Fermin Rocker

Fermin Rocker (22 December 1907 – 18 October 2004) was a British painter and book illustrator. He was the son of the anarcho-syndicalist theorist and activist Rudolf Rocker, a German, who had moved to London 1895, and Milly Witkop, a Ukrainian Jew, an anarchist and a feminist activist, who had fled to London in 1894.

Biography Rocker was born in Stepney, East London in 1907 and named after the Spanish anarchist and mayor of Cádiz Fermín Salvochea. During his youth, he got to know many prominent anarchists such as Errico Malatesta and Peter Kropotkin and often attended anarchist meetings with his father, a prominent activist, whom he fondly recalls in his 1998 memoir. Later he would also meet Augustin Souchy, Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Erich Mühsam, Nestor Makhno, and Buenaventura Durruti. During this period he learned to draw, guided by his half-brother Rudolph, and exhibited a natural aptitude.

When World War I broke out, both his parents were interned as enemy aliens, along with many naturalised Germans and Russians, his father in 1914, his mother in 1916. In 1918, they were released and moved to the Netherlands, then rapidly to Berlin where his artistic practice developed. Fermin Rocker trained as a lithographer. His early works consisted of sketches, watercolours, and graphic work.

In 1956, he visited the United Kingdom for the first time since 1929. His wife liked the continent so much that she returned to settle in England in 1970, Fermin following her in 1972, to escape the crime and expensive rents in New York, and because Rocker thought New York had become ugly. He and Ruth lived in Tufnell Park for the rest of their long lives. Rocker illustrated books for the Oxford University Press and did paintings on the side. Mick Jagger bought a painting for £4,000 from him Rocker died peacefully aged 96 on 18 October 2004.