by Maggie Craig
These people believed that if fascism wasn’t fought in Spain it would sweep across Europe, crushing everything in its path. One contemporary poster from the Spanish government’s Ministry of Propaganda shows a dead child lying under a sky full of planes, two numbered labels attached to her clothes. The caption reads, ‘If you tolerate this, your children will be next.’
By January 1937 the Glasgow Herald was reporting that Nationalist forces were approaching Madrid. The Republican government had ordered civilians to leave the city and heavy fighting was raging around it. This is when Franco famously spoke about the fifth column he had within the city: covert supporters working in secret to bring about the Spanish capital’s fall to the fascist forces.
As Madrid was poised to fall, British volunteers, members of the ILP, were setting off from Victoria Station, in London:
Young men and girls sang the ‘Internationale,’ and a grey-haired woman wept silently on the Continental departure platform at Victoria Station, London, yesterday when 25 I.L.P. volunteers left on their way to join the Spanish Government forces.
One voice of protest was heard above the farewells.
‘It is suicide for all of you,’ a young woman exclaimed. ‘It is said that the volunteers have no dependants,’ she said to a press reporter, ‘but some of them have mothers who are pleading with them not to go.’
James Maxton’s friend Bob Edwards was the captain of the ILP company, which numbered around 100 men in total. Their service in Spain began shortly after that departure from Victoria Station, when they served on the Aragon Front, near Zaragoza. Edwards remembered the bravery of the Spaniards with whom they fought:
We spent much of our time training members of the Spanish Militia how to take cover and we were constantly trying to persuade them that to walk upright and bravely into an offensive was not necessarily the best method.
Author George Orwell joined this ILP contingent. Later, he was to write about his experiences in Spain in Homage to Catalonia. The Spanish Civil War attracted some famous volunteer combatants, writers and reporters: Orwell, Laurie Lee, Ernest Hemingway, legendary journalist Martha Gellhorn.
Meanwhile, James Maxton and John McGovern, who had led the Scottish Hunger March to Edinburgh in 1933, were trying to win hearts and minds at home. Lifelong pacifist though he had been, Maxton’s standpoint on the Spanish Civil War was clear: this was a conflict between fascism and freedom and it had to be fought.
In August 1936 he had dispatched John McNair to Spain to see the situation on the ground. McNair and Maxton were old friends and comrades from their early days in the ILP. When McNair returned with the information Maxton initiated a fund-raising campaign for medical supplies and ambulances. People all over Scotland raised money for Spain.
Quite disparate groups of people sent medical help. The Scottish Ambulance Unit wanted to render assistance to both sides. One of its volunteers was Roddy MacFarquhar of Inverness. He is quoted in Daniel Gray’s moving Homage to Caledonia on the horror of seeing a Spanish mother and her three children running for cover. As the young man watched, one of the children was hit by shrapnel.
Newly arrived in Spain though he was, experiencing war for the first time, MacFarquhar knew the little girl wasn’t going to make it. It was a baptism of fire, yet when the unit returned to Spain for a second time, in January 1937, MacFarquhar went too, listed in the Glasgow Herald’s report of their departure from Glasgow:
A crowd of several hundred persons gathered outside the Glasgow City Chambers on Saturday morning to see the reorganised Scottish ambulance unit leave to resume duties in Spain. The Lord Provost (Mr. John Stewart), in bidding the members of the unit farewell, said everyone knew the splendid work the unit had done previously. Taking on work of that kind in a country where civil war was being carried on was a heroic act, but notwithstanding the danger, the unit felt that their work had been so much appreciated that they must go back.
Now Communist MP for Fife, Willie Gallacher travelled to Spain during the civil war. Some of the British volunteers of the ILP Battalion he went to see may well have been his own constituents:
Around Easter, 1937, I paid a visit to Spain to see the lads of the British Battalion of the International Brigade. Going up the hillside towards the trenches with Fred Copeman, we could occasionally hear the dull boom of a trench mortar, but more often the eerie whistle of a rifle bullet overhead. Always I felt inclined to get my head down in my shoulders. ‘I don’t like that sound,’ I said by way of apology.
‘It’s all right, Willie, as long as you can hear them . . . It’s the ones you can’t hear that do the damage.’
Afterwards, Gallacher made a speech to the lads and when he had finished everyone sang ‘The Internationale’ ‘with a spirit that all the murderous savagery of fascism can never kill’.
Back in his hotel in Madrid, Willie Gallacher met Ellen Wilkinson, Eleanor Rathbone and the Duchess of Atholl. All three women were MPs. Ellen Wilkinson sat for Middlesbrough and then Jarrow, helping to organize the most famous hunger march of the 1930s. Eleanor Rathbone was an independent MP who lobbied successfully for the introduction of family allowances paid directly to mothers.
Willie Gallacher shared some of the journey home with them, writing that ‘those three women gave an example of courage and endurance that was beyond all praise’. It’s a handsome tribute, especially from a committed communist to the one woman in that group whose politics were the polar opposite of his.
Katharine Murray, Duchess of Atholl, was Scotland’s first woman MP and the first woman to hold office in a Conservative government, spending five years as an under-secretary for education. One of those who saw that if fascism triumphed in Spain it would march all over Europe, she clashed with her party over the issue. They nicknamed her the Red Duchess as a result.
Many women volunteered to go to Spain, a few to fight, some to work as nurses in the corps which became known as the Red Nightingales, others to fight the battle for hearts and minds. The ‘Bellshill Girl Anarchist’ was one of those. Ethel McDonald was 25 years old when she went off to war with Jenny Patrick, who became the partner of Glasgow anarchist Guy Aldred after his relationship with Rose Witcop ended.
Although she joined the ILP in her teens, Ethel McDonald too became an anarchist and worked as Guy Aldred’s secretary. In Spain she made broadcasts in English for the anarchist radio station in Barcelona, where she and her Scottish accent attracted attention. She stayed on in Spain alone after Jenny Patrick returned to Glasgow, as The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women relates:
She visited anarchists in prison, helped others escape, and became known as the ‘Scots Scarlet Pimpernel’ and the ‘Bellshill Girl Anarchist’. Imprisoned for several days herself, she spent further weeks in hiding, unable to exit Spain legally. Consular intervention got her out and she was welcomed back to Glasgow, telling the press: ‘I went to Spain full of hopes and dreams . . . I return full of sadness, dulled by the tragedy I have seen.’
Whatever their politics, people in Britain were gripped by Spain’s agony. Glasgow’s newspapers overflowed with stories from the war. Writing in the Glasgow Herald’s women’s page, Ann Adair got a whole column out of an ‘encounter in the gown department’ of an upmarket shop in London’s Regent Street, when she met Inez, ‘a daughter of Spain’ employed there as a model, trying on dresses to demonstrate them to potential buyers. Ann Adair was contemplating buying an elegant blue dress:
It was a lovely shade. The girl who showed it was lovely, too, a tall brunette with the slender figure and swaying gait of her kind. The saleswoman asked her some trifling question. As she answered it, she looked directly towards us, and it was then I saw her eyes. They were dark with misery, the eyes of one who had lain sleepless all through the night.
When the saleslady went off on some errand, the Herald’s correspondent started talking to the girl and found out that she was Spanish: ‘Spain! So that was the explanation of her tragic mien.’
On a
sudden the professional mannequin was gone. In her place was the Spanish patriot. She told me things I dare not set down on paper. She told me her promised husband had been wounded outside Madrid, that her mother, her young sisters had been obliged to flee their home, that they were now refugees in Portugal.
Both sides considered themselves to be Spanish patriots. There’s no way of knowing which side the lady of Spain with the melancholic mien was on.
In late 1937 James Maxton went to Spain to see the situation for himself, an uncomfortable business for a man who was not in the best of health. He travelled by train from Paris to Toulouse and then by plane to Valencia, ‘over the snowy peaks of the Pyrenees and I can’t say I like the look of them from up above. The plane got oil and petrol and we got coffee . . .’
Tearing themselves apart, riven by bitter political divisions, the Republicans in Barcelona had begun fighting one another instead of the fascist enemy. Ideologically the ILP supported POUM, the anti-Stalinist Spanish Marxist Workers’ Party, against the pro-Stalinist Spanish Communist Party. The vitriolic war of words and internecine strife between people who might have been thought to be on the same side reminded many ILPers in Spain of Glasgow. Presumably without the guns.
Four POUM members and some International Brigade volunteers had been imprisoned as spies. Despite not speaking any Spanish, Maxton managed to secure their release. One ILP member who didn’t make it home from Spain was Bob Smillie. The grandson of the miners’ leader of the same name, Bob Smillie junior did not die in battle but in mysterious circumstances while a prisoner in Valencia.
The Spanish Civil War ended in defeat for the Republicans and ushered in decades of dictatorship and social repression. One million died during the war and the brutal peace which followed. The psychological scars of the conflict sear Spain to this day.
When the volunteers from the International Brigades came home to Scotland, many found it hard to get a job. Roddy MacFarquhar was one of them. Having helped repatriate them, the Foreign Office wrote to all British members of the International Brigades asking them to kindly refund the £3.19.3d it had cost per head.
Many British and Scottish cities gave them a much warmer welcome. At railway stations and in city squares, ‘The Internationale’ and ‘The Red Flag’ were sung. In December 1938 almost 100 Scottish members of the International Brigades came by bus from London to Glasgow and an official reception in the City Hall.
One of the speakers was John MacCormick of the Scottish National Party, author of The Flag in the Wind. He welcomed home those who had taken up arms in ‘the fight for freedom without which there is no civilisation’. Hugh Roberton, conductor of the fondly remembered Glasgow Orpheus Choir, told the returning Scottish brigaders that he was proud of them.
In Kirkcaldy, a rugged stone commemorates the Scots who went from Fife and the Lothians to the International Brigades:
Not to a fanfare of trumpets,
Nor even the skirl o’ the pipes
Not for the off’r of a shilling,
Nor to see their names up in lights.
Their call was a cry of anguish,
From the hearts of the people of Spain,
Some paid with their lives it is true:
Their sacrifice was not in vain.
In Glasgow, the Scots who fought by the side of the people of Spain are remembered on the banks of the Clyde by the dramatic statue of Dolores Ibárruri, ‘La Pasionaria’, and her ringing words of defiance: ‘Better to die on your feet than live forever on your knees.’
The battle for Spain was lost. The battle for Europe had yet to be fought.
29
On the Eve of War: The Empire Exhibition of 1938
Let the spirit of the Exhibition live on!
Visitors to the Scottish Exhibition of 1911 strolled around Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow’s West End under sunshine and blue skies. Those who went to the Empire Exhibition at Bellahouston Park on the city’s South Side in 1938 weren’t so lucky. There were grey skies and end-of-the-world downpours throughout that summer. The twelve million visitors didn’t let the weather stop them from enjoying themselves.
Read up on the Empire Exhibition and you immediately get the sense of a much more democratic affair than the 1911 event. Glasgow had changed over the intervening years. Now that the Depression was at last beginning to recede into the past, a new generation of working-class men and women had grown up not only to hope for more out of life but to expect it.
Clydesiders were still standing up for themselves. There was a strike at Bellahouston at the end of February, when joiners building the place demanded higher wages. The plumbers on site came out in sympathy but the dispute was quickly resolved. Nobody wanted to hinder the birth of the exhibition. The world was coming to Glasgow.
What the millions of visitors saw was a celebration of all the British Empire had to offer, a showcase for Glasgow and Scotland and a celebration of the modern age. This was the era of streamlining, of the Mallard steam engine designed by Sir Nigel Gresley, of the Coronation-style Glasgow city tram.
Bellahouston’s pavilions reflected this modernist aesthetic. One of them is still there today in the park. The Palace of Art was built to last, while the other pavilions were temporary structures, although no less impressive for that. Other than the two Scottish pavilions, rich blue to match the Saltire, the pavilions were painted in soft pastel shades. Also helping lighten the dull weather during the summer of the exhibition were the colourful paths which linked the pavilions. Those were made of red asphalt mixed with chips of white granite from Skye and pink granite from Banffshire.
There was one nod back to tradition. An Clachan, the Highland Village, had been one of the most popular exhibits of 1911, fondly remembered by so many. So it was recreated at Bellahouston, only bigger and better. It had traditional white-walled cottages from Skye and black houses from the Outer Isles and a burn with a bridge over it which flowed into a small replica of a sea loch.
Raise your eyes from the old stones of An Clachan and you saw a soaring and thrillingly tall tower. The Tower of Empire soon became Tait’s Tower, named for the architect in overall charge of the design of the exhibition. One of the foremost architects of his generation and already famous as the architect of Sydney Harbour Bridge, people were proud to claim Paisley buddy Mr Tait as one of their own.
Three hundred feet high, placed at the highest point of Bellahouston Park and visible for miles around by day and by night, Tait’s Tower soon became the symbol of the exhibition: tall, futuristic, reaching for the skies and the years to come. Also reaching for the skies was the acrobat known as ‘the Stratosphere Girl’. She turned and tumbled at the top of a 200-foothigh pole, accompanied by the gasps of those watching her from below.
At the South African Village people could taste passion-fruit juice. More familiar refreshment was on offer at the Empire Tea Pavilion. The colourful saris of the Indian women who served the tea were much admired. This being Clydeside, there had to be a Palace of Engineering. The Australian Pavilion featured a kangaroo, led by a lead. Scotland’s major churches each had a pavilion.
The concert hall was off Bellahouston Drive, close to the junction with Paisley Road West. Gracie Fields sang there and returned to the exhibition on a few private visits. On one of those, Our Gracie stood in front of the exhibition’s Atlantic Restaurant and wowed the crowds with ‘Sally’, one of her most famous numbers.
Paul Robeson, who at that time was living in Britain, gave two concerts at the Bellahouston Concert Hall. Shamefully, he was refused accommodation at one Glasgow hotel because of his colour. Thousands of Clydesiders loved him for his voice, his humanity and his politics. He donated his entire fee for his first concert at Bellahouston to the Spanish Civil War Relief Fund.
At his second concert he sang ‘Ol’ Man River’, ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, ‘Curly-Headed Baby’ and a few Scottish songs, including one in Gaelic. He delighted the rebels and revolutionaries in his audience with ‘The Ballad
of Joe Hill’, the tribute to the Swedish–American union leader shot by firing squad for the murder he did not commit.
There was respite from the rain with a brief dry spell in August. The downpours began again in September, matching one of the year’s biggest hit songs, ‘September in the Rain’. While the crowds were enjoying themselves at Bellahouston, Britain was holding its collective breath. Look at one of the photographs of the picturesque ruined kirk of An Clachan and you’ll see a man sitting on a stone bench with his gas mask in a carrying case slung over his shoulder.
In September 1938, while the Empire Exhibition continued to draw in the crowds, Britain’s prime minister Neville Chamberlain was flying backwards and forwards to Germany to parley with Hitler. He made three separate visits there that month.
Hitler was determined to annexe the Sudetenland, the area in the west of Czechoslovakia populated by ethnic Germans. Chamberlain called for talks. One country could not simply march into another and take over a part of it. Besides which, the Nazi leader wanted more Lebensraum for the German people. He wasn’t going to stop at the Sudetenland. Not present at the talks, Czechoslovakia’s fate was decided by Germany, France, Britain and Italy.
As tension mounted, Britain hoped for the best but prepared for the worst. Defensive trenches were dug in towns and cities, plans for evacuating children from the industrial areas were drawn up and gas masks were issued to all. Children had their own special small ones, known as Mickey Mouse masks. Their mothers were advised to play a game with them every day so they got used to them.
There were masks which fitted over babies’ prams but no masks for cats and dogs. When war broke out a year later, some pet owners made the heartbreaking decision to have their animals put to sleep rather than run the risk of them suffering in a gas attack.