Stuart Christie was born in Glasgow in 1946. He has been an apprentice dental technician, sheet metal worker, barrow boy, litho printer, gas fitter, bookseller, occasional farmhand, lobster fisherman, writer and publisher. He became a socialist (Labour Party Young Socialists) at the age of fifteen, but moved rapidly to anarchism. He served over three years of a twenty-year sentence for "banditry and terrorism" imposed by a Spanish court for his part in an attempt to assassinate General Franco in 1964. He was later arrested and imprisoned in London for eighteen months until acquitted in the "Angry Brigade" trial at the Old Bailey, one of the longest trials in British legal history. Albert Meltzer (1920-1996) was born in London in 1920. Committed to anarchism from the age of fifteen, he engaged in rent and other strikes as well as the movement for workers' councils. He was an amateur boxer, a bookseller, a print worker, an author and publisher of countless works on anarchism, but he was, above all a "torchbearer of international anarchism" who fought, in theory and practice, for anarchism to be living movement.

Christie and Meltzer co-founded the revitalized Anarchist Black Cross and for many years edited the legendary Black Cross journal Black Flag.