Storione, Lawrence 1867-1922

Laurent (anglicised as Lawrence) Storione was the son of the Italian stonemason Felix Storione and Philomena Moir (or Noir). He was born in Italy in 1867 in the French speaking area of Valle d'Aosta at the town of Pre Saint Didier near the border with France. He left France when he was called up for a medical examination for training as a conscript. He deserted to Switzerland and then to Italy. He worked as a miner in these countries. Storione later went back to France to get to Belgium, where he lived in Liege, in 1891. He participated in several miners' strikes in Belgium during which locomotives were derailed and cage ropes severed. It appears he was given pamphlets on anarchism in this period by the noted French anarchist Elisee Reclus, who was lecturing at the University of Brussels and Storione now began to identify as an anarchist. When workers threw a bomb into a judge's garden, it resulted in several arrests, with some facing sentences of up to 25 years in prison. Whilst Storione was not involved in the incident, there were agent provocateurs and spies working in these pits, and due to Storione's agitation the police intended having him exiled. He managed to avoid this for a short time, staying in and around Liege and Charleroi. He ended up in Scotland in 1897, after fleeing France disguised as a woman, arriving in Muirhead, Ayrshire. He moved on to Hamilton in Lanarkshire where he was to marry Annie Cowan in 1900 and stayed until 1906 when he travelled to Canada.

Due to the 'money panic' he returned to Scotland in 1908, where he lived in Lumphinnans,Fife. His coming to the pit village of Lumphinnans and his employment at No1 pit there had consequences for revolutionary ideas among the miners in that area. He soon set up an Anarchist Communist League which, according to Stuart MacIntyre in his Little Moscows: Communism and working –class militancy in inter-war Britain (1980) “preached a heady mixture of De Leonist Marxism and the anarchist teachings of Kropotkin and Stirner, a libertarian communism which was fiercely critical of the union”. Macintyre bases this view on literature stocked by the group(see below) and is not necessarily the case! Among those who appeared to have joined the League were the miners Abe and Jim Moffat and Robert (Bob) Selkirk. All three were to join the Communist Party in 1922, Abe Moffat having an important position within it and Selkirk serving as a CP town councillor in Cowdenbeath for 24 years. In his anarchist years, Selkirk had been a member of a Scottish branch of the IWW, and publicly polemicised against Guy Aldred’s rejection of workshop organisation, as well as denouncing Kropotkin for his pro- First World War position.

Storione had a report of activity in Cowdenbeath published in the anarchist paper Freedom in November 1913. "COWDENBEATH. We held our first Francisco Ferrer commemoration on Saturday October 11th. All the comrades did not turn up, due to the short notice. Nevertheless, we had an interesting meeting, which has left us with good prospects for the cause in future. We have had discussions on many subjects. We hold a Chicago Martyrs’ commemoration on Sunday, November 9th, in Parker’s Hall, North Road, Cowdenbeath, at 2 o’clock. Comrades Armstrong and Sodorom will speak on the judicial murder of our Chicago comrades. All friends and sympathisers are cordially invited." Storione also is noted as providing sums of money collected locally to various publishing projects initiated by Freedom in this period.

Storione’s children were given good revolutionary names: Armonie, Anarchie, Autonomie, Germinal and Liberte! His daughte Anarchie, usually known as Annie, was a leading light in a Proletarian Sunday School in Cowdenbeath, far more radical than the Sunday School set up in the area by the Independent Labour Party.
According to Abe Moffat, Storione was “very short in height”. Bob Selkirk wrote that the League sold copies of Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, Stirner’s The Ego and His Own, and De Leon’s Two Pages From Roman History. The main slogan of the League was, again according to Selkirk, “Trade Unions are bulwarks of capitalism and all Trade Union leaders are fakirs”. Acccording to Mary Docherty, the League ( which she refers to as the Communist Anarchist Group) held weekly Sunday evening propaganda meetings after the Proletarian Sunday Schools, at which such notable activists such as Willie Gallagher, John McLean, and Jack Leckie held forth ( A Miner's Lass, Mary Docherty, 1992).

Both Abe Moffat and Selkirk mention Storione as an inspiration. However as members of a Party that was virulently anti-anarchist they had to re-write history. So for Moffat, Storione, (remembered as Storian in his book) was no longer an anarchist but “an ardent Communist,” who had convinced he and his brother Jim to a militant anti-capitalist position (My Life With The Miners, 1967).

Selkirk is a little more truthful, mentioning the League and Storione’s initiative in founding it. On the League’s critique of the trade unions Selkirk remarks that: “We thus sowed defeatism and pessimism instead of strengthening the organisations of the workers. Actually most of the members of this Branch became successful businessmen, accountants, dance band leaders, insurance agents, etc. They had lost faith in the workers” (Bob Selkirk, The Life of a Worker, 1967). This requires further investigation as to whether this is true, bearing in mind that members of the League like Selkirk himself, went on to be founders of the Communist Party in Fife. Graham Stevenson in his biography of Davie Proudfoot, Communist and then Labour activist, says that he was influenced by the League, although carrying on the CP tradition conveniently drops the "Anarchist" from the League's title , see http://www.grahamstevenson.me.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=892:proudfoot-davie&catid=16:p&Itemid=119

The League set up a bookshop in nearby Cowdenbeath in 1916, as the result of the subscriptions of twelve workers subscribing £24 each. It sold Capital, Ancient Society and other Charles Kerr publications. “We sold anything considered progressive, even “The Strike of A sex”. We sold the anti-war literature of the time and became familiar with police warrants and police searching of our houses” (Selkirk). this was the Communist Literature Depot at 128 Perth Road, described in Freedom in 1915 as selling Freedom and other anarchist literature. Freedom also recorded Storione as having contributed 3 shillings and three pence ( a considerable quantity for a miner) to the Freedom press fund in June-July 1915.

Storione and the League surely deserve further historical investigation, buried as they were by an “official” version of working class history as purveyed by the Communist Party.

Lawrence Storione died in 1922 after a pit accident invalided him during 1917. At a compensation hearing that year the Sheriff gave a decision in Storione's favour. However, police were to challenge this, saying that he was fit to work. They said that, along with Jack Leckie and Willie Gallagher, he headed a demonstrations in Kelty when 5,000 workers struck during the Three Weeks Strike. He was eventually to lose his fight for compensation. Annie survived him by two years.

NICK HEATH
Sources: works mentioned in main text. Information on Lawrence's parents and his marriage was provided by a relative of Lawrence's