Homage to Caledonia

by Gray, Daniel.

  Not all volunteers were surrounded by the same buoyant atmosphere as they departed. John Dunlop had to elude the attentions of his father and uncle who, desperate for him not to give up his promising career as an accountant to go to Spain, attempted to head their young relative off at the railway station. The determined Dunlop, though, boarded the 5pm train rather than the 6pm as anticipated, and arrived in London in time to take part in the May Day Rally of 1937.

  Aberdonian Archie Dewar (front left) poses with British and Spanish comrades. On arrival in Spain, Scottish volunteers were often struck by the sense of solidarity that existed between the different nationalities of the International Brigades.

  Once in London, volunteers were divided into groups and instructed to wait, usually in Euston Station, while designated group leaders journeyed to Communist Party buildings to gather money for train fares. Having collected these funds, weekend return tickets to Paris were purchased for the key reason that travel on these tourist trains did not require passengers to show a passport – very few of those travelling to Spain from Scotland had ever required or been able to afford one. The ticket, Steve Fullarton recalled 70 years on, cost 28s. 6d., and included passage on the Newhaven to Dieppe ferry, and then onward rail travel to Paris.

  In Paris, volunteers faced a short wait until the time was right to move on to the French border with Spain. Tom Murray, granted eight months’ leave from council duties to serve in Spain, was put in charge of 35 men, including 11 Scots, one of whom was Fullarton, 19 years his junior, for the French leg of the journey. In an April 1938 letter home to his wife Janet, Murray, a leading figure in the Scottish Temperance Movement, put this elevation to leadership down to his sobriety:

  It was amusing to be strongly urged by the comrade in charge in Paris to rigorously exclude drink from my mind until I got to Spain. He was very strong on the point and I think the fact I announced myself a tee-totaller was the principle factor in the decision to make me a group leader.

  This was certainly modest; in truth, Murray excelled in Spain and showed himself to be a born leader of men, as was indicated in the decision to make him a Political Commissar with the machine-gun company of the British Battalion. He later described the scene as those 35 men waited in a dormitory in Béziers, a French border town, ahead of their crossing into Spain:

  My comrades are all determined opponents of fascism and have spent most of this forenoon in heated political discussions. They are mostly people who have never been out of their native land before.

  In addition to Scots, this group included Austrians, Czechoslovakians, Dutchmen, Germans and Italians, all energised by a heady mix of excitement, nervousness and political conviction. Volunteer John Ross, whose father had fallen at the Somme, enjoyed the forging of a similar comradeship upon his arrival in France several months earlier:

  In Paris, we stayed one night, eating our meals at a co-operative restaurant filled with people of every possible nationality, all united by a common purpose, based on international ideology: a most stimulating experience, I found.

  Steve Fullarton’s morale was boosted in a very personal way; between leaving Glasgow and arriving in Paris, he managed to age from 18 years old to 22, which was ‘not bad, especially at that age, where one year makes a difference.’ As he explained:

  I told the Communist Party organiser in Shettleston where I lived that I wanted to go and join the International Brigades, and he told me before we went to the Party office in Glasgow: ‘You’d better say you’re 19.’ He went to the office and he came out and said: ‘You can go, but you’ve to say you’re 20.’ And when we got to London and [Chris] Smith got back with the money from the Party office he says: ‘Oh, you have got to be 21.’ Then in the medical examination in Paris, the doctor said ‘You have to be 22 to join, so by now I just says, ‘I am 22.’

  In the medical examination Fullarton referred to, he had initially been rejected for being ‘flat-footed’, but argued his corner until he was permitted to join the Brigades. Formal medical and political screening of volunteers in Paris was carried out only from early 1938. Prior to that date, there had been instances of budding one-armed soldiers being admitted in to Spain, and an ethos that any volunteers with dubious personal or political credentials could be easily detected without formal scrutiny, as John Dunlop recalled:

  In my experience, there was no screening of volunteers neither in Paris nor on the way through France, nor in Spain itself: there was hardly any need for it, as any elements that might be considered ‘disruptive’ stood out like sore thumbs and became obvious candidates for surveillance.

  After Paris, the new Brigaders moved on through France towards the Pyrenees, usually on board the ‘red train’, to gather in Perpignan and nearby towns such as Cerbère and Béziers for transportation by bus to crossing points. While waiting in Perpignan on the night they were to leave for their passage into Spain, John Dunlop enjoyed a good meal and some old-fashioned Dutch courage in a local café, quaffing, as he wrote in Blue Blanket magazine ‘a flagon of wine, sour red stuff. It was our Stirrup Cup and made us feel fit for anything.’5

  Bill Cranston (bottom left) with English and Greek comrades, grateful to have eluded the ‘fascists in Perpignan’ and arrived in Spain.

  Passport checks by local police were often carried out on the buses transporting volunteers towards the French–Spanish border (France, after all, was a signatory of the Non-Intervention Agreement).

  The Gendarmes seemed generally sympathetic to the cause of those travelling, and often bent the rules to admit passengers without passports through, as George Watters stated:

  From Perpignan there were buses, and they [the police] came on and checked you had a passport to go on to Spain. One fellow in the bus had a passport. Whenever they came in he showed his passport and they were quite satisfied. They were obviously all sympathetic and knew what was happening. We all went through quite easily.

  Donald Renton, in charge of Watters’ group, also remarked upon this:

  We crossed the frontier in relative comfort, and the guards in broad measure appeared to indicate to us a considerable sympathy for the aims that we were seeking to achieve in terms of support for the Spanish republic.6

  From now until the men were safely in Spain, silence and stealth were vital in order to avoid the attentions of any French officials actually obeying the Non-Intervention Agreement, and local fascists liable to ‘shop’ those attempting to fight Franco’s forces. As Bill Cranston observed, ‘we were told to speak among ourselves, and only in whispers. It seems there were a lot of fascists in Perpignan.’ The quiet went on as the volunteers boarded the large, canvas-hooded charabancs which were to transport them to the foot of the Pyrenees, each man ducking to avoid detection when other vehicles passed. John Dunlop recalled in Blue Blanket that the silence was finally broken by defiant laughter as the charabancs raced towards their drop-off points:

  Exhilaration frothed in our veins. We laughed at the laws and international agreements made to forbid us in our mission, at the venal politicians who had made them and at the police and military who were charged with the duty of preventing us. A feeling of triumph seemed to trumpet all over us.

  Amidst sweeping searchlights, the Brigaders disembarked and were told to follow practised guides on their long and tortuous night time treks over the Pyrenees in what Steve Fullarton called ‘a game of follow the leader’. Conditions were not for the fainthearted: the men, Dunlop wrote, hauled their way up ‘by hand, through pine trees whose roots clawed through their bed of soft needles into the jutting rocks below.’ The trekkers faced the dual perils of treacherous terrain and patrol guards. Their relief at making it over the border into Spain was immense.

  The comradeship built up in these testing conditions was evident in the bonhomie that usually accompanied volunteers’ entries into Spain. Dunlop described in stirring terms his arrival at a mountainside cookhouse, where he found coffee, bread and comrades from across the world awaiting him and his
travel partners. After mutual back-slapping, recollected Dunlop:

  The singing started, such singing as I had never heard the like of, each nation singing its own workers’ song of protest till the building became filled with a volume of sound that gradually swelled into one glorious chorale – The ‘Internationale’ – sung together in a dozen different tongues. Words cannot express the exaltation that surged in our hearts. This was the greatest moment of our lives.

  The hike into Spain over the Pyrenees took seven or eight hours. The volunteers’ real journey had only just begun.

  While the route was well-trodden and generally successful for Scottish volunteers, journeys did not always run smoothly. Glaswegians Andrew Winter and William Duncan were arrested along with nine others attempting to make a routine night crossing of the Pyrenees. From their cell, the prisoners issued a joint statement that declared, ‘I have come direct from my country with the intention of going to Spain and helping my republican comrades.’ Winter did eventually make it into Spain, sadly perishing in battle near Brunete.

  On arrival in France, Dundonian Frank McCusker, a participant in the 1936 NUWM march to London, was deported as a vagrant, yet still contrived to make it over the Pyrenees three days later. Another Dundonian, Tom Clarke, faced an altogether more slapstick form of adversity. On departing his home city, he was given a packet of cigarettes containing a secret message to be handed over to a Communist Party contact in Paris. Clarke, though, suffered an unfortunate craving on his journey to France and contrived to smoke the one cigarette in the pack containing the message.

  Republican soldiers set off for the front line in a buoyant mood. The slogan daubed on the side of their carriage reads: ‘O brothers, swear on these words: it is better to die than to allow tyrants’.

  A number of resolute Scots made it to Spain completely under their own steam. Hugh MacKay, from Perth, deserted the French Foreign Legion in 1934, and eventually found his way to Spain to fight on the government side. Imprisoned by republican authorities as a spy for the very act of managing to make his own way into Spain, he was eventually freed and served in the British Battalion at the Ebro and Gandesa. Falkirk lad Sam Hannah was possibly the youngest Scot to travel to Spain, having been born in 1920. On hearing of the Spanish Civil War, he joined the SS Aitkenside, then docked at Grangemouth, and sailed, via France, to Bilbao. At 16, he was deemed too young to fight, and so became a runner with the American Abraham Lincoln Brigade, serving at Madrid, Jarama and Ebro.

  Following the outbreak of civil war, the very first Scottish arrivals in Spain were tooled with bagpipes rather than rifles. Four pipers were selected to play at the week-long Peoples’ Olympiad in Barcelona from 19 July 1936, and while there headed a march of workers from the Catalan city to Zaragoza. They returned at the end of the games, though the Daily Worker claimed the pipers had expressed a desire to fight for the republic. That wish unfulfilled, there was a trickle of Scottish volunteers from August onwards, until larger numbers began to arrive from December.

  British volunteers would usually arrive at Figueras in the Spanish north, something of a holding base, before being transferred to the International Brigade headquarters at Albacete, and then the nearby village of Madrigueras for training (after the summer of 1937, instruction took place at Tarazona de la Mancha). On reporting for duty, they were issued with khaki uniforms featuring Balmoral-style caps, strong boots and a food-cum-shaving bowl.

  The little-travelled volunteers were often astounded by the eclecticism of their new international comrades. Tom Murray expressed this view in a letter dated 10 April 1938:

  What an inspiration it is to find oneself among fine fellows from practically every country in Europe, America and Canada – including Germans and Italians, some of the latter two having escaped from fascist hands. I wish that all of you in Britain could just experience the emotions and thrilling sensations which my experience has given me.

  Upon his own arrival, Donald Renton was similarly enthralled by the sight of female participants defending the republic:

  For the first time we saw the militiawomen, comrades who like ourselves were either going to have or had already had first hand experience in battle conditions against the fascist enemy. These were wonderful comrades, people who had, so far as I was concerned at least, a very very powerful, inspirational effect.7

  One month to six weeks of basic military training would commence for recent recruits soon after their arrival. For much of the war, describing the training as ‘basic’ appears generous at best. George Murray was probably closest when he described it as ‘more or less useless’.8

  Steve Fullarton was alarmed to find that, due to a chronic lack of equipment, shooting practice was undertaken with mock-up wooden rifles. Where it did exist, much of the weaponry used in training and combat dated from the first quarter of the 20th century and earlier; battered old Lewis and Chauchat guns were deployed, despite being more suited to the scrapheap than the battlefield. Renton commented:

  What little training we were getting was training based on weapons that were completely obsolete. They were as liable to explode in your face if they were actually used, and most of them were donkeys’ years old and of no use what so ever in terms of actual battle conditions.9

  This exacerbated the problems caused by the inexperience of volunteers. William Jackson, a 41-year-old Glaswegian who had fought in World War One, estimated that 80 per cent of arrivals at the training camp where he was an instructor had never seen a rifle before. Jackson was assiduous in his task nonetheless, Jimmy Maley remarking that: ‘Willy took his job seriously, helping to instil confidence in many of the younger men including me.’

  In the absence of suitable firearms, an emphasis was placed on marching, as Renton verified:

  I got six weeks training at Madrigueras. This began with essential weapons training, this being the result of Tom Wintringham’s influence. He was a most effective instructor, who believed the importance of co-ordinated foot drill would be clear to us once we could handle our weapons.

  As the Soviet Union began to send aid to the republican side, the equipment shortage did lessen somewhat. Jimmy Maley commented on the sudden improvements prompted by the arrival of Soviet arms:

  It was chaotic, and it seemed to take a long time. We sat around for three or four weeks; there was no training, until all of a sudden the stuff had arrived.10

  The arrival of Soviet help was welcome and, for some, awe-inspiring. Jimmy Moir, a 19-year-old who was to die brutally at Brunete, wrote back from behind the lines in June 1937:

  For the first time today I saw a Russian aeroplane in flight. It seemed to be of advanced design and had two engines which propelled it at great speed. Chaps at the front say that our bombers are faster than the enemy fighters.

  John Dunlop too talked of the positive impact Soviet Chatos aeroplanes had, and the ‘marvellous’ anti-tank guns provided by Moscow. Donald Renton went further:

  In Madrigueras, for the first time we saw Russian rifles and I’ll never forget that day because at that particular time I worshipped the Soviet Union. When one finally had a rifle on which one could depend to do a specific job, in terms of killing fascists and not killing yourself, and with a hammer and sickle emblazed on it, then one felt a real thrill of pride.11

  This undoubtedly made training more useful as time progressed, though quality equipment was always in short supply, and as such pre-fighting instruction remained basic; long periods of marching, shooting (or ‘shooting’), and learning how to take cover were of some value, but far from realistic preparation for the brutality of battle.

  CHAPTER 3

  Early Action:

  Brunete and Jarama

  It is a tragedy that we had to lose so many fine comrades. That of course is war which, as we have often said before, is pure hell.

  George Murray, Glasgow

  THE FIRST SCOTS to arrive in Spain intent on fighting rather than piping were lucky if they received any training, ‘use
less’ or otherwise. Early participants fought as part of militia groups such as the English-speaking Tom Mann Centuria, though even that troop was manned primarily by French and German volunteers. Jock Cunningham, an early volunteer from Coatbridge who would attain legendary status during the conflict, joined the Commune de Paris Battalion, a part of the XIth International Brigade charged with defending the north-west of Madrid during an early nationalist offensive.

  The foreign militias were fairly rag-tag, ill-equipped groups, yet they fought heroically and tenaciously. John Gollan described them as an ‘army in overalls’, though he noted that of those applying to be in the militias, Spanish or otherwise, virtually none had any previous military experience to speak of. Inevitably, they suffered heavy losses, including those of Scottish recruits such as Martin Messer, a 24-year-old hotel worker from Glasgow who had arrived in London on a hunger march and elected to continue onwards to Spain. Messer was killed in a battle with German troops in the University City area to the northwest of Madrid in December 1936, as the nationalists advanced, ultimately unsuccessfully, on that sector of the capital. Glaswegian Phil Gillan, fighting next to Messer, conveyed the intensity of the assault:

  In spite of my ‘terror’ training, I was just plain scared – and I’m not ashamed to admit it – the zip, zip got louder and then suddenly I knew that the air was just thick with machine-gun bullets. Did I duck? You bet I did.12

  Gillan somehow survived that particular bombardment, though only just, as George Murray reported:

  He has been shot through the neck and had a miraculous escape from death. The bullet affected a nerve in one of his arms which is now partly out of action, but there is chance more or less of a complete recovery.