On Sunday 26 September 2021, the respected and popular Trade Unionist, political activist and writer, Manus O’Riordan, died suddenly of a heart attack. Among many to pay tribute was the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, who remarked that. ‘It was a privilege to have known him and his father, Mick O’Riordan, particularly for their testimony to the bravery of those who served in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.’ As the son of a former volunteer, Manus grew up steeped in his father’s world of politics, of which Spain was always a significant part.
Born in Dublin in 1949, Manus was raised in the Portobello area of the city. Having earned a secondary school scholarship, he went on to take a degree in economics and politics from University College Dublin and a Masters in Economics and Labour History from the University of New Hampshire, USA. After graduation he returned to Dublin to work as a researcher and economist for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (later merged into SIPTU, the Services Industrial Professional and Technical Union), becoming the Head of the Research Department. It was a job to which he dedicated the entirety of his working life and where he met Annette, who he married in 1974.
The couple regularly accompanied Manus’s father to International Brigade commemorations and reunions in Ireland, Britain and, following the death of Franco in 1975, Spain itself. Continuing the work of his father, who wrote a history of the Irish in Spain, Manus penned numerous articles and reviews defending the reputation of the former volunteers, notably his fellow UCD alumnus, the Irish Republican leader, Frank Ryan. Soon after the International Brigade Memorial Trust was formed in Britain in 2001, Manus joined as a trustee and Executive Committee member. In 2010 he officially took on the role of Ireland Secretary and, three years later, he took on a similar role in the Friends of the International Brigades of Ireland.
Both organisations were very fortunate to have him, for Manus possessed a unique skillset. He was extremely knowledgeable, with a prodigious memory and his presence and gravitas commanded fellow committee members’ respect. He was dedicated and hard-working, organising the IBMT’s AGM in Dublin on two separate occasions: in 2005 when Irish President Mary McAleese invited a group of veterans, including Manus’s father, to meet her at her official residence and in 2016 when President Higgins opened the meeting and delivered a beautifully crafted and heartfelt speech on the volunteers’ political legacy.
Irish President Michel D. Higgins, Manus O’Riordan and myself at the IBMT’s AGM in Dublin, 2016.
Erudite, cultured, with a mischievous sense of humour, Manus was always entertaining company. He was a brilliant linguist who translated poetry between English and Irish and, like his wife Annette (who sadly died in 2013), was an accomplished singer. He often performed the wonderful Spanish Civil War ballad, Si me quieres escribir, to captivated audiences. Somehow he also found the time to be a devoted supporter of Bohemian Football Club. On the day after Manus’s death, fans of both sides observed a minute’s silence, paying their affection and respect with a large banner: ‘RIP Manus – ?No Pasarán!’
It’s always sad when someone dies prematurely, but there is some consolation that Manus’s final hours were spent doing what he loved and to which he dedicated much of his life. On the day before he died, he had attended the annual International Brigade commemoration at Omeath, County Louth, proudly bearing the flag commemorating the Irish veterans of the Spanish Civil War. Jim Jump, Chair of the IBMT, expressed the view of many when he paid tribute to his former colleague’s life and work:
Manus made an enormous contribution to the work of the IBMT. He brought a scholarly wealth of knowledge about the volunteers from Ireland to our deliberations and did much to raise awareness about the large Irish contingent in the British Battalion in Spain. He was also a warm and loyal colleague and his loss will be painfully felt by his many friends in the IBMT and beyond.
Above all, the loss will be felt most keenly by his family, to whom he was devoted: his partner Nancy Wallach (also the child of an International Brigader); his sister Brenda; his children, Jess, Neil and Luke and his grandchildren, Amaia, Rory, Caleb and Eli. Hopefully the widespread demonstrations of affection and respect with which Manus was clearly held will provide them with some small measure of consolation.
Micheál Manus O’Riordan, 30 May 1949 to 26 September 2021.
Leanann an streachailt – la lucha continua – the fight goes on.
On 10 June 2017 a memorial to volunteers for the Spanish Civil War from Oxfordshire was unveiled in St. Clement’s, Oxford. The road to this event had been incredibly long and tortuous, not least because many locals had opposed the erection of a monument to ‘a bunch of reds’. That the project had ever managed to be realised was down to the hard work, determination and bloody-mindedness of the members of the Oxford Memorial Organising Committee, not least the historian and journalist Chris Farman who sadly died last week, one of all too many victims of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Chris Farman, with fellow author Valery Rose
With Valery Rose and Liz Woolley, Chris was the author of No Other Way, Oxfordshire and the Spanish Civil War. Sales of the book did much to help fund the erection of the Oxford memorial. It’s a great piece of local history, well written and extremely thoroughly researched, with a great introduction written by Chris. He was the perfect choice for the introduction, for he had previously written for The Guardian and the Illustrated London News and worked as an editor on a book on the British Empire, published by Time-Life Books. He also has written his own monograph: The General Strike, published in 1972.
I first met Chris in at a fundraising for the Oxford memorial. Like his fellow organisers, Colin Carritt and John Heywood, Chris put a huge amount of time and effort into this and subsequent events. His natural charm and enthusiasm did much to help make them a success and (as I know) he was adept at persuading other people to get involved. A regular and popular presence at IBMT events, Chris will be very sadly missed.
On 5 October 2019, as part of a weekend of activities to accompany the Annual General Meeting of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, I gave a talk on the role of London and volunteers from the capital, in the Spanish Civil war. As part of the talk, I chose to bring to light, or return to the light, a first generation Irish resident, who was born and lived in north Kensington. Like most of the men and women who went to Spain, he wasn’t famous, so little, if anything has been written about him. That’s not wholly surprising, for it’s not always easy to write about a relatively unknown individuals, as information is not always easy to come by. Fortunately, there are a few documents held in the National Archives in Kew and in the RGASPI archives in Moscow. Most helpful of all, there is an interview in the Imperial War Museum in London. Unfortunately, I have yet to find a photograph.
Harold Bernard Collins was born on 26 June, 1912, the son of Irish parents. He grew up in north Kensington, then ‘a real working class area.’[1] After a typically short elementary education, Bernard left school at 15 to work in the family coach-building business. Inspired by his father’s Irish Republican politics (Michael Collins – no relation – once stayed at their home) and by a lively political scene based around the Portobello Road, at 16 he joined the Young Communist League.
Documents listing Harold Collins as a member of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, held in the National Archives in Kew and the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History in Moscow.
While other people
might have joined the YCL for their regular dances, Bernard was spurred by their
political campaigning. He helped defend tenants being evicted and he marched
alongside the Hunger Marchers when they arrived in London in 1934, joining them
at a rally. And, like many others, he took part in – frequently violent – demonstrations
against Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts, who were attempting to gain a
foothold in the Portobello Road. Collins was himself arrested at an antifascist
demonstration in Tooley Street, in Bermondsey in 1937, when the 8 stone Collins
was accused of assaulting a 6’ police officer.[2]
Like most Party members, Bernard was an avid reader of the Daily Worker and it was through the paper that he came to learn of the civil war in Spain. He was not initially thinking of volunteering, but a fellow Party member who had recently returned from Spain assured Collins that he could be of use, despite his complete lack of military experience. Nevertheless, Collins remained undecided for almost a year, until the sight of a group of Blackshirt thugs beating up some children in London’s east end, purely because they were Jewish, convinced him that he had to do something.
Accompanied by his
friend, a local decorator called Wally Clasper, Collins approached his local Party
and made out that, like his mate who had served in the Royal Artillery, he had
military experience. His interviewer attempted to dissuade the pair, but realising
that they were determined, let them go. So, in early February 1938, having said
nothing to his parents, Collins set off with Wally for Spain, both dressed in their
best suits. Using money given to them by the Party, they followed the typical
route to Spain, via Folkestone, Dieppe, Paris and, finally, a long, exhausting
night-time slog over the Pyrenees.
After some basic
training in Figueras and Albacete, and a brief time in a training battalion at
the British base at Tarazona de la Mancha, Collins joined the British Battalion
itself at Teruel. Posted up high in the snow covered mountains, Walter and his
comrades were a sitting target for enemy artillery. Walter later described his
first experience of being under fire:
Strange to say I wasn’t nervous at all, because I don’t think I knew what fighting really was, anyway. I had no idea of people being killed, or anything like that. The shells from the fascists were falling about twenty or thirty yards away and it didn’t seem to worry me at all, even though everybody else would go down flat and dodge the shells coming. It didn’t happen to me and I don’t think it was because I was brave, or anything like that, I think it was that I really didn’t know what war was about.[3]
Fortunately for
Collins, he had arrived right at the end of the fighting at Teruel, in which as
many soldiers died from cold as combat. The Battalion was withdrawn from the
Teruel front towards the end of February and sent to the Aragon village of
Lecera, a hundred kilometres north of Teruel. There they remained until the
beginning of March 1938, living ‘in stone barns, huddled together against the
bitter cold’.[4]
On 7 March, Franco
launched a colossal offensive against the Republican forces in Aragon. The Nationalists
outnumbered the defending Republicans by almost five to one and what began as a
series of breakthroughs swiftly turned into a rout, as the Republican lines
virtually collapsed.[5] As the Republic struggled to
hold the onslaught, the British Battalion was rushed up by lorry to Belchite, which
had been captured by the American Battalion the previous autumn, but was
quickly overwhelmed as the Nationalists swept forward,. Motorised units punched
holes in the Republican lines, in a forerunner of the Blitzkrieg tactics which would be used with devastating effect
during the Second World War.
Over the next two
weeks Collins and his comrades were in constant retreat, bombarded with
anti-tank and anti-aircraft shells all the way. Only on reaching the town of Batea,
over 100km from their initial position, were they able to find brief sanctuary.
It was to be all too
brief.
On 30 March 1938,
Franco resumed his offensive and the remaining members of the battalion were
urgently sent back to the front. Early in the morning of 31 March, they advanced
cautiously past a small village called Calaceite, which was being violently
shelled by Nationalist artillery. As the volunteers rounded a sharp bend in the
road, they were confronted by a group of six tanks approaching them from the
trees alongside the road.[6] Collins watched as Battalion
Commissar Walter Tapsell, assuming that the tanks were Republican, approached one
and banged on the side of it with his pistol.
As Tapsell attempted
to converse with the tank commander in Spanish, he responded by shouting out in
Italian, drawing his pistol and opening fire on Tapsell. The commissar was
killed instantly and Collins saw at least 50 other men hit, before he sought cover
alongside the road. As darkness fell, a group of about 30 members of Collins’
Company made for the safety of Calaceite village, only to discover that it had already
fallen to Italian troops. They opened fire with machine-guns and Collins saw
his friend Clasper hit and badly wounded and another Kensington volunteer,
Richard Moss, killed. Outnumbered and with little other option they surrendered
and were taken prisoner.
The prisoners were taken to a POW camp in a former monastery near Burgos, called San Pedro de Cardeña (on 8 April 1938). Built in 1711 on the site of the first Benedictine monastery in Spain, San Pedro was, the prisoners were later told, ‘the last resting place of El Cid’.[7] As they were marched through the massive wooden gates, one prisoner, looking up, noticed that ‘ironically, the monumental work over the main doorway was that of a horseman, lance in hand, on a fiery charger, trampling down Moors.’[8]
That night Collins
encountered the awful reality of conditions at San Pedro. Wrapped in a thin
blanket, he was forced to sleep on the floor, surrounded by rats. Keeping clean
was virtually impossible, for there was only one tap for the entire group of
600 international prisoners.[9] There were so few toilets
that inmates often had to queue for hours. Not surprisingly, such filthy and
insanitary conditions proved a fertile breeding ground for fleas and lice. Diseases
such as scurvy, malaria and enteric fever were widespread, for medical
facilities were also extremely limited, with only five doctors divided between
the International prisoners. The inhospitable conditions were exacerbated by
the dire lack of decent food. The principal diet consisted of a thin soup of
warm water flavoured with olive oil, garlic and breadcrumbs, accompanied by one
small bread roll per day.[10]
But what really made the
prisoners’ lives utterly miserable was the brutal behaviour of the guards. Collins
himself saw prisoners being savagely beaten:
[The guards would] walk around with sticks, thick sticks, and they’d lash you at the slightest chance they had. If you didn’t answer them correctly, they’d slash you. They weren’t worried where they hit you, [they’d] hit you across the head or across the face …. They were really nasty.
As the days of
captivity turned into weeks and then months, Collins and the other inmates did
what they could to pass the time and break the monotony. They organised
lectures and discussions and played chess using pieces carved out of soap or
stale bread.
A number of British were
transferred out of the camp in a prisoner exchange in June, but Collins was not
one of them. He remained in San Pedro for another 7 months, desperately hoping
that another exchange would be arranged. Eventually, on 23 January 1939, almost
all of the remaining prisoners, including Collins, were transferred to Ondarreta
jail in San Sebastián.
And at the end of February 1938, the prisoners were finally released and marched across the international bridge into France and freedom. There Collins and his fellow veterans of the International Brigades were generously offered a huge dinner to celebrate their freedom. Unfortunately, having spent ten months on a starvation diet in a Francoist concentration camp, none of them were able to eat it.
[1] Interview with Harold Collins, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive (IWMSA) 9481, reel 1.
[2] Sarah Collins, ‘Why did Britons fight in Spain’s Civil War?’ March 1984, p. 9 from Marx Memorial Library (MML) SC/EPH/10/7.
[3] Interview with Harold Collins,
IWMSA 9481, reel 2.
[4] Edwin Greening, From Aberdare to Albacete, p. 71.
[5] Bill Alexander, British Volunteers for LIberty, pp. 169–70.
[6] Report by George Fletcher, 5 May 1938, Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) 545/3/497, p. 30.
[7] Bob Doyle, Brigadista, p. 71; Walter Gregory, The Shallow Grave, p. 143.
[8] Report of Franco Prisoners, MML SC/IBA/5/3/1/20, p. 8; George Wheeler, To Make the People Smile Again, p. 134.
[9] Cyril Kent, ‘I Was in a Franco Prison’, Challenge, 5 January 1939, pp. 10–11.
[10] Carl Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, pp. 102–3.
Form completed by Charlie Hutchinson, giving brief biographical details.
It’s widely known that within the American Lincoln Battalion of the International Brigades that served in the Spanish Civil War there were a number of African Americans. Most famously the Texan military veteran and Communist, Oliver Law, became the first Black American to command white troops in battle; when he was tragically killed at Brunete in July 1937, he had risen to the rank of commander of the American volunteers. What is much less known is that there was a black British volunteer serving in the British Battalion. His name was Charlie Hutchison [his name usually appears, erroneously, as Hutchinson].
It’s perhaps not surprising that little known about Charlie for, apart from a small file held within the Comintern archives in Moscow, few details of his time in Spain remain and, sadly, no photographs. While it would be a stretch to discuss wider issues of race and prejudice within the International Brigades based on the record of one volunteer, his experiences do tell us much about the difficulties many Britons encountered when they wanted to go home. As one Scottish member of the battalion later explained, ‘while you could volunteer in, you couldn’t volunteer out.’Interview with John Tunnah, Imperial War Museum Sound Archive no. 840, reel 1.
We know that Charles William R. Hutchinson was born in Witney, Oxfordshire, on 10 May 1918. His mother, whose maiden name was Harper, was presumably not in a position to raise him, for Hutchison tells of growing grew up in the National Children’s Home and Orphanage in London. In the spring of 1936, Hutchinson, who had just turned 18 years of age, was living in Fulham and working as a lorry driver. He was also Branch Chair of the local Young Communist League and it seems clear, from remarks he made later, that he had become personally involved in the battle against Mosley’s Blackshirts. In the late summer of 1936 this led him, like nearly 2500 from Britain and Ireland, to volunteer to go to Spain and personally take the fight to Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. As he explained: ‘’I am half black. I grew up in the National Children’s Home and Orphanage. Fascism meant hunger and war.’ Charles Hutchison cited in M.J. Hynes, ‘The British Battalion of the XVth International Brigade’, unpublished B.A. dissertation, University of Manchester, 1985, p. 40. For Charlie, as for the numerous Jewish volunteers, fascism was a real and personal threat, beyond any theoretical abstraction.
He left Britain in either late November or early December 1936 and was recorded by Special Branch as having ‘left for Spain to serve as machine gunner with Govt. Forces,’ having allegedly stolen money from a church to pay for his passage to Spain. National Archives KV 5/112, p. 7. At this time the British Battalion had not yet been formed, so once in Spain he joined the British and Irish dominated Number One Company of the Marseillaise Battalion of the 14th International Brigade.He served in a section of Number One Company commanded by Joseph Kavanagh, a long-time member of the Communist Party from London. RGASPI 545/6/150, p. 92. He was with the unit when it was sent to contain a Rebel breakthrough at Lopera, on the Cordóba front in southern Spain. There, outnumbered and at the mercy of the Rebels’ overwhelming air dominance, the British and Irish company was cut to pieces. Charlie Hutchison was wounded and a great number of his comrades – including Charles Darwin’s great-grandson, John Cornford – were killed.
Having recuperated from his wounds, Charlie was informed that he was going to be sent home due to his age, but he refused to leave. Bill Alexander, British Volunteers for Liberty, p. 73. So, rather than being sent to join his compatriots in the British Battalion then fighting on the Jarama front, he was transferred away from the line, assigned to be an ambulance driver with the 5th Republican Army Corps. However, while Charlie seemingly wanted to remain in Spain, his mother (from whom it seems he was no longer estranged) was of a different mind and she wrote in April 1937, citing his young age and pleading that he be sent home. This seem to have rather changed Charles’ feelings about leaving, partly because he was becoming worried about his step-father, who had been hospitalised with serious gastric problems.
Letter from Gallo (Luigi Longo) to Comrade Fusimaña, Commissar of the XV Republican Corps
Over the next few months, Charlie made a number of appeals to his superiors, garnering much support, but little success. The following June, he wrote a worried note explaining that he hadn’t received a letter from his parents for ten months, leading him to assume that they must be facing dire circumstances. Yet, rather than asking to be permanently repatriated, Hutchinson asked only that he might be granted a temporary leave of absence to deal with his family problems. ‘I have been in Spain since Nov 25th 1936’, he pleaded, ‘When I came to Spain I was 18½ yrs and not on one occasion have I use[d] my age for an excuse.’ Furthermore, Charlie was himself now suffering from health problems, so was becoming increasingly desperate.RGASPI 545/6/150, pp. 93-4.
Assessments by his superiors make it manifestly clear that the lack of progress was not as a result of any failure on Hutchinson’s part. Jim Ruskin, a Captain in Brigade Transmissions, recounted that both Hutchison’s political views and his work were ‘Good [and] for his age quite developed.’ ibid Likewise, Charlie’s senior officer in the Motorised Company of the 15th Army Corps, Harry Evans, described Hutchinson as ‘a hard and capable worker’. RGASPI, 545/6/150, p. 90.
Finally, in August 1938, an order was given that Hutchison should be repatriated due to his young age and exemplary period of service. On the 27th of that month the Italian Communist, Luigi Longo, one of the most senior and powerful commanders of the International Brigades (known in Spain as ‘Gallo’), wrote to a Comrade Fusimaña, the Commissar of the XV Army Corps, on Hutchinson’s behalf:
Te ruego intervengas para que este Camarada obtenga un permiso de acuerdo con las ultimas disposiciones del Excmo. Senor Presidente del Consejo Ministros, Dr. NEGRIN.RGASPI 545/6/150, p. 83. [I ask you to intervene so that this Comrade obtains a permit in accordance with the last dispositions of the Hon. Mr. President of the Ministers Council, Dr. Negrín.]
Despite this, nothing seems to have happened, for on 2 September 1938, Charlie sent another personal appeal, complaining that ‘I was 18 when I came to Spain and I feel it is just to[o] bad if the I.B. can release a kid of 20 y[ea]rs after nearly two years of good service.’ RGASPI 545/6/150, p. 95.
His appeal was answered personally by Alonso ‘Lon’ Elliot, a former Cambridge University languages student, who worked under Luigi Longo in the Political Commissars’ headquarters in Madrid and in the Foreign Cadres Commission of the Spanish Communist Party in Barcelona. Elliott assured Charlie that he was taking a personal interest in his case and apologised that it still hadn’t been resolved. ‘For my part’, he wrote, ‘I will see that comrade Gallo is reminded of your case, and can assure you that everything that can be done from the Barcelona end will be done to help you. Best of luck, yours fraternally, AME.’ However, somewhat unhelpfully, he suggested that Charlie should raise the matter once again with his immediate superiors.Alonzo Elliott to Charles Hutchison, 10 September 1938. RGASPI 545/6/150, p. 85.
After all these efforts on Hutchinson’s behalf, one might assume that he would have been repatriated with the other British volunteers, following their withdrawal from the front in September. However, when the survivors of the British Battalion crossed the border into France on 6 December 1938, the unfortunate Hutchinson was not among them. Only on 19 December, nearly two weeks later, was he finally released from service and repatriated.On 15 December 1938, Hutchison was at Ripoll, in northern Spain, still awaiting repatriation. RGASPI 545/6/150, p. 78.
That a request to repatriate one British volunteer should thwart the efforts of several senior figures in the International Brigades rather flies in the face of the view that the Brigades were a highly-disciplined, strictly-hierarchical organisation, where commanders, such as Longo, held absolute power and could act with impunity. While that could certainly be the case on occasion, it is important to recognise the corrosive effect the war had on the Republicans’ political and military efficacy. As Paddy O’Daire, one of several Irish commanders of the British Battalion accurately observed, ‘all war’s a muddle.’ Interview with Harry Fraser, Manchester History Archive, tape 241, reel 1, side 2.
As yet, little evidence can be found of Hutchison’s later life. We do know that Charlie was one of a number of veterans to take part in Clive Branson’s ‘International Brigade Convoy’, a nationwide tour of 20 British veterans which raised over £5000 for the Spanish Republic (equivalent to over £300 000 today). MML SC/IBA/5/3/3 We also know that he was one of the first of the Spanish veterans to volunteer for service in the British Army in the Second World War. He served for a time in Iran, before being transferred to France in 1944, just after D-Day. Volunteer for Liberty, Vol. 6, No. 3, July 1945, p. 7. And in early 1947, a Charles W. Hutchinson was married to a Patricia L. Holloway and the same individual reappears in the electoral register of 1958, living at 11 Argyll Mansions, Fulham, London. Records suggest that he later moved to Bournemouth, where he died in March 1993, aged 74. Many thanks to John Halstead for the details gleaned from census and registry files.
Charlie Hutchison occupies a unique position as the only mixed-race volunteer among the British volunteers in Spain, so it would be fitting if more details could be found about his life. However, there is one small detail that remains to tell: in 1985, while helping M.J. Hynes with his research for an undergraduate dissertation, Charlie Hutchinson (along with 65 other British International Brigaders) completed a questionnaire on his experiences as a volunteer in Spain. Whether the questionnaires themselves survived is unknown, but one snippet remains, allowing Charlie to have the last word on why he believed so many people from around the world joined him in choosing to risk their lives on behalf of the Spanish Republic:
The Brigaders came out of the working class; they came out of the battle of Cable Street, they came out of the struggles on the side turnings … they weren’t Communist, they weren’t Socialists, but they were anti-fascist. Charles Hutchison, cited in Hynes, pp. 25-6.
Over the last few years, several announcements have mourned the passing of the last of the British volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. First there was David Lomon, then Philip Tammer and most recently Stan Hilton, all of whom were hailed as ‘the last of the last’. In fact, none of them were. As a recent article by Carmelo García in The Times revealed, 99 year old veteran Geoffrey Servante is alive and well, living in a nursing home in the Forest of Dean.
Geoffrey’s Spanish adventure began in the summer of 1937. He was drinking in a Soho pub with his father, when he overheard a man claiming that it was no longer possible to join the International Brigades, as the Spanish border had been closed. ‘I bet I can join’, declared Geoffrey, impulsively. When the man insisted that there was ‘no chance’, Geoffrey refused to believe him, vowing ‘I’ll bet you a hundred quid I can do it’.
Geoffrey was hardly a typical volunteer for the International Brigades. He had been educated by Jesuits and had never joined a political party nor even a Trade Union: ‘I wasn’t politically inclined at all’, he confessed. However, he had served briefly in the Royal Marines and his earlier experience working on the Canadian–Pacific line helped him secure passage on a boat to Spain.
When they docked in Valencia, Geoffrey jumped ship and accosted a local, repeating the only Spanish phrase he knew: ‘¡Internacional Brigadas! ¡Internacional Brigadas!’ Surprisingly, it was enough to land him a rail ticket to Albacete, the headquarters of the International Brigades. Interviewed there by a Political Commissar, Geoffrey admitted that he was only 18 years old, and was consequently refused admission into the British Battalion, which was then being slaughtered on the Brunete battlefield. Instead, he was posted to a much less hazardous unit, an artillery battery then in training in Almansa, some 70km east of Albacete.
The Anglo-American artillery unit, known as the John Brown Battery, was commanded by an Estonian born American called Arthur Timpson, who had been trained in artillery in Moscow. Alongside Geoffrey were four other English volunteers, all under the watchful eye of their Sergeant, David King, a Communist Branch Secretary and former Royal Marine from Skipton in Yorkshire. Initially posted to the Estremadura front in south-west Spain, the battery was transferred to Toledo in December 1937, where it remained for the duration of the war.
Geoffrey Servante during the Second World war
With ammunition extremely scarce, the men rarely did much more than take the occasional pot shot at the enemy lines. However, on one of the few occasions when they were called upon, the battery members had just taken the opportunity to polish off a barrel of local brandy. Geoffrey, who was by his own admission utterly ‘sozzled’, did his valiant best to aim the gun, but the shell missed its target by miles. For this, Geoffrey was punished with six extra guard duties; ‘it was a very lax discipline’, he laughed. Only later did he discover that he had inadvertently scored a direct hit on a fascist officer’s car, blowing him, his aide-de-camp and the car to pieces.
When the majority of the International Brigades were withdrawn and repatriated at the end of 1938, the battery members remained in place, seemingly forgotten. Only in early 1939 were they withdrawn to Valencia, then on to Barcelona. From there, a narrow gauge railway took them half-way to the frontier and they then had to walk the remaining 80km, harassed constantly by Nationalist aircraft. Safely across the French border, Geoffrey and his comrades enjoyed a huge breakfast, courtesy of the International Red Cross, before being repatriated via Paris and Dieppe.
Within a year, Geoffrey was back in uniform, having been called up into the British Army. He had a relatively good war, spending three years in Egypt with the Royal Army Ordnance Corps and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. After demobilisation, he worked for Marshalls, reconditioning military lorries, joining Vauxhall Motors in 1957, where he remained until he took early retirement twenty years later.
‘I heard on the radio that there were no more International Brigades left, and I said, ‘Well, that’s nonsense. There’s still me.’
When his daughter Honor contacted the Spanish embassy, Geoffrey was invited to London to sign the declaration entitling him to his Spanish passport. He still retains an interest in Spanish affairs; he is a strong supporter of Catalan independence and voted in the 2017 referendum. Geoffrey remains extremely proud to have fought for Spanish democracy and has no regrets. Well, perhaps one. When he returned from Spain and triumphantly called into the pub to collect his winnings, Geoffrey was saddened – and a little disappointed – to discover that his fellow gambler had passed away. So he never did get to see his £100.00.
Many years ago now, I was a young(ish) undergraduate history student, excited at the prospect of taking a course in the Spanish Civil War. At the time, like many in Britain, my knowledge of one of the twentieth century’s most seismic events was based primarily, if not solely, on two works; one a memoir by a British novelist; the other, a novel by an American journalist and writer. Yet neither Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia nor Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, important though they may be, can in any way be seen as histories of the conflict. Consequently, like many students before me and since, I immersed myself in the encyclopaedic study, The Spanish Civil War, by Hugh Thomas.
Born on 21 October 1931, Hugh Thomas was the son of a British colonial officer and nephew of Sir Shenton Thomas, the governor of Singapore, who surrendered to the Japanese in 1942. Hugh attended Sherborne School before going on to study history at Cambridge. He worked for a time at the Foreign Office, before leaving, so he said, over the Suez crisis. That same year he published his first novel, The World’s Game, which led to him being invited to submit a proposal for a history of the civil war in Spain.
Published in 1961, to coincide with the 25 year anniversary of its outbreak, The Spanish Civil War was generally well received by critics. Smuggled into Spain during the Franco dictatorship, it became a clandestine best-seller. Eminently readable and packed full of entertaining anecdotes, the book has become seen as the history of the civil war. It has now run to four editions and sold more than a million copies across the world. The book still appears on undergraduate reading lists today and I know that I am not the only historian of the civil war to consult it regularly. However, it is by no means faultless; there are many errors of fact and judgement and Thomas has rightly been accused of occasionally valuing narrative style above factual accuracy. Fortunately, revisions have gradually been made during later editions, such as the removal of the following offensive description of the International Brigaders: ‘Many of the British volunteers appear to have been persons who desired some outlet through which to purge some private grief or maladjustment.’
Third revised edition of Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War
A year after the book’s publication, Hugh Thomas’s success allowed him to marry the glamorous Honorable Vanessa Jebb, daughter of Lord Gladwyn Jebb. A talented and popular lecturer, four years later, in 1966, Thomas was made Professor of History at the University of Reading. When he took a sabbatical in 1974 to concentrate on his writing, his research assistant, a promising young historian called Paul Preston, took over his teaching duties. Hugh Thomas’s 1700 page history of Cuba was published in 1971 followed, eight years later, by An Unfinished History of the World.
Meanwhile, the 1970s saw a shift in Hugh Thomas’s political allegiances. After an attempt to secure a Labour seat in North Kensington was stymied by Militant Tendency, he abandoned the Labour Party for the Conservatives’ free-market economics. Having replaced Keith Joseph as Chairman of her think-tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, Thomas became a favoured confidante of Margaret Thatcher and was a frequent guest at Downing Street and Chequers. In 1981 he was rewarded for his support when he was ennobled as Lord Thomas of Swynnerton.
A prodigious work ethic enabled him to continue his remarkable output of works on Spanish and Latin-American history. His substantial history of the Spanish Conquest of Mexico was published in 1993 and was followed by what many would argue was his crowning achievement, a trilogy about the Spanish Empire, consisting of Rivers of Gold (2003); The Golden Age: The Spanish Empire of Charles V (2010) and World Without End: The Global Empire of Philip II (2014).
Increasingly disillusioned by the Tories’ increasing Euro-scepticism, Lord Thomas crossed the floor of the House of Lords on 17 November 1997 to join the Liberal-Democrat benches. A committed Europhile, he maintained his opposition to the Brexit shambles right to the end. After suffering a stroke, Hugh Thomas died on 7 May 2017, leaving behind several unfinished projects, including an autobiography. He is survived by his wife Vanessa and their three children, Inigo, Isambard and Isabella.
An edited version of this post first appeared in issue 45 (3/2017) of the IBMT Magazine.
Former British volunteer Stan Hilton in 2012, helpfully engaging in a bit of marketing
Sadly, we have now reached the end of an era. With the death of 98 year old Stan Hilton, there are no longer any British veterans of the International Brigades who fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 alive to tell their tale. Stan may well have been the last member of the entire English-speaking Fifteenth International Brigade. Jules Paivio, the last of the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, died in 2013 and the American, Delmer Berg, the final Lincoln, died earlier this year.
Over the course of the civil war more than 6000 international volunteers (1000 Canadians, 2500 British & Irish and 2800 Americans), served in the Fifteenth International Brigade, part of a 35 000 strong band of brothers – and sisters – from some 53 countries around the world. These anti-fascists volunteered to join the battle because, as one American from Mississippi put it simply, ‘I saw in the invaders of Spain the same people I’ve been fighting all my life.’ They believed that Spain’s struggle transcended national boundaries; arguing that fighting fascism in Spain would help the fight against fascism across Europe and conversely a victory for Franco would be, by extension, a victory for Hitler. The rapid and determined support for Franco’s Rebels by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy provided convincing evidence for a connection between the regimes.
While the International Brigades were only a small part of the Spanish Republican army, their arrival on the Madrid front eighty years ago this November was hugely significant. The international volunteers raised the morale of the defenders of the Spanish capital, whilst providing invaluable instruction in the use of weaponry such as machine-guns. However, the involvement of the International Brigades in the fighting around Madrid between November 1936 and the spring of 1937 was probably their high-water mark. As the war dragged on, their influence gradually waned. Outnumbered and outgunned, lacking crucial air cover, and consistently thrown into the heart of the fire, the foreign volunteers were, in the words of one senior Scottish volunteer, ‘cut to pieces’. Around a fifth of the 35 000 international volunteers were killed in Spain and the vast majority were wounded at some stage. As American historian Peter Carroll explained, raw courage and belief in the essential ‘rightness’ of the volunteers’ cause ‘could not overcome inexperience, poor coordination and superior military force’.
When nineteen year old Stan Hilton jumped ship in Alicante and volunteered to join the fight, he was convinced that ‘it was the right thing to do’. By this time, November 1937, the British Battalion had been fighting in Spain for almost a year. They had been having a very tough time of it: during the bloodbath at Jarama in February and in the ferocious heat of the Spanish summer at Brunete the British had been virtually annihilated. While some success had been seen on the Aragon front in the autumn, the target of the Republican offensive, Saragossa, had stubbornly remained in Rebel hands. With the battalion in reserve, Stan was sent for military training at the British Battalion’s headquarters in the village of Madrigueras, just to the north of the main International Brigades headquarters at Albacete. His period of training (such as it was) completed, Stan joined the battalion in early 1938, as the British volunteers fought as part of the Republican force desperately trying to hold on to the remote capital of Teruel. Conditions were horrendous: in freezing temperatures that sank to twenty below zero at night, more men died at Teruel from the cold than were killed in battle. For Stan, brought up on notions of ‘sunny Spain’, it was a brutal introduction to the realities of warfare: ‘It was freezing. I was always bloody cold,’ he later recalled.
Things were about to get much worse. Boosted by reinforcements, Franco’s forces recaptured Teruel before pressing home their advantage by launching a colossal offensive in the spring against the Republican forces in Aragon. Thirteen divisions, including Italians and the German Condor Legion, plus a huge number of tanks, artillery and anti-tank guns, backed up with over 900 aircraft, were massed for the push through to the Mediterranean. Much better armed and supplied, Franco’s forces outnumbered the defending Republicans by almost five to one. What began as a series of breakthroughs swiftly turned into a rout, as the Republican lines virtually collapsed. Franco’s soldiers successfully reached the Mediterranean in mid-April 1938, splitting the Republic’s territory in two.
Flowers laid for Stan Hilton at a commemoration in his birthplace, Newhaven, on 29 October 2016
With the Republican army in disarray and communications having essentially broken down, Stan ended up having to undertake a dangerous swim across the fast-flowing River Ebro to evade being captured (or worse). Half-drowned, starving and exhausted, Stan decided that he had had enough of the Spanish war and headed for the Mediterranean coast. In March 1938, with the permission of the British ship’s captain, he boarded the SS Lake Lugano at Barcelona, and sailed for home.
During the Second World War Stan served in the British Merchant Navy and, after demobilisation, in 1956 he took the decision to emigrate to Australia with his young family. There he remained, mainly working as a tiler in the building trade, living a quiet life, his presence unknown to the UK’s International Brigade Memorial Trust. That is, until he was tracked down in an old people’s home in Yarrawonga, Australia, on the border between Victoria and New South Wales. A couple of years ago Stan was transferred from there to a nursing home in Ocean Grove, near Melbourne, in order to be closer to his family. It was there, on 21 October 2016, that Stan Hilton, tiler, merchant seaman and International Brigader finally died, aged 98. He was the last of the last, el último de la última.
This article originally appeared in The Spain Report on 28 October 2016.
When Paul Preston was promoting his monumental study of atrocities committed during (and after) the Spanish Civil War, Spanish Holocaust, he took pains to point out how much his book had depended on the efforts of other researchers and historians, many of them amateurs, who had dedicated huge amounts of their time and energy into collating accounts of murders within their particular localities. All historians depend on the work of others. Many are published historians themselves, but others are not. A look through the acknowledgements in numerous works published in Britain over the last thirty years on the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War will show the truth of this. In almost every work one comes across the same name, time and time again. That name is Jim Carmody.
I first met Jim in 1996, when I was an M.A. student at the University of London. He was sitting in a quiet corner of the Marx Memorial Library, working methodically through lists of volunteers from the International Brigades, trying to collate them all into one universal list. Using documents from archives in London, Salamanca, Moscow and beyond, Jim eventually established a record-card index of volunteers from Britain and Ireland to which all historians refer.
It was, in some respects, his life’s work. Over the last thirty years very few weeks have gone by without Jim ringing to tell me, in his distinctive Belfast accent, of the latest nugget of information he’d found, often in some obscure out of print book, or distant local newspaper. His diligence and meticulous attention to detail have become legendary, not just in the UK, but also in Spain, the US and in many other countries besides. For the last few years he has become the researcher and archivist for the International Brigade Memorial Trust, answering queries with a generosity that has earned him widespread gratitude and admiration. A stubbornly modest man, Jim has never written a book, never written so much as an article, but his expertise and encyclopaedic knowledge have been invaluable.
Sadly, for many years Jim has been beset with numerous health problems, the result of an accident on a building site in his youth. On Wednesday 3 August 2016, following an extended stay in hospital, his long struggle finally came to an end. Jim, you were a great friend and an amazing fount of knowledge. You will be sorely missed.
Rather than asking for flowers, the family have set up a donations page, for anyone who wishes to remember Jim by supporting the British Liver Trust.
Scottish volunteer, James Maley, served in the British Battalion on the 15th International Brigade from December 1936 to May 1937. He was a member of the No.2 (Machine Gun) Company captured on 13 February 1937 during the infamous Battle of Jarama and imprisoned in the Francoist prisoner-of-war camp in Talavera de la Reina. During the Second World War he joined the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, serving in Burma and India.
In the Youtube video above, James Maley discusses in detail his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. Here is a link to a transcript of the interview (in MS Word format), generously provided by his son, Willy: James Maley International Brigader
James Maley appears in both my accounts of the British volunteers in the Spanish Civil War and there is also an interview with him in the Imperial War Museum. He received fulsome obituaries following his death in 2007, including this one in The Scotsman.
The following lecture was delived at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, as part of an event to commemorate the centenary of Jack Jones’ birth.
Jack Jones and the Spanish Civil War
Seventy-five years ago, a young trade unionist and Labour councillor from Liverpool took the momentous decision to leave his home and family to fight in a war in a country he had never seen. The young man was, of course, Jack Jones. To some contemporary audiences, this can seem an astonishing thing to do, yet for those who volunteered to fight at the time, it was often a simple and straight-forward decision. The issue was put starkly by the English poet, Stephen Spender, for whom the war in Spain was ‘an absolute choice between good and evil.’ The 1930s, wrote a volunteer from Wembley (John Bassett), were ‘a time of hope, when a man with a rifle had some power to divert the tide of human affairs.’
The reasons that lay behind the decision of some 2500 men and women from Britain and Ireland to go to Spain had more to do with events outside the country than within. While the vast majority of the volunteers from Britain knew little of Spanish politics, they certainly had personal experience of the powerful forces engulfing Europe in the 1930s, which had encouraged many to shift politically to the left. First had come the Great Depression, the catastrophic economic crisis that followed the stock market crash of 1929 and put over two million Britons out of work by 1930.
Hunger marchers in the 1930s
Alongside the economic turmoil came a political storm, one that had been growing since the end of the First World War and now swept across Europe. The birth of Mussolini’s fascist state in 1922 was followed by the establishment of other European dictatorships, most significantly in Germany following Hitler’s ascent to the chancellorship in 1933. By the mid-1930s, essentially constitutional states such as France were themselves seemingly under threat. And, of course, fascism was not just a continental phenomenon. In Britain, Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (known as the Blackshirts) which had been founded in October 1932, appeared to present a similar threat to democracy. Mosley’ Blackshirt thugs were involved in vicious attacks on opponents, in particular in Jewish neighbourhoods such as Cheetham in Manchester and London’s east-end.
So, when on 17 July 1936, a military uprising was launched in Spain in order to overthrow the democratically elected government, Spain appeared to be the latest country about to succumb. However, while the rising scored some initial successes, it failed to capture significant parts of Spain, including the cities of Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Bilbao. Here opponents of the rising took to the streets, erected barricades and confronted the insurgents under the rallying cry ¡No pasarán! (They shall not pass).
Madrid, 1936: ¡No pasarán!
Faced with determined opposition, the generals saw that their rebellion was in real danger of being defeated. With their best soldiers, Franco’s elite Army of Africa, trapped in Morocco, the Rebel officers turned to fascist Italy and Nazi Germany for assistance. After some hesitation, both Hitler and Mussolini sent help, providing vital aircraft to ferry Franco’s troops across the Strait of Gibraltar onto the peninsula, where they were able to head rapidly north, leaving a trail of slaughter and destruction in their wake.
Desperate pleas for assistance from the Spanish Republican government, initially regarded with sympathy by France, met with firm opposition from Stanley Baldwin’s national government in Britain. Determined to avoid a wider European conflagration, and maintaining that appeasement of Germany and Italy was the best means of preventing it, the European democracies chose not to come to the Republic’s aid. Instead a ‘non-intervention agreement’ was created, to which Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and the USSR all signed up – in writing at least.
Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that the agreement strongly favoured the Rebels, who continued to receive covert assistance from Germany and Italy. Indeed, for many supporters of the Spanish government, the non-intervention pact was the real villain of the story, and George Orwell later argued that the fate of the Republic ‘was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin – at any rate not in Spain’.
So for Jack and other supporters of the Spanish Republic the war was never seen as a domestic conflict. The view is often expressed in interviews with brigaders, that ‘Although the war was fought exclusively on Spanish soil, I never saw it as a domestic conflict.’ To the volunteers, Spain’s struggle transcended national boundaries, a perspective lucidly expressed by the sculptor, Jason Gurney from London, who arrived in Spain in December 1936:
“The Spanish Civil war seemed to provide the chance for a single individual to take a positive and effective stand on an issue which appeared to be absolutely clear. Either you were opposed to the growth of Fascism and you went out to fight it, or you acquiesced in its crimes and were guilty of permitting its growth…for myself and many others like me it was a war of principle, and principles do not have a national boundary.” (Jason Gurney, Crusade in Spain, p.36.)
Therefore fighting fascism in Spain would help the fight against fascism across Europe: conversely a victory for Franco was seen, by extension, as a victory for Hitler. The rapid and determined support for the Spanish Rebels by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy provided anti-fascists with convincing evidence for a connection between the regimes.
Around the world supporters of the Spanish Republic held meetings and demonstrations, collected food, money and medical supplies. However, some felt that sending help and money was not enough. Spain needed arms, as one young Spaniard argued: ‘We Spaniards are greatly thankful for your charity and your lint and your ointments which you send us to repair Don Quixote’s wounds; but we would be much more thankful if you were to outfit him with a new lance and an up-to-date shield.’
Some anti-fascists agreed and took the decision to volunteer to go to Spain, determined to seize this opportunity to halt the spread of authoritarian right-wing regimes across Europe. As Jack explained:
“The awful realisation that black fascism was on the march right across Europe created a strong desire to act. The march had started with Mussolini and had gained terrible momentum with Hitler and was being carried forward by Franco. For most young people there was a feeling of frustration, but some determined to do anything that seemed possible, even if it meant death, to try to stop the spread of fascism…This was Fascist progression. It was real and it had to be stopped.” (Introduction by Jack Jones in Judith Cook, Apprentices of Freedom, pp.vii-ix.)
The first volunteers consisted mainly of German and Italian anti-fascists, plus some British, French and Polish left-wingers. Sprinkled among the Spanish defenders at the rate of one to four, the brigaders both boosted their morale and trained them in the use of weapons such as machine-guns. The arrival of a well-disciplined group of soldiers provided an important psychological boost to the Republican forces. To many observers’ surprise, the defenders of Madrid managed to halt the advance of General Franco’s forces at the gates of the Spanish capital.
Yet when Jack first approached the Aid Spain Office in Liverpool’s Haymarket in order to offer his services to the Spanish Republic, he was turned down, despite having experience in the Territorial Army. Instead, he was told that he would be of more use staying in Britain and working on behalf of the Spanish Republic, including helping to recruit volunteers for the International Brigades.
However, after several requests, in early 1938 Jack’s efforts to volunteer were finally rewarded and permission was granted for him to go. However, it was not easy to get to Spain, for volunteering for the Spanish war had been made illegal in Britain, so the journey had to be undertaken in secret. Jack’s organisational experience meant that he was sufficiently trusted to be put in charge of a group of British volunteers. They followed the by now well-trodden route: from London by train and boat to the main recruiting centre for the International Brigades in Paris and then on by train once again to Perpignan in southern France.
Jack Jones’ route to Spain in March 1938
With the border between France and Spain closed, volunteers were forced to undertake an exhausting nine hour climb over the Pyrenees to get into Spain – carried out at night to avoid the patrols set up to catch them. Jack’s group arrived in Spain in March 1938. Upon his arrival he was given some brief training in the fort at Figueras in northern Catalonia, before being allowed to carry on to Barcelona to deliver a letter he was carrying from Ernest Bevin to representatives of the socialist trade union, the UGT. After delivering the letter, Jack briefly joined a UGT unit fighting on Aragon front [near Lerida], an experience he later described in his autobiography, Union Man:
“My character was hardened by many experiences at that time but one incident stands out vividly in my memory. ‘Yo lucha para Libertad! (‘I fight for liberty’) shouted the old Spaniard, digging in alongside me. The ground was hard and stony and with the aid of a trenching tool it was possible to dig only a shallow strip and use what natural cover was available. Laying his trenching tool on the ground, he picked up his rifle to fire at the opposing force. We faced a hail of rifle and machine-gun fire and shells came flying over at the same time. I looked at the unlikely soldier by my side and marvelled at his courage. He had a gnarled bronze face, a heavy body, and was wearing the cap and overalls of a working man. He was afraid of nothing. It turned out that he was an anarchist, but he typified for me the resolve of so many Spaniards who hated the idea of a Fascist take-over. [But] in his courage he was reckless, a recklessness which did for him, for he was killed within minutes of his picking up his rifle and firing a few shots.” (Jack Jones, Union Man, 2008, p. 68.)
Despite choosing to wear a black leather jacket – he later admitted it was not exactly the most effective form of camouflage – Jack survived a period of service with the Spanish UGT unit, before rejoining his compatriots. Jack Jones from Liverpool became volunteer number 1788 of the British Battalion of the 15 International Brigade.
Probably due more to his political, than military experience, he was appointed as political commissar to the No. 1 Major Atlee Company. Jack described his role as ‘a combination of welfare advisor and political advisor’; but he would have been unusual if he had not been informed that he should both keep watch over – and a watch on – the men in his company. Based primarily on the model of the Soviet Red Army, the political commissars operated as a parallel command structure to the military and were responsible for both morale and discipline within the Communist-dominated International Brigades.
Jack Jones in Spain (to the left of photo, in beret and leather jacket)
In many ways it was not an auspicious time to join the International Brigades. The appalling number of casualties in the battles of Jarama and Brunete around Madrid the previous year, meant that those who arrived in 1938 could have no illusions of the danger they faced. Furthermore, the massive offensive in Aragon launched by Franco at the end of February 1938 had ended with his soldiers dancing triumphantly in the Mediterranean at Viñaroz, splitting the Republican zone in two.
During the chaotic retreats at least 100 members of the British Battalion were killed and many more wounded. A similar number were captured and imprisoned in prisoner of war camps. The following photograph was taken of the defiant British survivors responding to a story in a pro-Franco British newspaper which had triumphantly announced the annihilation of the International Brigades.
Yet, when Jack joined the battalion in the summer of 1938, he found the men in training at Fontanella, a pretty valley surrounded by rugged hills and mountains near the Catalonian village of Marsa. The volunteers christened it ‘Chabola Valley’ after the small rough shelters they constructed under the hazelnut bushes that proliferated in the barrancos, the small dried up river gullies.
The volunteers were kept busy with ‘training, marching or rifle practice’ and ‘the procedures for crossing rivers’, while at night one of the volunteers who was a particularly strong swimmer (Lewis Clive) swam clandestinely across the Ebro to reconnoitre the Nationalist positions. Benefiting from regular food and sleep, and safe from the daily risk of death, some came to see this as one of their most pleasant periods in Spain, as one Scottish member of the battalion described: ‘In this happy existence, which was really enjoyable, we were out in the fresh air and we were sleeping under the open sky. The weather was fairly good and we were getting plenty of exercise and plenty of food.’
On 8 July the battalion was visited by a travelling van fitted out with hot showers. Many volunteers also took the opportunity to lose themselves in a book. Their ranks included a number of voracious readers and they had amassed a huge library of English books; these were stored at a nearby hacienda, where they managed to rig up electric lighting and could read long into the night. ‘It was a strange, argumentative army of thinkers,’ remembered one young Briton. Jack described his time at Chavola Valley to the historian Max Arthur:
“Life wasn’t easy, but a good spirit prevailed in the ranks. Food was short; our main meals consisted of beans, lentils and chickpeas, sometimes beans with dried fish in a stew, or beans with mule meat or old goat, stewed and topped off with rough – very rough – red wine. Some of the lads visited an old chap in a nearby village who, allegedly, made stew from mice, but nobody would admit to having tasted it. Needless to say, there were no cats or dogs around!” (Interview with Jack Jones in Max Arthur, The Real Band of Brothers, p. 137.)
Towards the end of July 1938, the period of training finally came to an end. Now promoted to Commissar of Number Four Company, Jack and his comrades in the International Brigades were to be part of a huge – and ambitious – Republican offensive back across the River Ebro.
The British Battalion advance during the Ebro offensive of July 1938
During the nights of 23 and 24 July 1938, the British Battalion marched nearly thirty kilometres to their crossing point over the river near Ascó. Early the following morning, the British followed the Canadian battalion over the river, most of them taken over in small rowing boats, while others crossed on pontoon bridges rapidly erected during the morning by Republican engineers.
Republican pontoon bridge across the River Ebro
Initially, the Republican soldiers found the Nationalists unprepared and they were able to advance rapidly. By the afternoon of 25 July, Jack and the other British volunteers were within two kilometres of the village of Corbera, that lay between them and their principal target, the small town of Gandesa, the key to the Ebro offensive.
However, within two hours of the first troops crossing, Nationalist aeroplanes had begun attacking the temporary bridges over the river. A lack of supplies, especially food and water, were becoming problematic as the battalion’s supply line became dangerously over-extended. Nevertheless, in increasingly difficult conditions, the battalion pressed on towards Gandesa. As Spanish forces battered the town itself, the British Battalion was ordered to capture a hill, just over a kilometre to the east, nicknamed ‘The Pimple’ by the British. The Pimple (Hill 481) overlooked Gandesa, and though not the highest hill in the vicinity, its capture was vital if the attack on the town was to stand any chance of success. Unfortunately, Franco had by now brought up reinforcements and the attacking Republican forces met with extremely fierce resistance, particularly aircraft and artillery fire. The volunteers in the battalion faced what one described as ‘a withering, murderous reply of shells, rifle and machine gun fire’ from the resolute defenders on Hill 481 and from Nationalist positions on the surrounding heights and on top of high buildings within Gandesa itself. Between 27 July and 3 August, in searing heat, the battalion launched increasingly desperate assaults on the hill, but all were repulsed, as Jack sadly recalled, ‘at great cost’.
Even for men hardened to the brutal realities of warfare, the number of casualties sustained on Hill 481 was deeply shocking. Many of them were popular, long-standing members of the battalion, who had fought in Spain since the very creation of the battalion eighteen months earlier. One of many casualties of the first day’s fighting on the hill was Jack himself, as he describes:
“Once more I had clambered up the hill with my comrades, taking cover where we could and firing at the enemy wherever he appeared. The bullets of the snipers whizzed over, grenades and shells were striking the ground, throwing up earth and dust and showering us with shrapnel. Suddenly my shoulder and right arm went numb. Blood gushed from my shoulder and I couldn’t lift my rifle. I could do nothing but lie where I was. Near me a comrade had been killed and I could hear the cries of others, complaining of their wounds. While I was lying there, to make things worse, a spray of shrapnel hit my right arm. The stretcher bearers were doing their best but could hardly keep up with the number of casualties. As night fell I made my own way, crawling to the bottom of the hill. I was taken with other wounded men down the line to an emergency field hospital at Mora del Ebro where I was given an anti-tetanus injection. The place was like an abbatoir; there was blood and the smell of blood everywhere.” (Jack Jones, Union Man, 1986, pp. 75–6.)
Transferred from hospital to hospital, it soon became clear that Jack’s wounds were not going to recover easily and the decision was taken to send him home. Jack was finally repatriated on 14 September 1938, and he left Spain accompanied by his friend and former company commander, the Irishman, Paddy O’Daire. Back home he was reunited with his fiancée Evelyn, the widow of his friend, George Brown, who had been killed whilst serving as the British Battalion’s political commissar at Brunete in July 1937. Jack & Evelyn married the following month, in October 1938.
Jack & Evelyn Jones, October 1938
His wounds healed, Jack returned, as he put it, to ‘the world of ships and cargoes and the human problems of the waterfront.’ But he continued to work for Spain and campaigned to bring an end to the western democracies’ policy of non-intervention. After the final defeat of the Republic in March 1939, Spanish seamen stranded in British seaports who did not want to return to Franco’s Spain sought – and secured – Jack’s help. His connections arranged their transportation to Argentina to begin new lives. He also kept in clandestine contact with the illegal trade union movement in Spain and provided help and legal assistance to those imprisoned by the Franco dictatorship. Following Franco’s death in 1975, Jack lent his support to the re-establishment of independent trade unions in Spain.
As Jack declared in the postscript to the 2008 edition of his autobiography, the cause of democracy in Spain and the contribution of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War remained important to him throughout his life. When Jack died in 2009, he was the President of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, a position he had held since its inception in 2001.
The following 2 minute video clip is of Jack Jones talking about his time in Spain, from his participation in the battle on Hill 481 near Gandesa, to his rather sobering assessment of the legacy of the Spanish war. The interviews are from David Leach’s Voices from a Mountain, 2001.
James Larkin ‘Jack’ Jones, 29 March 1913 – 21 April 2009.
