In the summer of 1936, Spain reached breaking point. On 12 July, a left-wing police officer in Madrid, José Castillo, was murdered by a fascist group, creating an incendiary mood and rioting. The following day, the left took its revenge: José Calvo Sotelo, leader of the conservative opposition in the Spanish parliament, was killed by Luis Cuenca, a commando with the civilian police. Though it is doubtful that the Popular Front government ordered the assassination of Sotelo, the slaying of a man who had virulently protested against Azaña’s reforms and openly admitted to being a fascist aroused the suspicions of the right, and exacerbated their feeling that an overthrow of the government was necessary. In this context, Franco and his henchmen launched their attack on the mainland from Ceuta in Spanish Morocco. Spain was at war.
The conspirators had anticipated a swift and comprehensive victory and, with the help of sympathetic army generals, were able to overrun swaths of southern Spain. They had not reckoned upon resistance from soldiers sympathetic to the republican cause and civilians fiercely protective of the elected government. Forming the republican side, an alliance of anarchists, communists, democrats, moderates, socialists and trade unionists sprang to the defence of that administration. Rather than conquering Spain rapidly and incisively, Franco and his nationalist army were left with isolated pockets of territory.
From the end of July, the nationalists began to receive significant military assistance from Adolf Hitler’s Germany and Benito Mussolini’s Italy. Crucially for the continuation of Franco’s early assault, German planes were provided to facilitate the mass airlift of his elite Army of Africa from Morocco to mainland Spain. For their part, the republican side received foreign assistance in the form of the volunteers that flocked over their borders to form militias and eventually the International Brigades, and, from October, materiel and troops from the Soviet Union. Rather than a civil war, then, Spain’s conflict became one of foreign intervention.
The Scottish desire to intervene was, in that sense, typical, though in its scale it was unique. Of the estimated 2,400 men and women who left Britain to serve in Spain, about 20 per cent were from Scotland. This is especially impressive when one considers that Scots then comprised only 10 per cent of the population of Great Britain. There were, too, Scottish volunteers from groups unaffiliated with the International Brigades, such as those who travelled to serve with the Independent Labour Party (ilp) contingent. The mass base of Scottish support for the Spanish republic, though, centred around the phenomenally successful ‘Aid for Spain’ movements, which garnered support across class, party and gender. In the Spanish cause, Scotland found a place to channel its energies, and the country’s efforts outweighed those of any similarly populated area in Britain, or indeed the world.
PART 1
From One Struggle to Another
CHAPTER 1
Connecting the Fight:
Scotland in the 1930s
An empty stomach made an empty head think.
Tommy Bloomfield, Kirkcaldy
THE POLITICAL FIRES of 1930s Scotland burned and crackled unremittingly. Entertainment and education came from the soapbox oratory of radical street preachers; a truly open university. What a massive working class lacked in ha’pennies to rub together, it made up for with a bountiful grassroots democracy. Talking and listening on corners, men and women became inspired to struggle against poverty and fascism, domestic and foreign. Shortly before he passed away, Steve Fullarton described the often incendiary atmosphere in which future fellow International Brigader Jimmy Maley held court:
I always attended his meetings. The Communist Party organiser would say ‘it’s time we had a meeting’. If Jimmy was available, he would always go. So Jimmy would carry this collapsible platform up to Shettleston Cross and I would give a hand to take it up there. Or, sometimes it was to help with chalking the streets, announcing that tomorrow night there would be a meeting by the Communist Party and Jimmy Maley would be speaking. Sometimes we painted it with whitewash; the traffic was such then that you could do that.
Jimmy Maley was a provocative speaker. He knew that the Catholic young men would be there in force, repeating whatever lies had been issued to them from the chapel. They would come out with these ridiculous things, even too ridiculous to bother about. Jimmy would be right in there and would knock the feet from under them, would leave them speechless.
Their Scotland was one of communist councillors and Members of Parliament, and seemingly endless waves of strike action, protest marches, and demonstrations. Very early on in the Spanish war, this movement lent its categorical support to the republican side. When in August 1936 an Ayr businessman confirmed that he was refitting small aeroplanes to sell on to ‘Spanish agents’, 400 people turned up at a spontaneous protest meeting and passed a resolution demanding that none of the aircraft should end up in the hands of General Franco’s forces. Around the same time, in Kirkcaldy sympathetic pilots dropped pro-republican leaflets on crowds attending a British Empire air display and 2,000 copies of the communist Daily Worker’s anti-Franco ‘Spain Special’ were sold in two hours on a Saturday night at Argyle Street, Glasgow.
Kirkcaldy volunteer Tommy Bloomfield, right, with two fellow Brigaders.
Though home to a resilient and tenacious people, this seedbed of radicalism was afflicted by horrific levels of poverty and limited life expectancy: the Labour MP for Stirling, Tom Johnston, lamented that poor, slum-like housing had saddled Scotland with the highest death rate in northern Europe. Tommy Bloomfield of Kirkcaldy, who served two separate terms during the Spanish conflict, endured a life of crushing hardship familiar to many Scottish republican volunteers. Bloomfield worked from the age of 11, delivering milk and bread in the mornings and working evenings in a dance hall ‘called the Bolshie, owing to the politics of the man who ran it’. Unemployed at 16, he ‘obtained a job chipping the tar off casie sets at ninepence an hour. The contractor was so hard and greedy that if he saw you straightening your back, you were sacked.’ It was in this context that many Scots turned to left-wing politics as a vehicle for their passage out of scarcity. As Bloomfield later remarked, ‘An empty stomach made an empty head think.’
Members of the Scottish working class threw themselves from the dole queue and the soup kitchen into the maelstrom of progressive politics and all of the agitation and protest entailed therein. These were times of daily ferment and solidarity. In the first week of August 1936, 30,000 people marched against the government’s new means test-based Unemployment Regulations in Lanarkshire, while protests took place in the name of the same cause in Leith, Greenock and Kelvingrove. Incredibly, Glasgow City Council asked its citizens to campaign against the Regulations, and in the Vale of Leven the council voted 17 to two in favour of protest. Clydeside Rivet Boys went out on strike in solidarity, then in September 54 miners at the Dickson Colliery in Blantyre began a stay-down strike over pay and conditions. When the authorities refused to send down food or water for the men, tens of thousands of Lanarkshire miners walked out on strike in sympathy. The following month, Caledonian rebellion crossed the border into England, as 2,000 Scottish fisher girls at Great Yarmouth staged a lightning strike against low pay. According to the Daily Worker, ‘the girls suddenly threw down their gutting knives and rushed through the curing yards, their numbers growing as they shouted their demands’. The women were hosed down and restrained by police, their rebellion quashed, if not their spirits.
The protests of redundant workers were voiced most formally by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM). In autumn 1936, the NUWM organised a hunger march from Scotland to London in protest at the proposed use of means testing. The march was completed by a number of men who would go on to fight in Spain. As Scottish NUWM leader Harry McShane suggested, ‘many of them [marchers] understood the significance of the war, and some expressed the desire to fight in Spain for the republic’. One of them was Bob Cooney of Aberdeen, arrested for chalking slogans on to the road as the march passed through Dundee. O
n being bailed, Cooney vented his anger outside the police station:
Apparently, chalking is illegal in this democratic city. The first intimation I had of this was when two limbs of the law swooped down on me and carried me off in a manner which suggested that they had got hold of Public Enemy Number One.
The 700 marchers, divided into east and west parties, regularly faced similar obfuscation from local authorities as they progressed south, though they were welcomed, fed and housed by compassionate locals throughout the country.
The Scottish contingent arrived in London on 8 November 1936 to participate in a national demonstration at Hyde Park attended by up to 100,000 people. Thirty Fife marchers were invited to take tea in the House of Commons with the East Fife Communist MP, Willie Gallacher, who consistently gave them solid support in parliament, fulminating against means testing and attacking Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin with the words, ‘You preach humanity – let’s have some of it.’
After a week of action in London, many of the Scottish marchers were firmly of the belief that poverty and the Spanish war were essentially facets of the same struggle. As well as Cooney, marchers like John Lennox of Aberdeen and Thomas Brannon of Blantyre started to conclude that they could influence this struggle most by making their way to Spain. The Daily Worker had already championed this theme a fortnight into Spain’s war, beseeching readers to ‘Smash the means test! Support the Spanish workers’ fight for democracy!’
Underpinning these struggles ran a deep-seated antipathy to fascism, whether in Scotland or further afield. If, ran the consensus, fascism was not defeated in Spain, it would soon have to be defeated on an unknown and unparalleled scale at home instead; ‘Bombs on Madrid today means bombs on London tomorrow’ became a common slogan. The popular mood in Scotland was overwhelmingly anti-fascist, as was demonstrated by the outrage provoked when the Scottish Football Association arranged an October 1936 match against Germany at Ibrox Park, the home of Glasgow Rangers. In protest at the fixture, local William MacDonald summed up the mood when he wrote to the Daily Worker:
The Nazis have violated every law and rule of sportsmanship and decency, and yet they have the insolence to send a team of propagandists on to Glasgow, a socialist city noted for its love of freedom and democracy. There will be no football at Ibrox on that particular day: in the interests of peace and safety the magistrates of Glasgow should urge an entire veto of the match. In this they will have the loyal support of all lovers of peace and fair play. The Scottish people want no truck with the representatives of Hitler and von Papen. Our slogan and that of the trade unions should be: ‘No truck with the Nazi murderers’. If an impudent attempt is made to proceed with the match, I can visualise in Glasgow the mightiest protest demonstration of our time.
Despite the objections of MacDonald and others, the match did go ahead, Scotland running out 2–0 victors. A number of anti-Nazi protesters were arrested, their fury amplified by the raising above the ground’s main entrance of a swastika flag.
Archie Dewar, Bob Cooney and Bob Simpson, all Aberdonians who carried the anti-fascist fight from the streets of their home city to Spain.
Prior to fighting fascism in Spain, many Scottish volunteers were involved with domestic action against Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF). Key in the battle against fascism at home was the city of Aberdeen. There, a broad anti-fascist group, galvanised by opposition to the 1935 Italian invasion of Abyssinia, took hold with gusto.
Regular street meetings and demonstrations were held, with locals perhaps more acutely aware of British fascism than residents of other towns and cities, owing to the fact that Mosley’s BUF leader in Scotland, William Chambers-Hunter, was a local resident. Chambers-Hunter was later to leave the BUF after Mosley became, in his eyes, ‘too dictatorial’, which suggests, to put it mildly, that he lacked political foresight when he agreed to work for the Hitler-admiring Englishman.
After pre-advertised meetings ended in their being driven from the streets, local fascists attempted on many occasions to hold spontaneous convocations in Aberdeen, but a network of cyclists, scouts and transport workers quickly spread the word, allowing the city’s anti-fascists the chance to mobilise. As Bob Cooney remembered:
I felt we had to smash them off the streets. When the BUF arrived we’d shout ‘These are the black-shirted bastards who are murdering kiddies in Spain – spit on them, kids.’ Sometimes we’d be too late because the women had already dealt with them!
The link between Aberdeen and Spain manifested itself in local events shortly before the Spanish war began. An Iberian ship, the SS Eolo, docked in Aberdeen in early July 1936, its crew unaware that the reformist republican government in Madrid had decreed that all seamen should receive pay rises. Bob Cooney and local Communist councillor Tom Baxter boarded the Eolo to inform the crewmen of their rights. When the captain of the ship refused to grant the revised wages, the seamen immediately went on strike. They received support and gifts from local groups, and the Aberdeen Trades Council resolved to do all in their power to prevent a ‘blackleg’ crew being admitted onto the ship. After three months, the vessel was ordered back to Spain prompting tearful goodbyes on both sides.
One of those who fundraised for the crewmen was Aberdonian John Londragan, who later fought in Spain. In an amazing coincidence, while there, Londragan spotted a postcard of Aberdeen harbour in the window of a photography shop in a village near to Brunete. On enquiring, he was delighted and overwhelmed to find that the postcard had been sent home by a crewmember of the Eolo he had befriended, Juan Atturie.
Outside of Aberdeen, many other Scottish volunteers served their anti-fascist apprenticeships locally before widening the fight to Spain. Edinburgh councillor Tom Murray pioneered some effective use of bureaucracy, for example in arguing that the Edinburgh Parks Committee should turn down on the grounds of noise pollution a BUF request to use a loudspeaker for their rally at the Meadows in September 1937. The Committee duly obliged, and Mosley et al. abandoned the meeting. Usually, action against the BUF was far more direct, as in Aberdeen. Bill Cranston, an unemployed chimney sweep from Leith, recalled being involved in numerous street scrapes with fascists, drawing direct parallels between the struggles in Scotland and those in Spain:
Something I didn’t like at all were the Blackshirts, the British fascists led by Sir Oswald Mosley. Before we volunteered to go to Spain to help the Spanish republic defend itself against Franco, we used to read a lot about the treatment that the Jews were getting in London at the hands of Mosley’s fascists.
George Watters1, a volunteer from Prestonpans, intervened directly with Mosley as he spoke at the Usher Hall, Edinburgh on 15 May 1936:
I had a front seat and my job was to get up and create a disturbance right away by challenging Sir Oswald Mosley, which I did. At that particular time I had a loud voice, and Mosley wasn’t being heard. I was being warned by William Joyce, Lord Haw Haw, what would happen to me unless I was quiet. There was a rush and I got a bit of a knocking about and taken up to the High Street. When I was in the High Street I was accused by one of the fascists of having kicked him on the eye. His eye was split right across. So I just said at the time: ‘I wish to Christ it had been me, then at least I would have felt some satisfaction!’
Watters escaped with a fine of five pounds and his determination to continue the fight, whether in Midlothian or Madrid, intact. Also present at the Usher Hall was Donald Renton, another who later served in Spain. During Mosley’s speech, Renton, a future Edinburgh councillor, leant over the balcony and gave a stirring rendition of the ‘Internationale’, before being forcibly ejected from the building.
Opposition to fascism did not always take the form of organised political demonstration or counter-demonstration. For Steve Fullarton, challenging fascism was a visceral, personal reaction rooted in his sense of humanity. This was pivotal in persuading him to take up in Spain the fight he had waged in his native Shettleston:
Fascism was a terrible thi
ng. And what it was doing to everybody; trade unionists and politicians who were not Nazis. Things like that. And of course it was the bombing, the bombing of civilians that really got on my nerves. I would go to the cinema and see that on the newsreel, see the women running with the bairns in their hands, eyes turned skywards for the planes, to see if they were coming. That was absolutely disgraceful in the twentieth century but it happened, I know it happened. And eventually that’s what drove me to offering to join the International Brigades. It was a straightforward thing to say I’d like to join them. All I could do was offer my services and hope it would be worthwhile.
This sense of moral crusade against fascism was apparent in letters sent home once Scotsmen had arrived in Spain. As Glaswegian Alec Park wrote on 27 January 1938:
You of course understand my reasons for coming here, my appreciation of the dangers of fascism, my bitter hatred of fascism and my great desire to have a go where the fight is hottest.
Whether motivated by political conviction or a heartfelt sense of right and wrong, Scots were resolutely moved to fight fascism at home and willing to export that fight abroad. This was underpinned by the notion that if it were not laid to rest in Spain, fascism would come to Britain in the shape of a second world war and subsequent invasion. Prevention of that wider conflict was at the forefront of volunteers’ minds, as Tom Murray wrote home:
If only the people of Britain could fully understand the utter brutality of fascism with its bombings of innocent people, they would rise in their wrath and come to the aid of the gallant Spanish people. If our people do not do this now, they cannot escape the necessity of doing much more later to save their own doorstep, and under much more difficult circumstances. On my first night here I was roused from bed by an air-raid alarm and had to spend a shivering time in a trench. I would hate to find that through indifference now my fellow-citizens of Edinburgh and Scotland were to find themselves in such close proximity to the stark realities of war.
Homage to Caledonia Page 2