Political Voices: Nellie Dick 
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Nellie Dick (1893-1995) was born Naomi Ploschansky in Kiev. In London before the First World War, she was active in the anarchist movement associated with Rudolf Rocker. She started a children's Sunday school at the Jubilee Street Cub at Stepney and became associated with a modern school. She met some of those involved in the notorious 'siege' of Sidney Street. Nellie married Jim Dick and they emigrated to the United States were both were key figures in the modern school movement.

I interviewed her at length - more than two hours - at her son's home in Oyster Bay, New York on 6 January 1993. This covers her early life in Ukraine and time as a youngster in London and in Leeds; her involvement in the East End anarchist movement and memories of Rudolf Rocker and the Jubilee Street Sunday School; her memories of Malatesta and Kropotkin and of the Sidney Street siege; the Russian Revolution of 1917 and travelling to the Soviet Union in the 1930s; and the Modern School movement in the United States. The voice heard occasionally in the background is that of her son, Jim Dick Jr. Only the first hour or so of the interview is posted on YouTube - the full interview is available on audio below the YouTube link.

I had interviewed Nellie Dick some years earlier - on 5 November 1985 - over the phone to Miami. The audio file of that interview is also posted. It covered much the same ground - but more briefly. The later and longer interview has not been transcribed. An edited transcript of the earlier interview was published and it's posted below.

I am also including an article I wrote for the New Statesman in 1993 to mark Nellie Dick's hundredth birthday. She also features in Paul Avrich's Anarchist Voices. I have a dozen or so letters and cards from Nellie sent over the last decade of her life - I have posted below a couple of the photos she sent me (the Christmas card dates from 1940) and a news cutting.
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Nellie sent me this cutting from the New York Times in December 1991, but in an accompanying note she said: 'The reporter said things which were not quite true - mixed up some of my doings with my sister.  ... We did not stop in London on our way to USA. London was our destination and I lived in England and Scotland until I was 19.' 

'John Pether' [Andrew Whitehead], 'A Conversation with Nellie Dick', The Raven (published by Freedom Press, London), 6, October 1988, pp.155-166
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