hegemony. Many of the CNT’s leading activists emerged from the rationalist schools, while the athenaeum played an active role in creating and propagating a distinctly alternative culture that rivalled the official one.62
This experience gave José his first direct contact with the alternative working-class public sphere to which he would devote his life. He flourished in the new school, where classes were conducted in Catalan by teachers who were frequently CNT members or anarchist activists. Gone were the beatings and humiliations; classroom discipline was maintained through reason and the charisma of the teachers. Students of both sexes were educated together and they were encouraged to formulate ideas freely, without prejudice or respect for established orthodoxy. This liberal, freethinking learning environment was far more in keeping with the disposition of the Peirats family and it irrevocably changed José’s attitude towards education. As he later reflected, ‘Once enrolled, I worked with all my heart and soul.’63 He underwent a profound personal change and was transformed into an industrious student, a voracious reader who excelled in class and demonstrated a lively intelligence. As another ‘graduate’ from a rationalist school reflected, ‘The pupil emerged with a set of morals.’64
His education was ended by state repression. In 1917, the Spanish monarchy experienced a revolutionary crisis. Rampant inflation had impelled the main trade unions – the CNT and the socialist Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT – General Union of Workers) – to make common cause, and their search for change saw them enter an ad hoc coalition with republican politicians and dissident military officers against the monarchy. The pressure for a social and political opening culminated in August in a general strike – a frontal challenge to the state.65 Still just nine, José was aware of the developing revolutionary crisis: he saw the hardships and food shortages at home and the frequent street protests. For the first time, he sensed the collective power of the masses, as he witnessed the police retreat in the face of working-class women, ‘those skirted battalions’, who sacked food shops and stores and then distributed their haul. In August, he saw the other side of the coin, witnessing soldiers in the streets and the gunfire as they repressed the general strike.66 Having shut down the unions, the escalating repression closed off all the institutions of the proletarian public sphere, including the rationalist schools. José had to watch helplessly as police arrived at his school and detained his teachers.67
Encouraged by José’s progress as a scholar, Teresa hoped he would continue his studies in one of the legally functioning schools. But José would now accept nothing but rationalist schooling. As he recognised years later, ‘I had found my path’,68 and he refused to return to a school system that previously converted him into a truant. With the family economy ailing, he re-entered the world of work, his ‘formal’ education thereby ending at nine.
He now became a brickmaker (ladrillero), one of the oldest activities in human history, a sector in which valencianos were heavily represented in Barcelona.69 Conveniently for Peirats, many of the city’s brickworks (bóvilas) were located in the Sants-Collblanc-Les Corts axis, all very close to home.70 There was nothing exceptional about his early baptism in the world of industrial work. If children from the very poorest families rarely saw the inside of a school, it was the norm for working-class boys and girls of José’s generation to be robbed of their childhood by the dull compulsion of economic forces, generally leaving school by the age of ten at the latest, as was the case with his sister Dolores.71 This was the start of an accelerated journey through life: if childhood ended at eight or nine, working-class youths were prematurely transformed into young adults by fourteen and many were already physically old at forty.
Workplace conditions were frequently atrocious, even in traditionally more protected sectors like the print industry. Employers, who knew they enjoyed the full backing of the authorities, adopted a cavalier attitude towards what they viewed as costly health and safety measures.72 Such was the seriousness of the situation that even the bourgeois press periodically condemned deficient workplace safety.73 Arguably, factory conditions were worse still when José started work in World War I, since wartime neutrality presented an unprecedented boom for entrepreneurs and fostered a new type of nouveaux riches employer, far more obsessed with profits and anxious to cut production costs, irrespective of the dangers to employees, who were in no short supply. Conditions were worse still for child workers, who were on the receiving end of brutal labour discipline imposed by adult foremen. In addition, José recalled having periodic fights at work, as he responded robustly to anyone, young or adult, who mocked his limp.74
In the brickworks, conditions were notoriously tough. Consisting of an oven in which bricks were forged, a chimney, and gaps in the walls through which the workers would pass to deposit bricks in a nearby store, the brickworks were exposed to the elements. Work was hard and fast-paced, as workers rushed to move bricks from the oven to the store. Barefoot and dressed in little more than baggy shorts and a hat to protect them from the heat of the oven, they toiled in extremely high temperatures in summer, when they became tanned, while in winter they faced chill winds. It was, as José reflected years later, and not without nostalgia, ‘a savage but fulfilling profession, working in the open, without shoes and the feet in contact with mother earth’.75 The most arduous and perilous tasks, such as scurrying around close to the ovens, were reserved for young workers.76 Employers were loath to improve hygiene and safety measures. In 1923, a brickmaker’s manual laid out a series of good practices in the industry, including the installation of showers, the cessation of winter work, and the limitation of employment to children over thirteen – all were ignored entirely.77
By winter, it was clear the work was 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