Image Credit: The Charlie Campaign
A new campaign has recently been launched in Oxford seeking to commemorate an overlooked activist, by erecting a statue to him in the city centre.
In December 1936 Charlie Hutchinson, a young Black British man from Eynsham, (a tiny village just outside of Oxford), arrived in Spain. Charlie would join the International Brigades, units of left-wing foreign volunteers who had arrived in Spain to help the country’s democratic Republican government fight against a fascist uprising aided externally by Hitler and Mussolini. Charlie Hutchinson is the only known Black British volunteer to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
Charlie was in Spain for two years and served much of his time as an ambulance driver. Upon his return to Britain, he joined the British Army. He participated in the 1940 Dunkirk evacuation and went on to fight in North Africa and Italy. He would also take part in the liberation of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp, and although he never spoke about any other details of the war, he did tell his children what he witnessed there. After the end of his military service in 1946, Charlie started work as a lorry driver, and was active in the Transport and General Workers Union. He would go on to take part in anti-apartheid activism and campaigning for nuclear disarmament. He married a fellow activist, Patricia Holloway, had three children, and passed away in 1993, aged 74, leaving behind a large family.
Charlie’s story has remained largely hidden from the public as he did not discuss many of the details of his experiences of the Spanish Civil War and Second World War, and his acheivements were not known to historians until 2019. It was then, following a project by school children at New Vic College in London, that the details of his life were pieced together by historians using letters, photographs, military, and government records.
A new campaign was launched at the Museum of Oxford in late October 2022, in the hope of gaining a memorial for him. Charlie’s many relatives gathered to tell his story, from his birth to a British mother and Ghanian father, to his impoverished childhood, and lifelong activism. The launch included a wealth of photographs of his service, as well as his many medals from the Second World War. This new project, led by Charlie’s family, and local historian Dan Poole, is campaigning to have a statue showing a life-size bronze figure of Charlie sitting on a stone or metal bench made. Their intention is that the statue will be welcoming and unimposing, in homage to Charlie’s working-class roots and lifelong activism, and in contrast to many other statues in the city. The campaign believes that a statue of Charlie would be the first statue to a black person in Oxford’s history. As organiser Dan Poole has said, ‘in a city with a thousand years of history, it is exciting to imagine that our project would be a historic first.’.
Though the family and local historian behind the campaign know that erecting such a memorial could take a long time, they have set themselves no deadline, ‘giving [them] the freedom to do this project the right way, without resorting to shortcuts.’ It is their hope that, with innovative fundraising and increased public awareness, Charlie’s story will gain both a physical memorial, and the place in the history books it has long awaited.