Homage to Caledonia

by Gray, Daniel.

  I just returned from supper, 7pm. Our menu consisted of soup, rissoles, bread, chocolate, a peach, coffee. ‘Six course’, you might say, but of course you understand that the courses are not large.

  George Watters recognised that in the circumstances, the Brigaders ate well:

  We were pretty fortunate as far as food was concerned at that particular time. Despite the difficulties that were there we seemed to get just enough to do us, and alongside of that we weren’t looking for much. We knew that certain things had to be for the Spanish children. And because of that I never heard a complaint yet regarding the food.

  There was even scope for the occasional celebratory meal; a Burns Supper was held close to the Jarama Valley in 1937, with potatoes, sardines, songs and poetry the order of an evening attended by 1,000 republican soldiers. At the year’s end, Bill Gilmour enjoyed a Christmas feast:

  We had a marvellous dinner on Christmas Day. We managed to buy four chickens, and to rustle some potatoes and dried fruit. A Greek roasted our chickens and cooked our spuds, so the cooking and preparation had the quality ‘par excellence’. Chickens and beef with mashed potatoes, Christmas pudding, compressed fruit and nuts, oatcakes, French cheese, tea, Malaga wine and cognac. It will remain one eternal sweet memory.

  ‘Vino’ was a thankfully frequent pleasure for the non-teetotal element of the Scottish contingent (given the national reputation, this group was not as large as might be expected; Tom Murray was joined in abstinence by Steve Fullarton, Tommy Bloomfield and many more). However, some Scots missed a more traditional tipple, as Eddie Brown wrote in a letter home to Perth: ‘That’s one thing I would like just now, a pint of beer. We cannot get beer out here. We were never boozers, but we liked our pint.’

  George Murray, right, and two comrades enjoy a ‘rest day’ away from the harsh realities of frontline action.

  John Dunlop, who found himself in a spot of bother when he and a group of comrades siphoned wine from the barrels of a cellar in an abandoned village, recalled the trouble alcohol could cause by citing one particular event. Barney Shields, an ex-British Army regular who had served in India, had spent an evening enjoying the local grape in Mondejar, where the Battalion were situated for post-Brunete training in advance of their move into Aragon. Despite being drunk, Shields was asked to guard Battalion headquarters for the night. Patrolling, he noticed that Political Commissar Walter Tapsell, a disciplinarian loathed by many in the Battalion, had left his high-laced leather boots outside the bedroom door as he slept. The temptation proved too much for Shields, and, Dunlop remembered, he duly ‘relieved himself inside them, filled them to the brim. Tapsell got up the next morning and put his foot in. Just as he had been thinking as to what grand exhortations he would offer the troops that day, he plunged in his left foot.’ As punishment, Shields was put into the ‘digger’, a form of prison cell burrowed into the ground, though, noted Dunlop, it didn’t bother him as his awestruck comrades passed bottles of wine through the bars. Shields, it should be noted, was an outstanding marksman with the machine-gunners, and was to die a defiant and valorous death at Belchite.

  Over consumption of alcohol was not a problem unique to the International Brigades. Ethel MacDonald, in Spain as a representative of the anarchist United Socialist Movement (see Chapters 11, 12 and 13), found that volunteers to POUM-associated militia groups were also regularly over-indulging in Spain, as she verified in a diary entry for 14 January 1937:

  Charlie Doran is sitting here at present telling me all about Glasgow and Lanarkshire. He came the day before yesterday with the ILP section from London and he is attached to the POUM. Why does someone not impress on the British volunteers not to get drunk when they arrive here? There is always that tendency. Perhaps it is because they are unaccustomed to wine. Doran was very indignant at the idea of volunteers for freedom getting drunk, and I sympathise with his feelings.

  Clearly, this perceived excessiveness did not meet with universal approval, though the impact of alcohol on the British Battalion or on the militias was never significantly debilitating.

  Hygiene, cleanliness and health were obviously difficult to maintain in the wartime countryside. Alec Park wrote from Aragon in February 1938 itemising the intricacies of dealing with lice:

  This morning has been spent ‘de-lousing’. The process is as follows. All our clothing and blankets are put through a machine built on a motor chassis. It is a boiler affair and when the container is filled with stuff to be ‘de-loused’, the container is pushed back into the boiler and closed with locking screws. Steam is then injected into the boiler also a chemical which does the killing of the louse. Whilst this is going on we of course are all without clothes but are given a sponge down with alcohol to give the louse on us the ‘once-over’. Further the rooms where we sleep and our mattresses are chemically treated. The process of de-lousing is pretty thorough and any louse that lives through it would I believe have to caught and shot!

  A defiant George Murray following his arrival at hospital in Huete, where he joined his nurse sister Annie.

  Whether through disease from these conditions or, as was far more likely, battle wounds, British Battalion members would be hospitalised in what were usually makeshift units in former hotels, churches and other large buildings. Though there was an acute lack of medical staff and equipment, and conditions especially in early-war hospitals could be horrendous, in the context of war some of the improvised facilities provided outstanding care in pleasant surroundings. George Murray, who for several months following a shot wound had been ‘missing’, forcing his nurse sister Annie to trawl the medical centres of republican Spain looking for him, described the surroundings he later found himself in:

  I get plenty of varied food and fruit to satisfy my hunger. We are well looked after and there are German doctors who know their business. This is a lovely place built for the indulgence of fastidious aristocrats but admirably suited to the needs of their convalescent enemies! There is a river nearby, shady trees and fine high buildings with big verandas and flat roofs where we can sunbathe.

  Willie McAuley, wounded at Brunete, reported to Peter Kerrigan that his own hospital was well-organised and functioned along co-operative lines:

  I am in the British hospital, and the treatment is very good. The hospital has been converted from an ancient convent, and when one enters the place, he is immediately struck with the alterations. The happy buzz of conversations in the wards among comrades, the majority of whom are in pain, speak themselves for the efficient running of the hospital. The organisation of the hospital in regard to social and cultural life is very good. We have our own band, composed of wounded comrades and we run dances. We have an excellent recreation room, complete with canteen, library, games etc. We are visited once a week by a travelling film show. It would be difficult for people in Great Britain to understand how our hospital is run. We have no artificial separation between the medical staff and the patients. One and all have the same interest, how can we improve the hospital, and because of this we have built a hospital we are very proud of.

  Though these hospitals were obviously well run, nothing could hide the fact that they contained patients with extreme war wounds. Before his stay in the more salubrious hospital described above, George Murray shared a ward with some profoundly unfortunate victims of the conflict:

  There was one fellow lying across from me with his head more or less half off. The blokes used to go along and lift up the cloth that he was in and have a look at him. The Spaniards were very insensitive, as far as that was concerned. I was amazed to see this Swiss coming through from one room to another, walking on his hands. He had a wound on his legs.17

  Following an injury suffered at Brunete, Bill Gilmour wrote from hospital detailing the horrors inflicted on his fellow patients:

  It is here one sees those who have suffered for the cause. Broken bodies, disfigured features, limbless heroes, who are useless for an active life in the future. When I look to them, I obser
ve my own wounds with contempt, as mere pin pricks compared to what they must have suffered.

  As Gilmour himself had found out, receiving treatment on the battlefield and in these hospitals could be perilous. He recounted his own desperate tale in a letter home of July 1937:

  I have been very ill, but it is over I hope, and during the times when I was able to write I was instilled with such a fit of melancholy that I could write nothing but a screech of misery such as was unfit to send anyone. My wounds are pretty well healed up now, but the effects of the anti-tetanus injection were what did the dirty work. The anti-tetanus injection was administered in the field, and for the first five days in hospital, I had nothing to worry about except my wounds. Then without the slightest warning, my body broke out all over in a rash; great white blotches all over my body. It irritated like hell. I could have scratched the skin from my flesh. My tongue swelled to twice its size. Also my hands and feet. My head split and my stomach grew so disordered that everything I ate was almost immediately vomited up again. I got over that spasm and I had not been two days when the whole thing happened all over again.

  With so much rusting, dilapidated equipment in use, there was an atrocious inevitability about such illnesses being contracted. Though the republican side clearly achieved much in providing healthcare, a lack of resources left them with some extremely primitive facilities unfit for use in times of war or peace. A positive aspect of the hospital experience was the way in which it allowed members of the British Battalion to mix with locals, something difficult to do on the often rural front lines of war. Indeed, many, such as Steve Fullarton, picked up their only Spanish while convalescing.

  Some opportunities to spend time with Spaniards behind the lines did exist. Like many other Scots Brigaders, George Murray found a welcoming people but was staggered by their poverty:

  The people here are likeable and friendly and they look quite healthy and well fed. Their houses and mode of life, however, appear to have changed little for centuries. The majority of the people in this district are peasant.

  In contrast to Steve Fullarton, Murray did find time to take Spanish lessons in between stints at the front, though with mixed results. Unfortunately, the rudimentary Spanish of Murray and his colleagues made charming local members of the opposite sex difficult:

  We have a Spanish class and I am now a fluent linguist. My Spanish is so perfect that the Spaniards hardly understand a word I am saying! The Spanish people are very attractive and not as squalid as I expected. They are friendly and happy whenever they have the least excuse. The children are pretty and intelligent and the girls ditto! Unfortunately we are handicapped in that we cannot speak to them much, plus the fact that some actions of our predecessors have led to a widespread suspicion of our intentions!

  There was, too, a certain amount of assimilation with Spanish life in other elements of Brigader existence. Murray was in a party of Brigaders that attended a bullfight, though he was left somewhat underwhelmed:

  We saw six bulls baited and killed. The spectacle was not particularly exciting and it didn’t even look so disgusting as one would expect. The matadors are very clever, of course, and their foot work was a study, but only Spaniards can really appreciate the fine points about the sport.

  Despite his comfort in Spain and a burgeoning love of the country, Murray did later admit a hankering for his homeland:

  I wouldn’t mind a glimpse of Perth just now if only for the green colour of the Inches and hills that are not bare and white for lack of water. Now I understand people who come from hot climes and marvel at the green landscape of Scotland.

  There were a number of home comforts to be enjoyed while adjusting to the local way of life, however. Jimmy Moir delighted in a visit to a village cinema where he witnessed, in equal bemusement to the locals, a Soviet film entirely in Russian. Moir noted the audience’s worship of Joseph Stalin, perceived as a kind benefactor to the republican cause:

  Whenever Stalin appeared on the screen the Spaniards got up and shouted red slogans. It reminded me of the silent films of 10 years ago when the audience shouted advice to the hero when he was in danger, and cheered the downfall of the villain of the piece.

  Bill Gilmour appeared charmed by that same excitable nature of the Spanish citizens, and in particular the ebullience of the children:

  We are billeted in a schoolhouse in a little village not far from Madrid. The children are not to be ousted so easily however, they still look upon this school as their own property in spite of the fact we have obtained possession. We have a hell of a job trying to keep their little inquisitive fingers from our arms. The little girls use our passages for skipping in, and they can’t skip without holding a community sing song. The boys spend their time either cadging our cigarettes or going to fill our water bottles ‘for a consideration!’ I find it all very pleasant however and interesting too.

  While Jimmy Moir witnessed a spontaneous airing of political views in the cinema, Alec Park found a more formal display of loyalties:

  The people are solid and you are greeted on all sides with ‘Salud camarada’ even by the children. They have been celebrating Lenin’s birthday, in the market square there is a large picture of Lenin on a red banner, at night there is lit up a large red star and all around the balconies of the buildings display pictures of the various Soviet and Spanish republican leaders amidst the republican colours.

  Such devotions chimed happily with those of Park and many of his comrades, meaning shared politics became a useful tool of assimilation.

  The British Battalion’s ‘grub truck’, which was at one stage rescued from outside a local brothel.

  Unity was also achieved on a more human level. Tommy Bloomfield often talked warmly of the reception he and his fellow volunteers received in small villages, and recalled how impoverished Spaniards would give their visitors every scrap of food they could muster. In turn, Bloomfield and company would regularly pretend to have already eaten, and accordingly return the food. His own admiration for the Spanish people was cemented when he witnessed three women pull a grounded fascist pilot from a tree and forcibly detain him.

  There did exist some problems between volunteers and the indigenous population. Hamish Fraser, during the civil war an influential member of the Spanish Communist Party’s secret police, the Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM), and yet by 1970 a Conservative councillor in Saltcoats, discharged himself early from hospital because of the hostility within:

  I was hospitalised in Barcelona after having been wounded at Seguro de Baños on 16 February 1938. Such was the atmosphere there at that time I volunteered to return to the front before my wound had healed and, paradoxically, felt much safer there.

  The behaviour of some Brigaders did occasionally upset the locals and make gaining acceptance difficult. Peter Kerrigan wrote to Harry Pollitt shortly before the Battle of Jarama to inform him that a driver with the field kitchen had taken the ‘grub truck’ used for food supplies when drunk. The vehicle was recovered outside a brothel, while its driver lingered within.

  These, though, appear to have been extremely isolated incidents. Scots Brigaders found, on the whole, a heartfelt welcome and immense gratitude from Spaniards, and behaved with a deep respect for the country and its people. Many fell in love with Spain, and spent the Franco era dreaming of a return. The prevailing attitude of Spanish natives and of volunteers was summed up by Brigader James Wark, a World War One veteran from Airdrie:

  This is something different from the last war. We know what we are fighting for this time. The kiddies hold up their hands in the Red Front Salute and greet us as we pass. I’m proud to be fighting for the Spanish people and democracy.

  Rarely before or since were foreign soldiers so welcome in another country’s war.

  CHAPTER 6

  With the Best of Intentions:

  The Scottish Ambulance Unit

  The work already carried out by these Scotsmen who came to Spain to mitigate the sufferings of w
ar is really extraordinary.

  Politica, Spanish newspaper

  THE FIRST ORGANISED group of people who left Scotland to intervene in Spain’s war did not travel with the aim of joining the fighting. The Scottish Ambulance Unit (SAU) left Glasgow on 17 September 1936. The idea of sending such a unit was the brainchild of Daniel MacAuley Stevenson, an 85-year-old ex-Lord Provost of Glasgow, and from 1934 the Chancellor of Glasgow University. At the start of hostilities in Spain, Stevenson brought together an Executive Committee to discuss the idea of sending over a medical company that would assist wounded combatants on both the nationalist and republican sides. Largely consisting of sympathetic members of the upper class such as the Marchioness of Aberdeen and the Countess of Oxford and Asquith, the group launched itself from an office at 5 Cleveden Road, Glasgow, and immediately began the search for the funds, staff and equipment required. Fundraising activities were quickly organised, and an appeal for volunteer drivers, medical students and doctors initiated.

  Though Stevenson himself often appeared sympathetic to the Spanish republic, his reputation was tainted by a distant relationship with the Nazi regime in Germany. Visitors to his Glasgow office such as Dr Len Crome recalled seeing a portrait of Adolf Hitler on Stevenson’s desk, and in late 1937 the educationalist accepted a medal for his services to a German–Scottish exchange programme, the citation for which read:

  The Chancellor of the German Reich, Herr Hitler, has bestowed on Sir Daniel MacAuley Stevenson the Cross, first class, of the Meritorious Order of the German Eagle in recognition of Sir Daniel’s foundation some years ago of exchange scholarships between Scottish and German students.

  Perhaps ironically therefore, Stevenson faced criticism from the right rather than the left for his central involvement with the SAU. Glasgow Bailies Victor D Warren and John Murdoch condemned the idea of Stevenson’s SAU as dangerously contrary to the government’s policy of neutrality, with Warren contending that ‘private intervention is even worse than political intervention’.