For this year's Len Crome event, I discussed the difficulties involved in establishing the precise background and origins of the volunteers for Spain from Britain & Ireland and how the various national groups in the International Brigades got along while fighting in Spain.
The talk will be on the IBMT's Youtube channel and a precis appears in issue 45 of the IBMT magazine (2/2017).
Pictured here with the two speakers at the IBMT's 2019 Len Crome conference in Oxford: to my right, the researcher and author Daniel Gray, to my left historian and The Guardian's football correspondent, Sid Lowe. There are more images on the IBMT's Flickr account.
Full report in the May 2019 issue of ¡No Pasarán!
In the Sky News studio talking about the former International Brigader, Geoffrey Servante, who died on 22 April 2019, aged 99. He was almost certainly the last surviving British veteran of the Spanish Civil War.
On 31 May 2018 I joined the biographer and filmmaker, Jane Rogoyska, for a presentation at L.S.E.'s Cañada Blanch Centre, chaired by Professor Paul Preston. We were outlining our thoughts on the image that had recently appeared on social media: did it really show the celebrated photojournalist, Gerda Taro, on her death bed?
On 12 June 2020 during Britain's Coronavirus lockdown, I was asked to contribute to Talk Radio's 'Home-Schooling' segment.
On 9 August 2017, I introduced a number of readings relating to the International Brigades, movingly delivered by actors Christopher Ecclestone and Yolanda Vazquez and by Margot Heinemann’s daughter, Jane Bernal.
I was very happy to take part in a short six minute film produced by the Gill Parker Consultancy. The film was commissioned by the L.S.E. to showcase the expertise of LSE academics; in this instance Professor of Contemporary Spanish History, Paul Preston. In addition to myself, the film included interviews with former Basque child, Herminio Martínez; Professor of Spanish History, Helen Graham; and Spanish writer and journalist, Lala Isla.
This edited volume is based upon a series of public lectures and seminars at Gresham College London delivered during 2013 and 2014. It features an introduction and two central essays by professional historians (Roderick Floud, Kevin Morgan and Nicholas Deakin) and a number of biographies, most by family members – the so-called ‘red nappy babies’ – with brief additions by Denis Healey, Peter Hennessy and Juliet Gardiner.
The book’s central premise is to critically re-examine the reasons that lay behind middle-class men and women joining the Communist Party during the 1930s. One obvious answer, of course, might be that following the Party’s abandonment of its disastrous class-against-class policy, they were no longer discouraged from doing so. Kevin Morgan’s essay, however, provides a rather more detailed analysis of, what Juliet Gardiner describes as, ‘a perfect political storm’. Clearly, the rise of fascism was crucial, but Deakin argues that there were as many different reasons for joining the Party as there were members: some practical, some philosophical. And, of course, Spain played a vital part, becoming ‘the “good cause” of the decade and one on which communists could campaign – and recruit – without inhibition, alongside other progressives.’ (p. 63.)
While many of the essays are critical in the strict academic sense, there is the sense that, twenty-five years after the end of the cold war and freed from its intellectual baggage, studies of the CPGB in the 1930s are free to adopt a more nuanced view. Yes, there is recognition that many recruits had to suspend their critical faculties in order to swallow the Party’s unquestioning support for the USSR, their philosophical about-turns and ideas of ‘revolutionary expediency’ and ‘democratic centralism’. However, at the same time there is an acknowledgement that most people became communists because they wanted to make the world a better place, and believed that the Party was the best means of achieving this. As Elizabeth Dolan puts it, writing about her parents, Mary Macintosh and Richard Clark:
It is my contention that this youthful enthusiasm for Communism, with its at that time inevitable support for the Soviet Union, far from being an illusion, or misguided or naïve, in fact helped to produce well-balanced, thoughtful citizens whose subsequent lifestyle, attitudes and values were a direct development, not a contradiction. (p. 149)
What is missing from the book is a discussion of the Cambridge spies. It’s true that plenty has been written about them already, but it does rather lead to an unfortunate feeling that there is something important that everyone is carefully avoiding. Apart from Denis Healey, that is, who cannot resist drawing a comparison between the Oxford Communists (of whom he was one) who ‘never wanted to do anything particularly for the Russians’, with those from Cambridge who ‘all spied for the Russians’. Clearly sectarianism can be just as rife in academia as it is in politics.
This review appears in the January 2016 edition of the IBMT newsletter.
It has become a tired cliché that necessity is the mother of invention, but it is nevertheless true that the demands of warfare have spurred the advance of technologies; some of them fortunately designed to preserve lives rather than cut them short. The war in Spain was no exception, with the pioneering work in the treatment of fractures and front-line surgery by the Catalan surgeons Josep Trueta and Moisès Broggi offering one pointed example. Developments in blood transfusion, the subject of Linda Palfreeman’s latest study, is another. As the author points out, ‘the Spanish Civil war marked a new era in battlefield blood transfusion.’
Though written in an academic style, the book is accessible to a non-specialised reader. It begins with a useful overview of developments from ancient times to the present, covering the use of direct arm-to arm transfusions established in the nineteenth century, Karl Landsteiner’s vital (and Nobel prize-winning) discovery of blood-groups in 1900, and subsequent improvements in storage. And for anyone with an interest in haematology, there is plenty of detail on the actual processes of transfusion: overcoming the limitations of direct arm-to-arm transfusion, mixing donations to minimise rejection and the use of sodium citrate to prevent coagulation.
The book focuses on the contribution of a number of key players involved in the developments of transfusion in Spain, including a brief chapter on the Nationalist efforts, led by Carlos Elósegui Sarasola. Interestingly, many Nationalists appear to have been singularly unenthusiastic about the use of stored blood, preferring traditional direct transfusions.
Amongst those working on the Republican side, the ground-breaking work of the Canadian Doctor, Norman Bethune, obviously features strongly. Described as an ‘explosive and unpredictable virtuoso’, Bethune does not seem to have been the easiest person to work with. However, as he has already been the subject of a previous volume in the Cañada Blanch/Sussex series, this study spends less time on the personal politics that underpinned his downfall, instead concentrating on his undeniable contribution to the Republican blood service and the mechanics of transfusions.
British readers will be pleased to find a chapter on Reginald Saxton, whose transfusions helped save the lives of numerous British and Irish casualties at Jarama and Brunete in 1937. Intriguingly, Saxton experimented with the use of cadaverous blood during the battle of Teruel in the winter of 1937-8. However his work was apparently brought to a halt by a Spanish law which prohibited any experimentation on corpses within twenty-four hours of death.
The author is clearly an admirer of Frederick Duran Jordà, for two chapters are devoted to the influential Catalan surgeon. However, a little explicit bias does not do the book any harm. Certainly Duran and his work were admirable and, as the author convincingly argues, political malice and the professional envy of colleagues has prevented his ground-breaking work from receiving the fame it should have. In fact, the author chooses to conclude the book with Duran’s exile to Britain in 1939 following the Republic’s defeat. Unwilling or unable to the take up of the lessons learned during the Spanish war, the British Government initially refused Duran permission to practice as a doctor and he could only find work as a laboratory technician. It was only in 1941 that he was at last able to take up a job as a pathologist. As the relatives of brigaders will know, it is an all too familiar tale.
This review appears in the January edition of the IBMT newsletter.
