Our business was to try and mislead the enemy about the actual strength of the Battalion and so build up a conception, when we were being questioned, of an enormous mass of men and materiel there ready to resist fascist onslaught and so on. Harry Fry and I were quite instrumental in building up this picture of a complete wall of opposition, something against which the fascists would be completely destroyed.14
The captured were marched towards army trucks for transport to San Martin de la Vega, southwest of Madrid. Tommy Bloomfield, who was alongside Watters, recalled the early moments of capture:
We were tied by our thumbs with field telephone wire in twos and threes and driven behind their lines by Moorish cavalry using the flats of their sabres. To drive us on, Harry Fry [the machine-gun company commander, from Edinburgh] must have been in hell.
Not all the weaponry employed in forcefully escorting the prisoners to their destination was as technologically advanced even as a sword, as Watters continued:
We were passing through a big town when we were going back as prisoners, and there was one fellow who came out with a big club, a prehistoric club, threatening us with this club, shouting at us. I says, ‘he’s a cheerful bastard!’
During this long procession through what Brigaders nicknamed ‘Death Valley’, Renton witnessed an incident which would shape his ‘militant atheism’:
Some of our comrades were dressed in exactly the same way as the fascists, and one of our boys got a very bad one [shot]. He was obviously dying, and a fascist clergyman, one of their chaplains, went forward to this boy to place the cross on his lips. Around him arose the shout ‘Rojo! Rojo’, meaning, ‘Red! Red!’, and that crucifix came back before it ever touched the lips of the comrade concerned. Well that is an example of Christian charity. It helps to illustrate how absurd it is for many people to place their faith in whatever kind of religious persuasion they may follow.15
At San Martin de la Vega, the arrested men fully expected to be executed, a fear inflamed by the early execution of three of their comrades, including one, Phil Elias of Leeds, who was fatally shot when reaching into his pocket for a cigarette. Tommy Bloomfield told of the moment when another of the company, Ted Dickenson, met his death:
He was given the choice of dying or soldiering for Franco. He chose death. He marched up to a tree like a soldier on parade, did a military about turn saying ‘salud comrades’ the second he died. What a man! When he was shot, I felt my hair stand on end, my scalp prickle, then my life flashed through my mind, things that had happened to me in my early youth, then a cold sweat and my senses went completely blank.
Jimmy Maley confirmed that the rest of the men anticipated the same fate:
Mr Dickenson was placed three yards away from two soldiers, and when he had given the Spanish salute his brains were blown out. We all thought that we would share the same fate, but the officer in charge of the soldiers marched us away from the spot.
As commander, Harold Fry was at more risk than most, and one of Dickenson’s final acts of heroism was to tear Fry’s military insignia from his uniform so as to disguise his importance to the company. Fry’s own valour during this time was noted by Donald Renton in the Daily Worker:
His broken arm was swinging, and the agonising pain brought beads of sweat to his brow, but even then his quiet words of encouragement helped guarantee us against panic. Forced to watch the cold-blooded murder of Phil Elias and Johnnie Stevens, later the execution of his friend Ted Dickenson, he nevertheless maintained that demeanour which during our period of training and at the front had made him more than simply our military commander. Even the Moors who bound his shattered arm in telegraph wire and beat him up could not make him forego his attitude of quiet contempt towards them.
Thankfully, the captured were given an unlikely reprieve, perhaps when it was realised that they were British combatants and, therefore, potentially of political value. The men were moved on to a prison at Navalcarnero. Renton gave an insight into existence there:
The Italian fascist officers used to bring their señoritas into the prison to look at the prisoners, and very often to encourage the Moors to come into the cells to knock you about.
From Navalcarnero, the prisoners were transferred to Talavera de la Reina, a concentration camp in the grounds of an old pottery factory southwest of Madrid. Bloomfield continued to fear execution, especially with regular departures from Talavera of the so-called ‘agony wagon’, a lorry which each day transported 90 republican prisoners to a local graveyard to be shot:
In the morning when the death wagon had gone they would say to us, ‘esta tarde todos muertos’ – this afternoon you all die. When it had gone in the afternoon, we were told ‘esta noche todos muertos’ – tonight you all die. Then when that one had gone we would be told ‘mañana por la mañana todos muertos’ – tomorrow morning you all die.
Bloomfield and his cellmates subsequently realised that their status as Britons meant they were never likely to be passengers on the agony wagon:
Then we began to analyse our position. We were under observation when captured so if they executed us there would be reprisals taken in republican Spain. It was a great relief when we realised that.
At Navalcarnero, a triumphant nationalist photo of the shaven-headed prisoners on the back of a truck had been taken, released and published in the British press. On 31 March, the Daily Mail reported the Brigaders’ capture with a cynicism – not to mention staggering inaccuracy – characteristic of their staunchly pro-nationalist take on the Spanish Civil War:
These are the first pictures of some of the misguided and hapless British prisoners who were captured by General Franco’s forces on the Jarama front. They were sent out to Spain by Communists with promises of work at £6 a week, but the first most of them knew of their real fate was when they were given arms and drafted to the Reds’ front line.
Undoubtedly to the chagrin of the right-wing Mail, the picture and story brought hope rather than despair; Brigaders’ relatives back in Britain had incontrovertible proof that their sons, fathers and husbands were, certainly until recently at least, alive.
Jimmy Maley, foreground, and other Brigaders are forced into line after their arrest at Jarama. Maley’s mother had images cut from a cinema reel after spotting her son on a Movietone news film.
The pictures were circulated throughout the media, and during a visit to the cinema in Paisley, Jimmy Maley’s mother was stunned to see her son peering back at her from a British Movietone News film. Such was her relief at learning Maley was in all likelihood still alive, she persuaded the projectionist to cut her two pictures from the reel.
That relatives in Scotland heard little from the prisoners was perhaps a blessing in disguise; so horrific were jail conditions it is unlikely any Brigader would have wanted to worry his family with the truth. In-depth individual interrogation began at Navalcarnero, and Bloomfield was astounded to find that the man interviewing him had a cut glass British accent:
It was a British official who did the interrogating. He had a college education with a Scots accent. His first words were: ‘Jolly fine mess you’ve got yourself into, what?’
This is likely to have been Alfonso Merry del Val, the son of an ex-Spanish Ambassador to London. The prisoners, stated Bloomfield, soon found a cunning route around his questioning:
The 27 of us had been put in three cells. The three cells managed to communicate with each other. A comrade by the name of Bert Levy coached us for when we would be interrogated. Everything he told us to say was the truth, even though it was a pack of lies. Questions and answers were, ‘Why did you come to Spain?’ ‘To do a job of work.’ But we didn’t add the work was to defeat fascism. ‘What happened?’ ‘After a time they gave us a rifle and a uniform and sent us up the front.’ We didn’t say we were willing. ‘Why didn’t you go home?’ We replied we had no money and didn’t know the language. That was true, so we were never untruthful.
These cross-examinations were often accompa
nied by physical harassment, as Bloomfield attested:
The first day as a prisoner we had one ration and two bashings from the Germans and Moors. The second day we received two rations and one bashing.
The prisoners were made to live in filthy, unhygienic and cramped surroundings. Bloomfield summed up the foul conditions:
During my three-and-a-half months in prison, I cannot remember having a bath or a wash. Neither did we have a change of clothes. We could pick the body lice off the outside of our trousers they were so plentiful. They were so fat that when you cracked half a dozen between your thumb nails, you had to scrape your nails on the floor to kill more.
In spite of this, felt Donald Renton, morale remained relatively high:
There were prisoners from not only Britain but from different countries on which the International Brigades were based. Efforts were being made to stimulate ideas of opposition [to the prison guards] between the one group and the other. The general solidarity of the comrades in the concentration camp, to describe it correctly, remained superbly high. Real friendships were built between the different groupings.
In the middle of May 1937, the prisoners were moved from Talavera to the Model Prison at Salamanca. There, they were charged with ‘aiding a military rebellion’, and made to sit silently through Spanish-language show trials. The men were ‘represented’ by a nationalist lieutenant, who elected not to speak. Five of the accused, including Harold Fry and Jimmy Rutherford, a young Brigader from Leith, were sentenced to death, and the remaining volunteers to between 20 and 30 years in prison. When Fry was sentenced, Donald Renton later wrote in the Daily Worker, ‘his shrug of the shoulders was an eloquent testimony to the fact that he could die as Dickenson had died, with his fist clenched and a defiant “Salud!”’. George Watters was told that the entirety of his life sentence would be spent in solitary confinement.
Happily, as the internees contemplated their terrifying futures, political negotiations were taking place to secure a mass release, and in late May a prisoner exchange took place, the republicans handing over a group of Mussolini’s Italian troops for the release of the men. On 30 May, the British prisoners crossed the Spanish frontier at Irun – where they were made to walk through a crowd of Franco-saluting nationalists – and began their journeys home as free men. At Dover, they were fingerprinted and questioned by the British CID, but released without mention of their being charged under the 1870 Foreign Enlistment Act. In early June, the British government sent its official thanks to Franco for the release of the prisoners.
Despite their experiences, Scots Tommy Bloomfield, Harold Fry, John Hunter, Jimmy Maley, John Montgomery, Jimmy Rutherford, Donald Renton and George Watters all arrived home in Britain keen to return to Spain immediately in order to finish off the fight. For various reasons, a number of them were unable to return: for example, Donald Renton was considered too indispensible to the CPGB to go away once again, while George Watters was extremely ill. Yet nothing could prevent Tommy Bloomfield, Harold Fry or Jimmy Rutherford from going back to Spain less than six weeks after their deportation.
As republican troops hastily retreated from Aragon (see Chapter 14), a second, larger group of British were captured by Italian forces at Calaceite. Over 100 were apprehended on 31 March 1938, with a trickle of further arrests over subsequent days. The new batch of prisoners were taken first to an Italian-run prison camp at Alcañiz, and then on to a military prison at Zaragoza, before their transfer to Burgos, and the infamous camp at San Pedro de Cardeña. Among this group were 36 Scottish Brigaders, including, fatefully, the returning Jimmy Rutherford.
Conditions at San Pedro made Talavera look almost passable in comparison. The camp’s international prisoners slept on the floors of dormitories crammed with up to 350 men. Inmate Joseph Murray, a Glaswegian, spoke of the horror of the camp:
The place was lousy and the food bad. There was no bedding and we slept on the floor with only one blanket. Rats were everywhere. Our prison was a convent from which the nuns had been driven away.
Sanitation was predictably woeful, with one tap shared between 600 men. Open lavatories, often blocked to a height and depth of six feet, made for an overwhelming stench and widespread dysentery. Bouts of scurvy and even malaria were common, with germs carried in the scarce food the prisoners were provided with, and on the omnipresent trinity of mice, lice and fleas.
Regular beatings from the camp’s military staff added to the pain of chronically under-treated illness and injury. Inmate William McCartney, another Glaswegian, described how German Gestapo agents used tactics of intimidation, espionage and violence against prisoners, and ‘frequent beatings with “loaded” riding whips and rubber hoses’. Inmates were assaulted, too, for failing to take part in what McCartney labelled ‘religion with a loaded whip’; in other words, avoidance of enforced mass would trigger severe reprisals. McCartney claimed 95 per cent of prisoners refused to kneel for worship and were accordingly punished. The only light relief for McCartney in San Pedro was the smoking of ‘a fine cut up boot lace rolled up in a piece of newspaper’.
Like the Jarama captured, the one thing the imprisoned members of the British Battalion had going for them was their nationality. Such was their value in terms of potential prisoner exchanges, they were unlikely to be executed. In mid-June 1938, after three hellish months at San Pedro, a large number of the British interned were moved to a camp at Palencia ahead of their rumoured exchange for republican-held Italian prisoners.
Conditions in the Italian-run camp at Palencia were marginally better than those at San Pedro, and contact with sympathetic locals brought some solace, as Joseph Murray noted: ‘They made us work the land. We got no money and no cigarettes, but the communist element in the town used to smuggle cigarettes to us.’ However, Murray explained that attacks on inmates were still a regular occurrence:
We were taken out once in a while and beaten up. They stood us against the wall and slashed at us with whips. Then we were out back into the dungeons. It was no use protesting. Protests got you nowhere.
Finally, on 22 October 1938, confirmation of the prisoner exchange was received, and the British were moved north to San Sebastian, prior to their crossing into France via the international bridge at Hendaye. Nine Scots were in the party of 40 Brits who departed Spain at Irun on 24 October, with the remaining men making the journey over the subsequent week. Despite the privations of life in prison, there was an absence of regret among Scottish Brigaders at their decisions to go and fight. Joseph Murray, speaking to the Glasgow Herald on arrival at London Victoria station, summed up the spirit:
I have not heard from my wife for 14 months and now I am looking forward to meeting her and our two children. If it came to the push I would go through the same again.
Unaffected by these group releases, a number of Scots lingered in Spanish prisons until well into 1939. On 7 February of that year, 18 Scots were among 67 British San Pedro veterans released at San Sebastian. Jim Cameron, a fisherman from the Highlands, was not released by Franco until April 1940, making him one of the last foreign prisoners of the war to be freed.
The fates of the three Scots who had been captured at Jarama, repatriated and later returned to Spain differed greatly. As part of the prisoner exchange that had seen them released by the nationalists, the men had signed an agreement stating that if they were ever to return to Spain and be captured, an automatic death sentence would be invoked. They knew, then, that their crossing the Pyrenees into Spain for a second time was a potentially lethal act.
Despite the protestations of his mother, Tommy Bloomfield made it back to Spain and served with distinction on the Aragon Front, before returning home to Kirkcaldy and becoming a family man, ‘whose hatred of Franco made him live every moment of war in Spain over and over again’.16
A Spanish cathedral in Aragon ravaged by shell fire. Close by, a large group of Scottish Brigaders were captured and imprisoned.
On re-entering Spain in September 1937, former
British Army soldier Harold Fry was made commander of the entire British Battalion. Fry’s tenure, though, was to be short-lived, as he was killed during the Battalion’s disastrous attempt to capture the village of Fuentes de Ebro the following month. Fry’s wife wrote a devastatingly touching tribute to him in a letter to Tom Murray:
My husband went to Spain because he realised the danger of fascism, and believed that his military experience could best be used in fighting it. He joined the International Brigade because he thought it was the job he could do best. His experience of fascist methods of warfare and their brutal treatment of prisoners behind the lines only helped to strengthen his determination to carry on the fight until Franco, Hitler and Mussolini were beaten. This is why he went back to Spain again after a short period of leave, his wound hardly healed, and without ever seeing his baby boy which was born the day after he left. I would not have stopped him even if I could, because I believe he was right, and I’m sure his last thoughts must have been of regret that he could not live to see the final triumph of the forces he fought for.
Disregarding a large age difference, through their shared experiences Jimmy Rutherford and Harold Fry became close friends in Spain. A baby while Fry was serving his country in World War One, Rutherford was a charismatic, highly politicised young volunteer from Newhaven in Leith. His decision to go to Spain, said friend and Labour parliamentary candidate David Dryburgh, ‘was no sudden impulse. It was the practical working out of his own theory of life.’
In between his two stints with the British Battalion, Rutherford toured his home area, speaking about what he had seen in Spain. His sister fondly recalled witnessing him holding an audience for one and a half hours at a public hall on Ferry Road, commenting, ‘it has never ceased to amaze me how he did it – he wasn’t very tall or commanding, but his voice and his vocabulary made up for that.’
Homage to Caledonia Page 6