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).
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.
On 12 June 2020 during Britain's Coronavirus lockdown, I was asked to contribute to Talk Radio's 'Home-Schooling' segment.
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?
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!
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.
George Wheeler one of the last survivors of the International Brigades that fought in the Spanish Civil war has died, aged 91.
Born in Battersea in 1914, the son of a committed socialist, he left school at 14 before taking an apprenticeship and working as a joiner in Brentford for a company that made spare parts for Royal Navy ships.
Following the outbreak of civil war in Spain in 1936, his father, a Labour councillor, became an active member of the local Aid Spain Committee. Inspired by a speech given by Aneurin Bevan at a rally in Trafalgar Square in early 1938, George decided to volunteer for the Republican forces. Assisted by the Communist Party, he departed for Spain in May 1938, accompanied by, among others, the trade unionist Jack Jones.
Within three months, he and his comrades in the British Battalion were thrown into the dramatic republican Ebro offensive which astonished those who had written off the Spanish loyalists. However, Franco’s superior forces – supplied with huge amounts of materiel by Hitler and Mussolini, despite an international agreement not to intervene in the conflict – soon reversed the Republican gains. After seeing many of his comrades killed or wounded, George was finally captured by Franco’s forces on 23 September 1938.
He was fortunate not to be summarily executed and was imprisoned in the notorious PoW camp at San Pedro de Cardeña, near Burgos. Kept in appalling conditions, many prisoners died from a combination of disease, malnutrition and the frequent vicious beatings. Finally released in April 1939, George returned to London, work and marriage to Winifred, who died ten years ago, before continuing his anti-fascist fight in the Second World War.
Although he was in a reserved occupation, he became such a thorn in the side of the management at the factory where he spoke out against the waste of raw materials, that he was released to join the army. George became an army instructor and was posted to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to train local troops. Promoted to Regimental Sergeant-Major, he was due to travel with his troops to Burma, but he caught malaria and was unable to travel.
Surviving the Second World War, he resumed his work as a carpenter and became an active trade unionist. After his wife’s death, George renewed his interest in the International Brigades and, to his obvious delight, his graphic account of his Spanish experiences, To Make the People Smile Again, was published in 2003.
Lawrence George Wheeler, carpenter: born Mitcham, Surrey 21 March 1914; married 1940 Winifred McDougal (died 1993); died Croydon, Surrey 11 February 2006.
The obituary above originally appeared in the Morning Star. An interview with George (with a portrait by Eamonn McCabe) appeared in The Guardian‘s ‘Last of the Brigade’ in 2000 and International Brigade Memorial Trust Secretary, Jim Jump, also wrote an obituary for George, which appeared in The Independent on 17 February 2006
David Marshall, poet, and one of the last surviving of the British volunteers to fight for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, has died, aged 90.
David was born on 27 March 1916, in Middlesbrough, the eldest of three sons of Methodist parents. Brought up mainly by his Mother, he gained a scholarship for High School, where he developed a lifelong love of literature and poetry. When he left school in 1934, with few jobs available for school leavers, David reluctantly sat the civil service entrance examination and began work in the Ministry of Labour. It was not work that David enjoyed, opening his eyes to the misery of life ‘on the dole’. However, unlike many of his peers, it was not to politics that David turned, but to books. He later admitted to have been, ‘utterly ignorant of the world…wrapped in my bookishness.’ The world of those who would later be his comrades in Spain – demonstrations, hunger marches, battles with Mosley’s Blackshirts – made little impact on him.
However, in July 1936, after 18 months working in the Labour Exchange, he read that a revolt had broken out in Spain. This changed everything:
One day I brought The Times…I remember reading a paragraph saying, “There is no doubt that if the Spanish Republican government wins the war, a socialist state will be set up”. Really that was the trigger. I thought, Christ, here’s a way out.
David quickly obtained a passport by forging a letter from his Father, told his sweetheart ‘some cock-and-bull story’, and bought a one-way rail ticket to London and on to Port Bou, in France. However, on reaching the Spanish border, David’s political naïveté was his undoing, when he was refused entry for not possessing any political or Trade Union credentials. However, a mysterious Italian appeared and got him across the border. David then volunteered to join the Catalonian anti-fascist militia and was put on a train to Barcelona.
This was to be an immensely influential time for David, for Barcelona ‘was seething with enthusiasm [and] colour’. As Orwell famously recounted, ‘the working class were in the saddle’; Trade Union and political banners were everywhere. Under the leadership of Nat Cohen- a battle-hardened volunteer from London- Marshall and his handful of comrades (including Georgie Tioli, a mysterious Italian, and Tom Wintringham, another poet and later a commander of the British Battalion in Spain) were formed them into the Tom Mann Centuria. The oft-produced photograph of the group has developed an almost iconic status.
After a few weeks in Barcelona they were moved to Albacete, the International Brigade base, and, at the end of October 1936, officially attached to the mainly German Thaelmann Battalion as part of the XII International Brigade. Here they were given uniforms and what David described as ‘bloody awful’ equipment. Most of the volunteers hadn’t even fired their rifles when they went into action on 11 November 1936, at Cerro de los Angeles, near Madrid. Less than 24 hours later, David’s Spanish episode was abruptly terminated when he was shot in the leg. Extremely shaken and with his morale severely knocked, he returned to England in December 1936, to hear that most of his friends had been killed in a vicious battle at Boadilla on the western outskirts of Madrid, memorably described in his comrade (and Winston Churchill’s nephew) Esmond Romilly’s book of the same name.
On his return to Middlesbrough, he joined the Young Communist League and returned to his old employment in the Ministry of Labour. In January 1939 he married his sweetheart, Joyce, with whom he later had a daughter and son.
David continued to work for the return of democracy in Spain and attended a reunion of volunteers in 1938, though he felt a reluctance to stand alongside his comrades, feeling that his all too brief time in Spain and ensuing return to Britain made him somehow unworthy. David always downplayed his role in Spain and possessed a strong sense of guilt that he had survived, when many others hadn’t. Nevertheless, with other veterans, he joined the International Brigade Association (IBA), formed in the Spring of 1939, for which he would later become Treasurer. As part of his support for the Republic, David also wrote a poem, ‘Retrospect’, which was included in an anthology edited by Stephen Spender & John Lehmann, Poems for Spain, (1939).
When the Second World War broke out he, like many other ex-brigaders, was at first barred from entry into the armed forces. However, following pressure from his superior at the Labour Exchange (who insisted that he volunteer), on 4 February 1940 he joined the Army Pay Corps. He was interviewed about his background in Spain by a Captain, who said that he knew that David ‘was Communistic or fascist’. However, David received no discrimination over his time in ‘Red’ Spain though, even as a corporal, he was never placed on guard duty when abroad.
An attempt to volunteer as a glider pilot failed when the optician twigged that the short-sighted David had memorised the eye-chart beforehand, and David transferred instead to the Army Engineers. He took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944 and also witnessed the liberation of Belsen concentration camp, altogether serving six years in the army. Demobilised in April 1947, he returned, once again, to his old job in the Ministry of Labour, where he remained until 1961, when he moved to London and began work as a joiner with the Theatre Workshop. Between 1963 and 1973 he had a small studio, building scenery for theatres and exhibitions.
In 1975 his wife, Joyce, died of cancer after a long illness and David bought and lovingly re?furbished a 90ft. sailing barge, ‘Jock’ where he lived, hosting exhibitions and dinners. His impromptu – and extremely lively – parties are still famous to this day. In 1982 David sold ‘Jock’ and bought an 85ft. long Dutch Barge, ‘Zwerver’, on which he lived until 1992, when he moved in with his long-time partner, the actress Marlene Sidaway.
Following the death of Bill Alexander, the secretary of the IBA in 2000, David was at the forefront in pressing for the admission of family members and friends, leading to the establishment of a new charitable organisation, the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT), for which he continued to donate considerable time and money. In November of the same year, the ‘articulate, poetry-loving 84 year old’ was amongst a number of Spanish veterans photographed and interviewed for a special piece in The Guardian.
David continued to write poetry throughout his life and eventually, a collection, The Tilting Planet, was published early in 2005. When, at the launch of the book of his poems a number of them were read by a number of well-known actors and actresses out to a packed audience, even David- always fiercely determined to downplay his own importance- could not disguise his pleasure and pride. This was to be David’s last public appearance.
The International Brigades and Spain’s struggle for democracy remained David’s abiding passions and his work on the committees of the IBA and later the IBMT were an important part of this, where David’s cantankerous charm reflected a singular impatience for protocol. But it was in his poetry, that David Marshall’s true, sensitive nature was revealed:
I sing of my comrades
That once did sing
In that great choir at Albacete
Before the battle.
Rank after rank
Of the young battalions
Singing the Internationale
They came from every corner of the earth
So many men from distant lands
Each with his private history
Of Spain’s Republic.
Along slow roads to Spain – at last a star
For desperate men, sensing the gathering storm
And we that fought to warn a watching world
Were called false prophets by appeasers
Yet we fought for the poor of the world.
Our lullabies were soldiers’ songs
Dead in the mud of the trenches
Sung by sad women to the sons of the fallen.
And remembered in Remembrance Day long past
After the thudding drum and shriek of bugles
I listened to the slow lament
For brothers, sons and lovers lost.
It is the sadness in the singing,
The undertones of woe,
The deep vein of grief
That throbs throughout my generation.
David Marshall, International Brigader and poet, 27 March 1916 to 19 October 2005.
Len Crome was Chief Medical Officer in the 35th division of the Republican army during the Spanish Civil War; and a lieutenant-colonel in the Royal Army Military Corps during the Second World War- earning the Military Cross for outstanding bravery.
He was born Lazar Krom in Dvinsk, Latvia, in 1909, but in 1926 he departed for Scotland, where his father had business interests, to study medicine at Edinburgh University When, in July 1936, four years after he graduated, civil war broke out in Spain, Crome viewed the rising as an attempt to instil another Fascist dictatorship in Europe. Though not a member of the Communist Party, Crome, like many others with leftist sympathies, on hearing that volunteers were leaving Britain to join the republican forces, decided to join them.
He wrote offering his services to Harry Pollitt, who suggested that he contact Sir Daniel Stevenson, a rich Scottish mine-owner, who was organising a Scottish Ambulance Unit. Despite reservations about Stevenson (Crome was taken aback to discover Stevenson was the proud owner of a signed photograph of Adolf Hitler), he joined the ambulance unit and arrived in Spain in December 1936. However, he did not remain with it for long; in March 1937, amidst rumours of members of the unit’s involvement in abetting the escape of rebel sympathisers from Madrid, Crome and three others left to join the International Brigades.
Len Crome became, Assistant Chief Medical Officer for the 35th Republican Division, of which the British Battalion was also part, until in August 1937 he replaced “Dr Dubois”, the Chief Medical Officer (Mieczyslaw Domanski, a Pole), who had been killed by a sniper: Displaying exceptional courage, Crome, with “General Walter”, the divisional Commander (another Pole Karol Swierczewski), personally retrieved Dubois’s body from no man’s land.
In his new role, Crome demonstrated great competence and imagination: by placing mobile hospitals as near the front as possible- necessarily increasing the risk to Crome and his comrades from enemy fire- trauma to the patients was dramatically reduced. As Jim Fyrth’s history of the British medical unit in Spain, The Signal was Spain: the Spanish Aid Movement in Britain 1936-39 (1986), acknowledges,
Wounded men in Crome’s command were getting better treatment than they would have been given at the time in famous London teaching hospitals.
When the International Brigades were withdrawn at the end of 1938, Crome returned to London, where he resumed his work as a GP and taught first aid to ARP workers. He also joined the Communist Party, impressed by what he had seen of the efforts organising the resistance against Franco in Spain. He continued to look after brigaders: with the help of Jack Brent, the Secretary International Brigade Association, he successfully, lobbied the US Ambassador to expedite the release of brigaders from camps in Vichy France.
In 1941 Crome was drafted into the British army as a captain in the Royal Army Medical Corps and posted to North Africa. Whilst helping many survivors of the International Brigades who had escaped there, Crome wrote an article in The Lancet complaining that medical lessons learned in Spain were not being fully utilised by the RAMC.
In the battles around Monte Cassino in Italy in 1943-44 Crome won the Military Cross for showing extraordinary bravery by carrying on working despite heavy enemy fire. His citation reads:
During the battle for the crossing of the River Gari, shortly after the bridge ‘AMAZON’ was established, on 13 May 1944, this officer established an A.D.S. [Advanced Dressing Station] on the west side of the river, having worked there himself from the time the bridge was established, until he decided it was safe to bring his section across. The section location was subjected to very heavy intermittent mortar fire for the next 48 hours, during which time an infantry A.D.S. nearby was forced to withdraw. Capt. Crome, by his courage and example, was instrumental in keeping the medical chain of evacuation open as established, and his conduct is worthy of the highest praise.
Two months later Crome was presented to King George VI during his visit to Italy. The King apologised to Crome for not being able to receive him in Buckingham Palace and invited him to “drop in next time you are in London”.
After the war Crome returned to Britain and trained as a pathologist at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Paddington (working under Alexander Fleming), and as a neuropathologist at the Maudsley Hospital. In 1956 he joined the Fountain Hospital in Tooting as pathologist before moving to the Queen Mary’s Hospital for Children in Carshalton as an expert in paediatric neuropathology.
Crome retired from the NHS at 65, though he carried on with locum work before accepting a post at the Wilhelmina Geisthuis Hospital in Amsterdam. Here he added Dutch to his impressive repertoire of languages, which included Russian, Latvian, Polish, German, English, Spanish and French.
Crone’s last position was at the Institute of Laryngology, specialising in the neuropathology of mental retardation. With J. Stern, he was the author in 1967 of the textbook The Pathology of Mental Retardation, which went into a second edition in 1972. After finally retiring at 75, he wrote Unbroken: resistance and survival in the concentration camps (1988), the story of his brother Jonny Hüttner’s resistance and survival through nine years of imprisonment in Nazi camps.
During the 1990s Crome continued to look after the interests of the International Brigaders as the Chairman of the International Brigade Association and was also the Vice-Chair of the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR from 1969 to 1976, before becoming National Vice-President.
Len Crome said that he was proud of having been in the International Brigades but, a self-effacing man, he resisted what he considered to be the glorification of the brigades in general and his role in particular. However, others do not doubt his worth. As Sam Lesser, one of his fellow International Brigaders, remarked,
War is a bloody business, and Len saw more bloodiness than most. But all who were treated by Len Crome and his team knew that everything that could be done for them would be.
Lazar Krom (Leonard Crome), medical practitioner born Dvinsk, Latvia 14 April 1909; MC 1944; married 1940 Helen Hüttner (died 1995; one son, one adopted son); died Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire 5 May 2001.
This obituary of Dr Len Crome originally appeared in the Independent (review section) 11 May 2001, p. 6.
James Hopkins’ new work follows three earlier books on the role and experiences of British volunteers in Spain, all of which, as Hopkins argues, have been determined to portray the British Battalion, and the Communist Party, in a positive light. The ex-Daily Worker journalist Bill Rust and the ex-volunteers Frank Ryan and Bill Alexander are thus “keepers of the story by which they wanted the battalion to be remembered”. Hopkins attempts to redress some of the oversights and biases of these earlier accounts of the British volunteers, a task considerably eased by the opening up of the large archive in Moscow, on which his work draws heavily.
Hopkins divides his work into two main sections: the first examines the social, political and cultural climate of Britain in the 1930s in which the volunteers motivations can be set; the second assesses the experiences of the volunteers in Spain. Part one is itself divided into two sections: the first looking at middle-class ‘thinkers’, the second at ‘proletarian intellectuals’. The former is an area that has been well studied: how ‘writers took sides’ and the role of British middle class intellectuals such as Orwell and Spender has been written about in great detail. Hopkins argues that despite the influx of middle-class intellectuals into the Communist Party during the 1930s, they were to some extent seen as outsiders; that the alliance between working-class and middle-class communists was somewhat uneasy, at best.
Part two provides much more of fresh interest. Hopkins here presents a detailed examination of working-class intellectual culture in the 1930s, explaining the development and dissemination of left-wing political ideology that led to more than two thousand volunteering for a war in a country ‘of which they knew little’. Hopkins suggests it found three main forms. First, newspapers, in particular the Communist Daily Worker; second literature, not just Marx and Engels, but also the works of Robert Blatchford, Robert Tresswell and Jack London, and third, the oral tradition of street orators: many of the speakers, and many of their audience, ended up in Spain. Hopkins also cites other influences: the influence of religious non-conformism, the alternative ‘English historical tradition’ of Wat Tyler, Thomas Paine and the Chartist movement, the influence of the Lenin School (though only the elite such as Will Paynter and Bob Cooney were sent to Moscow) and, finally, a tradition of internationalism, which Hopkins traces back to the ‘Hands off Russia’ campaign of 1917. To Hopkins, the crucial factor that differentiated the British working-class volunteers from their contemporaries was that they were ‘thinkers’, products of ‘an influential working class political culture’. Thus the much-derided view of the conflict as ‘the poets’ war’, has been represented by Hopkins instead as ‘the intellectuals’ war’.
How representative his view is of the battalion as a whole is not clear. Hopkins cites a number of volunteers, but they are only a small proportion of the volunteers. His examples all tend to be Communists, so this ‘plebeian intellectualism’ may be more typical of the Communist volunteers rather than the non-Communists who, by Hopkins’ own estimate, number at least half of the British volunteers. And, as he admits, “for the most part, the British volunteers were not Marxist revolutionaries. Rather, they were men of the left who saw themselves as “the standard-bearers of British Democracy in Spain.””
The second part of the book centres on a trenchant critique of the Communist Party’s role in Spain. Hopkins claims that the only route to promotion in the British Battalion was through the CP and it is the (by definition mainly communist) leadership, at battalion level and higher, that comes in for particular criticism. Hopkins supports Jason Gurney’s criticisms of the role of the political commissars, claiming their propaganda was misguided and they often ill-advisedly drifted into military, rather than political, affairs. He also accuses senior members of the British Battalion of complicity in the suppression of the POUM. Hopkins conclusion is that the leadership of the party, both at national and international level, cynically used the International Brigades to further the aims of the Communist Party, which were inextricably intertwined with the foreign policy of the USSR. Thus the accusation that appeared in the contemporary press that the volunteers were ‘dupes’ returns.
Having argued how he believes the leadership ‘sold out’ the rank and file, Hopkins goes on to claim that the party deliberately covered up the level of discontent by maintaining that deserters had been wounded, and that political ‘unreliables’ were at best imprisoned, and at worst deliberately sent into hazardous areas where there was a high likelihood of being killed. Hopkins completes his attack on the role of the Communist party by examining the ‘true believers’ in Spain, the advocates of ‘revolutionary expediency’. Hopkins believes that there was extensive NKVD and SIM (the Spanish military police) interference in the running of the battalion and that on several occasions, CP representatives of lowly rank appear to have held more influence than the battalion leaders. Here Hopkins’ summary is explicit in its criticism: “If the men on the battlefield sought to live their political ideals on the battlefields of Spain, they were betrayed by the party that made it possible for them to be there.
Few volunteers agree with Hopkins’ conclusions. As Fred Thomas, who fought with the Anti-Tank Battery (and who, sadly, died recently) has pointed out, Hopkins sometimes places too much reliance on volunteers’ testimonies, which as he himself would admit, are often somewhat subjective and impressionistic. For example, Hopkins readiness to accept Fred Copeman’s claim that he created an anti-tank battery composed of “good looking students” to keep the middle and working class Communists separated in a kind of apartheid, seems ill judged. Likewise, the reliability of the testimony of Bill Griffiths, on which Hopkins draws heavily, has also been questioned by ex-volunteers. However, despite these and other criticisms, the value of Hopkins’ work is without doubt. His extensive research, particularly his careful analysis of the Moscow files, ensures that this is a major work which adds substantially to the knowledge and understanding of the experiences of the British volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.
This review first appeared in The Journal of Contemporary Iberian History, 13:2, 2000, pp.125-127.
