On the Thursday and Friday evenings of this week I attended two events, in two very different settings. The first was a tour of Aldgate and Whitechapel, an area famous for its robust response to Sir Oswald Mosley’s BUF Blackshirts in the 1930s, as part of a book launch for Lydia Syson’s teen novel. The second was a lecture and discussion I took part in, alongside Jim Jump of the International Brigade Memorial Trust and cambridge post-doctoral Research Fellow, Dacia Viejo Rose, held in St John’s College of the University of Cambridge. The two events were only an hour away from each other by train but, to paraphrase the title of Lydia’s book, there was – and is – a world between them. The link between the two areas was, of course, that they were both the home of a number of Britons who served with the Republican Government’s forces in the Spanish Civil War.

Lydia’s novel A World Between Us opens in London’s east end on 4 October 1936. It was then the home of Britain’s largest Jewish community and was virtually under attack by the Blackshirts of Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. On Sunday 4 October, a huge anti-fascist rally was organised, which prevented Mosley’s Blackshirt thugs from marching through the area. As Lydia recounts, the experience was formative for a number of men and wome who would confront Mosley on the streets of London and Franco in the trenches of Madrid.

Cambridge, in a very different manner, was just as formative, of course and more than thirty men and women who served in Spain had studied at the university. Probably the best known, John Cornford, was killed in Spain, the day before his twenty-first birthday. Many thanks to Cambridge University’s Communist and Hispanic Societies, who jointly organised the latter event.