Homage to Caledonia

by Gray, Daniel.

  In April 1937, Sydney Quinn, of Glasgow, wrote an emotional letter home to his son emphasising the same point:

  I am writing this on the eve of going into action against fascism. Whenever I see the thousands of Spanish children streaming along the road away from the fascists, my thoughts revert back home, and I can see you and your brothers in the same circumstances if we don’t smash the fascist monsters here.

  Contemporary press coverage of events in Spain may also have helped persuade Scots to volunteer. The News Chronicle, Daily Mirror and Daily Worker all outwardly supported the Spanish republic, though it was the latter of those three that offered the most vehement support. The Worker was no fringe newspaper, and doubled its British sales over the period of the Spanish war from 100,000 in 1936 to 200,000 in 1939. As credible historical documentation, however, much of its editorial content should be treated questioningly; the paper was unwaveringly Stalinist in this era, for instance greeting the USSR’s 1936 constitution with the headline: ‘Stalin Opens New World Era – One-sixth of Earth Rejoices in New Charter of Freedom’. Yet its impact in crusading for the Spanish republic is beyond doubt, spearheading as it did countless campaigns of financial support and offering steadfast backing to the International Brigades.

  The Worker remained optimistic of imminent republican victory until the last days of the war, which can’t have gone unnoticed by would-be volunteers weighing up the chances of participating in a quick victory in Spain. More than anything, though, it was the images printed in the communist newspaper that provoked people into action. Just as Steve Fullarton had been disgusted at the movie reels he had witnessed of bombing raids on Madrid, so readers were outraged to see, from November 1936 onwards, graphic images of slaughtered Spaniards.

  However, of far greater motivation than newsprint for joining the fight in Spain was the perceived failure of government, Labour Party and trade union policies towards the Spanish republic. The National Governments of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain were deeply committed to a policy of neutrality. On 4 August 1936 the British and French governments signed a Non-Intervention Treaty making it illegal for the legitimately elected Spanish republican government and General Franco’s nationalists to purchase arms for self-defence. Additionally, the agreement prohibited signatories from sending troops to Spain. The pact was formalised on 9 September with the establishment of a 27 countries strong Non-Intervention Committee. The policy stood throughout the civil war, despite the evident flood of arms and troops supplied to the nationalist side in Spain by Germany and Italy. This myopia when it came to foreign assistance for Franco’s side led many of those who joined the International Brigades to believe that the British establishment were in surreptitious support of the military rebellion. Indeed, these misgivings were not without grounds: the British Ambassador to Spain, Henry Chilton, stated in 1937 that ‘I am awaiting the time when they shall finally send enough Germans to finish the war.’

  When the London government realised that the Non-Intervention Agreement was failing to deter British volunteers from travelling to Spain to fight, it invoked the 1870 Foreign Enlistment Act, from January 1937. This made it illegal for British nationals to participate in Spain’s war, though in reality the Act proved impossible to enforce and its adoption was more of a symbolic gesture aimed at underlining the government’s policy of non-intervention.

  The government’s determination to remain officially neutral had the ironic effect of becoming a recruiting sergeant for volunteers: if the elected representatives of the country were to do nothing about Franco’s coup d’état, then the burden would have to fall on individuals. George Murray, the International Brigader brother of Tom and Annie, who served in Spain as a nurse (see Chapter 7), displayed his contempt for governmental protection of Franco in a letter sent home from the front line:

  The very thought of [Anthony] Eden and company makes my blood boil. ‘Franco should be granted rights’ – ‘rights’ for the murder of hundreds of thousands of children, women and men. No more reactionary, hateful and deceitful gang of crooks ever disgraced Britain.

  Edinburgh’s John Gollan, a future leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who visited Spain twice though didn’t fight, summed up the feelings of many volunteers to Spain when he claimed that the Non-Intervention Committee was ‘a screen behind which Hitler’s and Mussolini’s invasion has been carried out’. Interestingly, the policy of non-intervention had the consistent support of both the Glasgow Herald and The Scotsman, the latter printing an editorial on 22 February 1937 that asserted ‘the future government of Spain is a question which should be settled by Spain alone’.

  Against this backdrop of institutional hostility to aiding the Spanish republic, many of its supporters in Scotland looked to the Scottish Labour Party for guidance. However, at a joint conference between the national Labour Party and Trade Union Congress (TUC) on 28 August 1936, a policy of neutrality on Spain was declared. This was reaffirmed at a further conference in Edinburgh in October 1936, when, despite significant support for intervention in Spain among union members, the policy of neutrality received 1,836,000 votes for and only 590,000 against. Yet by the end of that month, both the Labour Party and the TUC had declared against non-intervention, and advocated the republic’s right to buy arms. These, though, were constitutional moves, and very little practical assistance was offered in campaigning against Franco.

  At the top of the Scottish Labour Party, support for the Spanish republic appeared lukewarm and debate on Spain at the Scottish Council of the Labour Party’s 1937 conference was banned. Scottish Labour’s Secretary, Arthur Woodburn, was opposed to any unified action on Spain, much to the chagrin of the CPGB in its efforts to build a Unity Campaign. In the newspaper Forward, the vehicle of the Scottish Labour left, he wrote that ‘Peace Councils, Anti-Fascist Committees and Anti-War Organisations are useless’, and frequently criticised CPGB activity. As George Murray concluded in a letter home, action on Spain from the Labour leadership was barely existent:

  The Labour Party has been petrified for so long that it is next to impossible to make it move now. Spain has already paid heavily and tragically for that inertia.

  On the subject of British non-intervention and Labour Party inaction, William McDade, of Dundee, wrote from the Jarama front with a similar, if more desperate message:

  If Britain is going to withdraw her ships and leave the coast to German and Italian warships to bombard defenceless towns filled with women and children, and say it is to save Christianity, then Britain is openly helping Franco. Our comrades at home must raise hell and get the workers on the move over the question: what is Labour doing about it?

  If Scottish supporters of the Spanish republic felt betrayed and isolated by the government and the Labour Party, it was with good reason. They fared little better in looking to the Scottish Trade Union Congress (STUC) for dynamic leadership or support. As with the Britain-wide TUC, the STUC only belatedly condemned non-intervention and endorsed the republic; even then, it was slow in offering actual aid to the cause.

  Within the STUC, there was something of a chasm between a leadership cool on support for the Spanish republic and a membership keen to do what they could, from fundraising to fighting. This schism was largely a consequence of splits within the Scottish left caused by Labour’s 1931 election defeat and the disaffiliation of the ILP a year later, events which also influenced the atmosphere of discordance between the Labour Party and its own members on Spain.

  The STUC vigorously resisted affiliation with Aid Committees and similar organisations until 1939, and it was left to members to form their own ‘unofficial’ alliances, such as Glasgow and Edinburgh Trade Councils’ Arms and Ammunition for Spain group, formed in February 1938. Individual trade union branches gave solid backing to the republic for the duration of the war in Spain, whether through the passing of supporting motions, direct fundraising, or leaning on their local Trades Councils to stage demonstrations.

  Howe
ver, the STUC’s failure to organise a co-ordinated campaign of support for the republic until it was too late meant that the Scottish trade union movement was denied the influence it could have had, and Scots longing to aid republican Spain would have to take the initiative for themselves.

  For some Scottish volunteers, the chance to help preserve reforms enacted by the Spanish republican government acted as a further, if less weighty, motivation for travelling, as George Watters confirmed:

  We were afraid of the situation developing, of what was likely to happen to the Spanish Government, which at that particular time was carrying through some very good measures so far as the ordinary people were concerned: the eight-hour day, compulsory education for all children, a guaranteed wage and a number of other features that were considered a great advance.

  In somewhat grandiose terms, Tom Murray described his work in Spain as a revolutionary experience, writing home to his wife in April 1938:

  We are comrades in a great campaign, co-workers in a magnificent enterprise and a determined team of builders in the work for the Socialist Commonwealth.

  While this fits in with The Scotsman’s February 1937 description of volunteers as being ‘anxious to fight for the communist cause embodied in the International Brigade’, sentiments such as these often took a back seat to the reality of fighting the war once active service commenced. Though George Drever, an erudite Brigader from Leith, saw elements of building socialism in Spain and was willing to stay around for the journey post-civil war, even he railed against groups such as the Partido Obrero de Unificacíon Marxista, or POUM (see Chapter 11), who wanted to instigate a revolution while simultaneously fighting Franco’s forces, rather than concentrating on winning the war first. Brigader Garry McCartney, a blacksmith from Dennistoun who had participated in the 1926 General Strike, went further in an interview with the Glasgow Evening Times:

  We weren’t fighting for communism, we just wanted to beat the fascists. The Germans and Italians could have been stopped in their tracks in Spain if Britain and France had just let us get on with it.

  Having spent a year in a Gestapo-run concentration camp replete with gas chambers, McCartney knew the evils of fascism more than most by the time he had finished in Spain. Donald Renton supported his view of why Scots volunteered, remarking ‘the struggle in Spain was not a struggle to establish communism, but a struggle to preserve democracy against the fascist threat.’2

  For a small number of volunteers, motivations for signing up to fight in Spain appear less wholesome. George Watters admitted that early on in the war, prior to the tightening of discipline within the ranks of the International Brigades, some had ‘got away with going in, getting a certain amount of money and never being seen again’. ‘Naturally’, he admitted, ‘you had the adventurer and the boy that was trying to get something.’ John Dunlop, a learned Glasgow recruit, suspected one man he knew in Spain had run away from Scotland to escape a woman he’d ‘bairned’, though that particular Brigader became zealously committed to the cause and returned home solidly politicised.

  Jimmy Maley claimed that both Charlie ‘Cheeky’ McCaig of the notorious Garngad Cheeky Forty gang and members of the Union Jack Rangers Supporters Club set out for Spain, though he was unsure as to whether the men had made it out of Britain. Their motives can only be speculated upon; perhaps Cheeky McCaig was escaping gangland trouble at home and anti-Catholicism may have played a part in the case of the Union Jack group.

  The pro-neutrality Scotsman ran a story on 30 October 1937 undermining the stimuli of two Scottish volunteers and the British Battalion (the division of the republican army Scottish volunteers joined from January 1937) as a whole. The newspaper reported having spoken to a Scots duo in Spain awaiting repatriation by the ‘long-suffering British Government’. One of the two, a trained pilot, was in his second spell in Spain after an initial period in which he had ‘spent most of his flying time… hiding in clouds to avoid combat with the enemy’. This time, ran the story, he hadn’t even got that far, as the Spanish republican air service had now filled their quota of airmen with natives.

  The second man, formerly a machine-gunner with the Territorial Army, had expected to be given a high rank on arrival in Spain but was instructed to join the Brigades as an infantry private. Disgruntled at this but still desirous of an adventure, the men had considered joining the French Foreign Legion before resolving instead to request repatriation from the British Consulate. Both, implied The Scotsman, had gone to Spain only to escape the boredom of their domestic lives; it described the pilot volunteer as ‘just an irresponsible youngster’. Neither man was named in the story and no quotations offered. The piece ended with the telling and short-sighted description of the British Battalion as ‘a curious episode in the history of the British people’.

  Despite The Scotsman’s attempts to portray volunteers as gullible and disparate adventure-seekers, they were, in fact, generally united by pure motivations, and overwhelmingly united by their social backgrounds. John Dunlop said of his compatriot Brigaders, ‘I only knew one middle-class type, and that was me.’ Those who fought mainly came from a range of working-class jobs; there were coal miners, painters, printers, engineers, builders and even a lemonade salesman. There were, too, a considerable number of unemployed labourers in Spain, and a small cluster of middle-class students, obviously unknown to Dunlop.

  Most Scots volunteers came from urban and industrial areas, chiefly Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Fife, Glasgow and Lanarkshire. Glasgow, and specifically the Maryhill, Springburn and Bridgeton (despite the best efforts of the Billy Boys) areas, provided up to one half of all Scottish volunteers.

  Politically, around 60 per cent were in the CPGB, while a fifth of volunteers spread their allegiances between the Labour Party and the ILP. A further fifth had no formal allegiance or membership. Commitment to the party political cause varied between Brigaders: some, like Bob Cooney and Peter Kerrigan, were significant Communist Party figures, while others, like Steve Fullarton and Willie Gauntlet, only joined the Party once in Spain and drifted away over time. A number were members of two parties at once; Tom Murray, as a councillor, admitted to being ‘above board Labour and clandestine Communist’.

  Despite the significant influence of the Communist Party on the International Brigades and their members, until late on in the Spanish Civil War there was no organised recruitment process in Scotland, with would-be volunteers making their own way to Spain until mid-1937. Thereafter, such journeys were facilitated by the strategic and financial help of the Scottish District Committee of the Communist Party, based at 83 Ingram Street, Glasgow.

  There were, however, Party men throughout Scotland who would sound out possible volunteers and inform them about life on the front line in Spain, as well as vetting them for suitability. George Murray recalled being ‘more or less recruited’ by Jack Morrison, an influential member of the Spanish Aid Committee3. Jock MacDonald, a poacher from Cambuslang and thus adroit with a gun, was interviewed by CPGB man Geordie Middleton, who was slightly put off when he learnt that MacDonald had 18 children. With dependents’ pay at five shillings per child, Middleton is said to have replied to the volunteer: ‘We could get a general for that, never mind a poacher!’

  By spring 1938, with heavy defeats meaning losses in men and dwindling morale, Battalion representatives began to pursue volunteers in Scotland, with local Communist Party branches working to centrally-defined recruitment targets. Recruitment had slowed as it became clear that this was to be a drawn-out war with no fixed term of maximum service. Coatbridge volunteer Alec Donaldson referred, albeit comically, to the slow drip of recruits later in the conflict when writing back to Scotland in April 1938:

  Aberdeen seems to be sending a good type of comrade – so does Scotland generally – but the quantity isn’t enough. How about running a ‘Cruise Down the Clyde’ for males only, and then ship them here instead?

  Whatever the process of recruitment, with contact made and approval
granted, volunteers were ready to set out for Spain, most never having left their home country before.

  CHAPTER 2

  Bonny Voyage:

  Leaving Scotland, Arriving in Spain

  I ought to get a chance to mow down one or two

  fascist bastards before very long

  John Miller, Alexandria

  My Dear Tom

  Just a note before you leave Britain to tell you how sad but proud I feel at the thought of how much you, George and Annie are prepared to sacrifice for the great ideals we all hold for the betterment and happiness of humanity. I just can’t tell you how much we shall miss you and dread the thought of the awful dangers you will face; but through all the anxiety and sadness, we will know that you had the supreme satisfaction that you had done the very utmost you could. I can only wish you all the luck possible and look forward to the proud day when you will come back to us all.

  Much love, your affectionate sister, Lily xxx

  THE LEAVING OF Scotland for Spain usually meant a gathering of volunteers in Glasgow for the onward journey to London. The size of party they travelled in varied; Tommy Bloomfield recalled registering in a group of 150, while Steve Fullarton journeyed with only five others, three of whom (Jimmy Reid, Willie Gauntlet and Willie Dougan) were close neighbours of his in Shettleston.

  The work of processing new recruits fell to Isa Alexander at the Ingram Street headquarters. From Glasgow, volunteers would be conveyed to London via train or bus, often being sent off by cheering crowds. Jimmy Maley recalled the sense of adventure boarding the bus engendered: ‘It was like a Celtic supporters’ outing. I recognised some of them who’d gone to school with me.’4 Maley travelled in the same party of 150 as Bloomfield, three buses leaving George Square in December 1936, their passengers paying £5 8s. (£5.40) each for the privilege of riding towards war.