Breaking The Fetters
@breakingfetters.bsky.social
Investigating the life of Scottish radical Bob Stewart and the lost world of British communism. Family history project by @laikaalan.bsky.social
www.breakingthefetters.com
www.breakingthefetters.com
🎼 Libraries gave us power…🎵🎶
If you’re in Dundee on the 25th of February there’s a talk on my great grandfather at the Broughty Ferry Community Library.
‘Bob Stewart- The Dundee Folk Hero Who Spied for Stalin’
All details below.
‘Bob Stewart- The Dundee Folk Hero Who Spied for Stalin’
All details below.
January 26, 2026 at 7:05 PM
🎼 Libraries gave us power…🎵🎶
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
It’s the anniversary of Lenin’s death and 102 years ago my great grandfather accompanied his body back to Moscow as part of a Comintern delegation, Here’s his account of the funeral.
breakingthefetters.com/2022/01/21/t...
breakingthefetters.com/2022/01/21/t...
The Death of V.I. Lenin.
Lenin speaking in Petrograd 1917 Today is the 98th anniversary of Lenin’s death. At that time, Bob Stewart was in the Soviet Union working as a member of the Executive Committee of the Comintern. I…
breakingthefetters.com
January 21, 2026 at 6:57 AM
It’s the anniversary of Lenin’s death and 102 years ago my great grandfather accompanied his body back to Moscow as part of a Comintern delegation, Here’s his account of the funeral.
breakingthefetters.com/2022/01/21/t...
breakingthefetters.com/2022/01/21/t...
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Discovered this week that my great grandfather met Deng Xiaoping as well as Mao Zedong on his 1955 visit to China. I can only echo my brother’s reaction. In writing his biography you long for him to meet someone ace but it’s a parade of bastards for the most part.
January 15, 2026 at 5:43 PM
Discovered this week that my great grandfather met Deng Xiaoping as well as Mao Zedong on his 1955 visit to China. I can only echo my brother’s reaction. In writing his biography you long for him to meet someone ace but it’s a parade of bastards for the most part.
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Another pledge broken.
January 15, 2026 at 12:19 PM
Another pledge broken.
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Some words on Bob Stewart and the founding of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920. Possibly prompted by the dispiriting scenes from the Your Party conference last week.
breakingthefetters.com/2025/12/05/t...
breakingthefetters.com/2025/12/05/t...
To Shape the World Anew.
It’s a week since the founding conference of Your Party and the less said about the mess of factionalism and wasted opportunity the better. However, it did put me in mind of another gathering…
breakingthefetters.com
December 5, 2025 at 3:04 PM
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Happy St Andrew’s Day Comrades! Enjoy this 1930s celebration of all things Scottish from the CPGB that I found in Bob Stewart’s MI5 files.
breakingthefetters.com/2023/11/30/h...
breakingthefetters.com/2023/11/30/h...
Happy St Andrew’s Day Comrades!
I found the following document – a celebration of Scottish history through a communist lens, in Bob Stewart’s files at the National Archives. Been waiting for an occasion to share it an…
breakingthefetters.com
November 30, 2025 at 8:34 AM
Happy St Andrew’s Day Comrades! Enjoy this 1930s celebration of all things Scottish from the CPGB that I found in Bob Stewart’s MI5 files.
breakingthefetters.com/2023/11/30/h...
breakingthefetters.com/2023/11/30/h...
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Redrafting a piece about my great grandfather Bob Stewart's connection to the Cambridge Five and realising that this short description of Guy Burgess is actually a description of James Bond.
November 16, 2025 at 8:02 AM
Redrafting a piece about my great grandfather Bob Stewart's connection to the Cambridge Five and realising that this short description of Guy Burgess is actually a description of James Bond.
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
It’s Not My War. For Remembrance Sunday I wrote about my great grandfather Bob Stewart’s experiences as a conscientious objector in the First World War.
breakingthefetters.com/2025/11/09/i...
breakingthefetters.com/2025/11/09/i...
It’s Not My War.
Bob Stewart: Conscientious Objector. For Remembrance Sunday here’s something I wrote about Bob Stewart’s experiences as a conscientious objector during the First World War. On the day w…
breakingthefetters.com
November 9, 2025 at 11:11 AM
It’s Not My War. For Remembrance Sunday I wrote about my great grandfather Bob Stewart’s experiences as a conscientious objector in the First World War.
breakingthefetters.com/2025/11/09/i...
breakingthefetters.com/2025/11/09/i...
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Has anyone done this one yet?
November 9, 2025 at 9:48 AM
Has anyone done this one yet?
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Still writing the bloody thing but at least I’ve got the cover sorted.
November 9, 2025 at 9:45 AM
Still writing the bloody thing but at least I’ve got the cover sorted.
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Having a closer look at Anthony Blunt’s MI5 files. Here he’s telling Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame that my great grandfather Bob Stewart knew the identities of Blunt, Kim Philby and Guy Burgess as Lizzie Philby passed their secrets on to him in the 1940s.
November 7, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Having a closer look at Anthony Blunt’s MI5 files. Here he’s telling Peter Wright of Spycatcher fame that my great grandfather Bob Stewart knew the identities of Blunt, Kim Philby and Guy Burgess as Lizzie Philby passed their secrets on to him in the 1940s.
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
This Land Is Your Land: “After you’ve stopped the boats; after you’ve deported your neighbours; after you’ve waged war on woke, shrunk the state even further and redesigned the economy in the mould of Javier Milei what happens when people realise their lives are still shit?”
Here I ramble on about Caerphilly, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Woody Guthrie and Friedrich Engels. This Land Is Your Land.
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/28/t...
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/28/t...
This Land Is Your Land. (Night Off).
Gillian Welch, David Rawlings and Breakfast With Friedrich Engels. David Rawlings and Gillian Welch at Manchester 02 Apollo. Picture shamelessly nicked from The Guardian. I hadn’t realised quite ho…
breakingthefetters.com
October 28, 2025 at 9:12 AM
This Land Is Your Land: “After you’ve stopped the boats; after you’ve deported your neighbours; after you’ve waged war on woke, shrunk the state even further and redesigned the economy in the mould of Javier Milei what happens when people realise their lives are still shit?”
Here I ramble on about Caerphilly, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Woody Guthrie and Friedrich Engels. This Land Is Your Land.
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/28/t...
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/28/t...
This Land Is Your Land. (Night Off).
Gillian Welch, David Rawlings and Breakfast With Friedrich Engels. David Rawlings and Gillian Welch at Manchester 02 Apollo. Picture shamelessly nicked from The Guardian. I hadn’t realised quite ho…
breakingthefetters.com
October 28, 2025 at 9:05 AM
Here I ramble on about Caerphilly, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Woody Guthrie and Friedrich Engels. This Land Is Your Land.
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/28/t...
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/28/t...
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Wondered why I was getting so many views on my communist family history blog. Getting a lot more traffic than usual due to the Caerphilly By Election. Here’s Bob Stewart’s account of being the first communist Parliamentary candidate in 1921.
breakingthefetters.com/2022/12/14/b...
breakingthefetters.com/2022/12/14/b...
Breaking the Fetters Chapter 16: The Caerphilly By-election.
Election Poster 1921. This was the first parliamentary election ever to be contested by the British Communist Party. The decision to contest was taken by the Party Executive on July 16th 1921. The …
breakingthefetters.com
October 22, 2025 at 4:49 PM
Wondered why I was getting so many views on my communist family history blog. Getting a lot more traffic than usual due to the Caerphilly By Election. Here’s Bob Stewart’s account of being the first communist Parliamentary candidate in 1921.
breakingthefetters.com/2022/12/14/b...
breakingthefetters.com/2022/12/14/b...
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Looking forward to reading this. Claude McKay attended the same Communist Unity Conference in 1920 that my ancestor Bob Stewart did. Found this out after one of McKay’s poems was included in the GCSE syllabus. Can anyone pick him out of this photo?
October 16, 2025 at 12:00 PM
Looking forward to reading this. Claude McKay attended the same Communist Unity Conference in 1920 that my ancestor Bob Stewart did. Found this out after one of McKay’s poems was included in the GCSE syllabus. Can anyone pick him out of this photo?
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Oh man. Diane Keaton. Yes - the first two Godfather movies. But, come on, her performance as Louise Bryant in Reds is formidable and in a just world everyone would recognise this.
October 11, 2025 at 7:18 PM
Oh man. Diane Keaton. Yes - the first two Godfather movies. But, come on, her performance as Louise Bryant in Reds is formidable and in a just world everyone would recognise this.
NEW POST! Wartime Scrapbook (Marxist-Leninist).
New post from me on Breaking the Fetters. All about my grandfather not being called up to fight in the Second World War because he was a massive communist.
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/11/w...
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/11/w...
Wartime Scrapbook (Marxist-Leninist)
Despite growing up in the 1970s, The Second World War loomed large in my childhood. Probably due to a mixture of factors but mainly because the children who had grown up in its shadow were now the …
breakingthefetters.com
October 11, 2025 at 9:33 AM
NEW POST! Wartime Scrapbook (Marxist-Leninist).
Bob Stewart, Yvonne Kapp AND Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton!
A post about the unlikely friendship between great grandfather Comintern agent Bob Stewart & the bisexual, bohemian writer Yvonne Kapp. She called him ‘the finest human being I have ever known’ and dedicated a volume of her biography of Eleanor Marx to him.
breakingthefetters.com/2021/07/21/c...
breakingthefetters.com/2021/07/21/c...
Comrades: Yvonne Kapp
At the end of last year I was sorting through a large box of correspondence dating from the 1930s and onwards. In amongst them was a handful of letters addressed to Bill Stewart who was my grandfat…
breakingthefetters.com
October 3, 2025 at 5:28 PM
Bob Stewart, Yvonne Kapp AND Elsa Lanchester and Charles Laughton!
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
NEW POST! ‘Harry Pollitt and the Chamber of Bastards’ in which I write about my great grandad Bob Stewart attempting but failing to do the right thing in the wake of Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939.
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/02/h...
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/02/h...
Harry Pollitt and the Chamber of Bastards.
When we started this project on our great grandfather Bob Stewart, my brother and I both agreed that we thought there was much to admire about the man but also much to criticize. Although I’ve trie…
breakingthefetters.com
October 2, 2025 at 11:35 AM
NEW POST! ‘Harry Pollitt and the Chamber of Bastards’ in which I write about my great grandad Bob Stewart attempting but failing to do the right thing in the wake of Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939.
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/02/h...
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/02/h...
NEW POST! ‘Harry Pollitt and the Chamber of Bastards’ in which I write about my great grandad Bob Stewart attempting but failing to do the right thing in the wake of Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939.
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/02/h...
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/02/h...
Harry Pollitt and the Chamber of Bastards.
When we started this project on our great grandfather Bob Stewart, my brother and I both agreed that we thought there was much to admire about the man but also much to criticize. Although I’ve trie…
breakingthefetters.com
October 2, 2025 at 11:37 AM
NEW POST! ‘Harry Pollitt and the Chamber of Bastards’ in which I write about my great grandad Bob Stewart attempting but failing to do the right thing in the wake of Stalin’s pact with Hitler in 1939.
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/02/h...
breakingthefetters.com/2025/10/02/h...
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Recommended Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism to someone last week. Just had a look at a piece I wrote on it a while back. Still quite pleased with it. Includes a gratuitous reference to Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile.
breakingthefetters.com/2022/07/28/b...
breakingthefetters.com/2022/07/28/b...
Books: ‘The Romance of American Communism’ by Vivian Gornick.
“The idea that market crashes can act as catalysts for revolutionary change has a long history on the far left, most notably in the Bolshevik theory that hyperinflation, by destroying the value of …
breakingthefetters.com
September 23, 2025 at 6:43 PM
Recommended Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism to someone last week. Just had a look at a piece I wrote on it a while back. Still quite pleased with it. Includes a gratuitous reference to Kenneth Branagh’s Death on the Nile.
breakingthefetters.com/2022/07/28/b...
breakingthefetters.com/2022/07/28/b...
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
Ridiculously pleased with the title of my forthcoming piece about how the Communist Party of Great Britain responded to Stalin’s pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. Ashamed to say great grandad Bob Stewart did not exactly cover himself with glory here.
September 20, 2025 at 6:45 PM
Ridiculously pleased with the title of my forthcoming piece about how the Communist Party of Great Britain responded to Stalin’s pact with Nazi Germany in 1939. Ashamed to say great grandad Bob Stewart did not exactly cover himself with glory here.
Reposted by Breaking The Fetters
More Tom Mann action in this post about our grandad Bill Stewart.
breakingthefetters.com/2022/06/13/b...
breakingthefetters.com/2022/06/13/b...
William Stewart and the National Unemployed March to London, 1929.
The 1929 National Unemployed March from Glasgow to London arriving at Hyde Park. Frankly, the 1920s do not seem very different to our own times. Huge inequality, increasing poverty and a government…
breakingthefetters.com
September 15, 2025 at 7:53 PM
More Tom Mann action in this post about our grandad Bill Stewart.
breakingthefetters.com/2022/06/13/b...
breakingthefetters.com/2022/06/13/b...