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The Peter McQuitty Bursary, a research bursary awarded by the Museum of Oxford to fund local heritage projects led by young people in Oxford, has chosen to award local historian Dan Poole with funding for the research and creation of a biography of Charlie Hutchison. Due for completion in early 2024, this biography will contain original research based on newly recorded oral interviews with Charlie’s surviving family, alongside newly uncovered archival documents and photographs.

In this article, Dan Poole answers some questions about the Peter McQuitty Bursary and the direction of his research.

Who was Charlie Hutchison?

Charles William Duncan Hutchison (1918-1993), born on the outskirts of Oxford in the small historic village of Eynsham, grew up to become a life-long anti-fascist and trade unionist. He is most notable for being the only known Black-British person to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Having probably lied about his age when travelling to Spain, he was among the youngest foreign volunteers, one of the longest-serving, and one of the first to arrive from Britain. After narrowly surviving a bloody defeat which wiped out many of his fellow volunteers, he switched from fighter to ambulance driver, saving countless lives during the war. Come the start of the Second World War, Charlie joined the British military and was present at the Dunkirk Evacuation, the Italian Campaign, the North Africa Campaign, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, and the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. Having barely survived his ten-year crusade against fascism and having witnessed the very worst of humanity, Charlie laid down his weapons to begin a new life. He raised a large family and lived a long and quiet life in South England, only occasionally returning to politics in support of peace campaigns and trade unions.

Born into poverty and having spent years of his childhood in an orphanage, Charlie’s early experiences of racism and poverty inspired his life-long support for trade unions and anti-fascism. When asked why he had risked everything to fight fascists, Charlie summarised his life into two sentences:

England fans once blamed a Steven Gerrard misplaced pass at the Euros on the fact that he didn’t have a winter break... obviously. Today, Marcus, Jim and Vish discuss whether this new-look January schedule is finally the solution to Premier League burnout.

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October 6, 2023 – March 31, 2024

October 20, 2023 – February 18, 2024

Why an upcoming biopic about the British singer's life has sparked controversy

In the opinion of Simone Weil, King Lear was the only one of Shakespeare’s tragedies completely permeated with a pure spirit of love, and therefore on a level with the “immobile” theater of the Greeks. Perhaps Richard II never caught her attention at an auspicious moment. It is, anyway, very difficult to grasp and wrest into the light this mysterious tragedy, the most silent of all of Shakespeare’s works—this path that is constantly covering its own tracks, this voice that doesn’t want to raise any particular problem or to support any particular thesis. A story recounted with eyes downcast, slowly and, one might say, in the dark: en una noche oscura.

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings—
How some have been deposed; some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed.

For five long symphonic acts, full of returns and rigorous reprises, confined in the very tight mesh of unbroken blank verse, not a single laugh, in this drama of young people, not one gallantry or a pleasantry, even a lugubrious one, from a clown. Not one of those great breaths of spring or autumn. Not one of those gratuitous songs as natural to Shakespeare as the circulation of the blood. In Richard II, everything falls inexorably down. Everything obeys the law of gravity. And yet it is in Richard II, more than in any other work since Homer, that the royal gestures “continually cross like blinding flashes” and grace blooms, a pure, pale flower, on the dark foliage of necessity. Never, I think, have “gravity and grace” been more exactly encapsulated in a play.

If Hamlet is the tragedy of irresolution, Richard II is the tragedy of relativity, or rather of reversibility. A group of young princes, united by ties of blood, and profoundly divided by this same blood (which has many times been spilled by their ancestors), whose consciences are extremely refined and whose spirits are ardent and melancholic, unremittingly clash in an attempt at loyalty and unity that is continually frustrated. Behind them two old men, John of Gaunt and the Duke of York, grow feeble and obscurely fall into the same strain, already tinged with defeat or with a presage of death.

The impact of a drama about one of the UK's biggest miscarriages of justice