Homage to Caledonia

by Gray, Daniel.

  However, the ILP contingent saw very little action indeed, sustaining only eight wounds between them in their entire time at the front. Most famously, Eric Blair was shot through the throat by a sniper during this time. A friend of Blair and his wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy, David Murray intimated in a 1955 letter that the author’s wound was far from life-threatening, which suggested that artistic licence may have been at work in Homage to Catalonia. Murray wrote:

  Shortly after he was wounded by a sniper near Siétamo on the Aragon Front, I saw Eric Blair walking about in Barcelona as large as life and quite the thing. In fact, I talked to him quite a bit.

  As the suppression of the POUM entered its most brutal stage, the ILP contingent was hastily withdrawn from Spain. The men had been on leave in Barcelona when in-fighting broke out in early May, and some of them, including Blair, covered POUM headquarters from the roof of a theatre on the opposite side of the road. In late May, the ILP men were hurried out of Spain surreptitiously, thanks to the swift actions of party figures such as John McNair. For his part, McNair had been identified by the police as a wanted man, and spent his final two nights in Spain hiding alongside Eric Blair and Stafford Cottman, before the three, along with Blair’s wife, were able to cross the border into France posing as rich tourists.

  In his capacity as a freelance journalist specialising in articles on the steel industry, David Murray had visited Spain several times prior to the start of the conflict there. A fluent speaker of Spanish and German, his chief task during the civil war was to negotiate the release of POUM-sympathising prisoners, most famously Bob Smillie (see Chapter 12). He boasted to a Catalan friend and fellow linguist, Guillermo Neuman, that ‘every child here [in Motherwell] knows what No Pasaran means now, and the phrase may pass into the English language.’

  Murray also acted as a go-between for families and friends polarised by the conflict. He was a political campaigner of some brilliance, his biting prose style finding its way into the letters pages of many newspapers. Murray’s indefatigable work attracted the admiration of John McNair, James Maxton (in spite of Murray’s splenetic criticisms of his and John McGovern’s praise of Neville Chamberlain following the Munich Peace deal) and many others on the non-communist left.

  Before travelling to Spain for his work with prisoners, Murray had campaigned vigorously for the Spanish republic in his home country. In November 1936, he wrote to Neuman, describing a typical week:

  Last week I gave three lectures on Spain, one to friends, one to a group of miners, one to a semi-religious group, all in the way of propaganda for the Spanish government. Then in addition to my ordinary work, I carry on newspaper correspondence with various Roman Catholic apologists.

  He requested that Neuman should send him ‘insignia of the militiamen’ to put into a fundraising raffle, mentioning his recent success in raising funds from Motherwell railway workers, miners at Birkenshaw, Blantyre and Burnbank, and local Co-operative Men’s Guilds. Murray’s lecturing and fundraising tours took him to the Outer Hebrides. There, he drew out the parallels between the fight of the Spanish workers and peasants for land, liberty and education against the forces of landlordism and reaction, and the long drawn out struggle of the crofters and fishermen of the Long Island for the same things.

  Unusually for an ILP man, Murray comfortably put aside his differences with the CPGB to work alongside them in campaigns for the International Brigades; for instance, in December 1937 he helped organise a concert at Motherwell Town Hall in which the Railway Clerks Association Mixed Voice Choir sang for ‘the Dependents and Wounded Fund of the International Brigade’. He also became involved in the cross-party National Committee for Aid’s food delivery service, devising a system whereby payments to Spanish consuls in Britain could be withdrawn as food parcels in Spain. More unconventionally, in February 1937, he launched a bid to provide a staple of the Scottish diet to soldiers and civilians in Spain. A press release detailed this innovative proposal:

  The Independent Labour Party proposes to send a cargo of Scottish herring to Spain. Since most of the early Spanish potatoes are grown from Scottish seed, the loyal Spaniards will then be able to eat Scottish fish and chips.

  The herring would be klondyked in bulk before being transported to a port in republican territory, where they would be exchanged for a cargo of oranges to be sold in Britain to meet expenses. This ‘signal mark of solidarity’ did not, surprisingly, breach the terms of the non-intervention agreement, and would be guaranteed a fairly safe passage:

  A cargo of fish would be strictly permissible under the terms of the governmental non-intervention agreements and would be entitled to full protection from the Navy. At the same time a trawler is not so vulnerable to attack from submarines due to its small size and draft.

  James Maxton MP, one of the ILP’s most staunch supporters of the Spanish republican side.

  Sadly, the author has been unable to find any further trace of the ‘Fish and Chips to Spain’ plan, though this does not necessarily mean the idea never came into fruition.

  In November 1938, Murray lent his support to another clever campaign, this time spearheaded by 22-year-old ILP members Adaline Campbell (whom he was later to marry) and Nancy MacDonald. They devised a scheme to flood the postal systems of Britain and France with food parcels for republican Spain, so compelling the two countries to break their own non-intervention policies. As Murray explained:

  If all party branches arranged to send parcels on a particular date the British and French non-interventionist governments would be forced to provide transport and to use their official machinery to supply food to Spain. The extra expense would be worth it for the propaganda effect.

  As well as assisting in the export of goods to Spain, Murray was not immune to helping products make the opposite journey. As he informed Neuman: ‘My friends and I require good quality caps. I have started the fashion of wearing the Basque bonnets in Motherwell.’

  Murray’s passage to Spain in May 1937 was smoothed after a Spanish potato importation board appointed him their Scottish representative (though this ‘appointment’ could well have been a cover story devised by the ILP and the POUM). In Spain, he worked for the release and wellbeing not only of POUM/ILP prisoners, but also for Scots accused of deserting from the International Brigades, including John Mudie, Malcolm Sneddon and James Donald (see Chapter 15).

  As evidenced in his work with Mrs Lacey, George Keegan’s mother, Murray acted as conduit for information between relatives in Scotland and men in their predicament. He also visited and supported Raisuli, the Moroccan brother-in-law of north African guerrilla leader Abd-el-Krim, who had been ‘clapped in jail for no good reason.’

  When Murray arrived back in Scotland, he was unhappy to find that, as he remarked in a letter to Neuman, ‘All kinds of stories were circulating about me… I arrived to find myself famous, without cause. Being known is a nuisance to me.’ This did not prevent him from continuing to wage political wars in newspapers and lecture halls. Unwanted notoriety was a price he was willing to pay for championing his principles.

  The potency of these convictions was in evidence from the start of war in Spain. Murray was repeatedly disdainful about the inaction of the Labour Party (‘timid and inactive’) and the British government (‘deplorable’). Having met with officials from the British Embassy and Consulate in Spain, Murray was left under no illusion that they were ‘definitely pro-fascist and would rather help Franco supporters to get out of Spain than lend a hand with a real government supporter.’ His antipathy was not reserved merely for the Labour Party and British establishment. As tensions between the communists and POUM in Spain grew, so too did his distaste for the CPGB and Daily Worker. On 8 July 1937, Murray wrote to the Worker in response to an article by Harry Pollitt, which he had read ‘with utter disgust’, seeing it as a ‘gratuitous and venomous insult to the POUM and the ILP… from Pollitt’s nasty remarks one would almost think that there are no POUM men in the trenches and that neither
POUM nor ILP’ers have been wounded or killed.’ He also suggested that Pollitt had glossed over disharmony in the ranks of the British Battalion:

  He said nothing of the members of the British Battalion who are hiding in the Spanish ports waiting to get out of the country. He forgot the group of men who are left to rot in jail in Valencia, without even as much as a shirt on their backs. He omitted all mention of the wounded men who were abandoned in Barcelona to fend for themselves.

  Murray went on to denounce Pollitt’s article as merely a translation of a piece from the Spanish Communist Party’s pro-Soviet Frente Rojo newspaper:

  Until a few weeks ago, I had been a daily reader of your paper for years. Today I can hardly look at it; you have a positive genius for spleen, spite and studied insult. You will persist in getting in some wisecrack which has nothing to do with the point at issue.

  Murray displayed similar scepticism about the Communist Party in an August 1937 letter to Mrs Lacey:

  I saw Communist Party prisoners in jail with nothing else but their jacket and bags, for four or five months, not a shirt or pair of underpants. I have been very disappointed with the Communist Party both here and in Spain. They seem to have a craze for publicity and necessary jobs which bring no aura of glory are left undone. All the leaders want to be big shots and they have an enormous capacity for venomous insult.

  In a later letter, he elucidated how his own political sympathies had been crystallised by what he saw in Spain:

  I myself greatly admire the Spanish anarchists who are not the ruffians the papers here say, but are for the most part men of spirit and courage who have done most of the fighting. Today the Communist Party is going after them tooth and nail as the anarchists want a real revolution and the Communist Party are only out for parliamentary democracy which is just what we have here. Imagine all that precious blood being spilt for nothing.

  However caught up Murray was in the squabbles that dogged the republican side, unlike many others, he was able to put his own opinions aside and, as he wrote to Guillermo Neuman in November 1937,

  remain firmly on the side of the legal government as the confusion which accompanies every social upheaval is nothing compared with the organised murder of Franco and his hoards of foreigners. There may have been injustices on the government side but on the other side there is mass terrorism and murder.

  Murray placed the importance of republican unity over personal reservations and his sense of the ‘greater good’ is reflected in the countless missives he fired off in remonstration with anti-republican newspapers. Typical was a fiery letter written in August 1938, reacting to a Glasgow Herald article that had played down Franco’s fascist credentials:

  It is amazing how so many people like your correspondent continue to believe that the mission of the rebel General Franco is to preserve his country from communism. Last year I met in Valencia a very highly-placed British official who believed much the same thing and did not bother to hide his pro-Franco sympathies. I met the same person a few weeks ago after he had returned from a year in rebel territory. His views had completely changed. He informed me that the people under Franco’s domination were sullen, that oppression was rife and that executions took place continually. He confirmed that all the essential services in rebel Spain are under the control of Germans and Italians. The railways, the posts and the telegraphs are run by Germans and the whole country is rapidly becoming a Nazi colony.

  Murray, who found common ground with the wider republican left in deploring the role of the Catholic church in Spain, made this parting shot:

  It is a pity Franco has so many supporters in this country, and still more a great pity that they masquerade mostly as Christian patriots with a civilising mission and often get away with it.

  He believed that a victory for Franco would mean a restoration of the Catholic church’s power, and therefore that, as he later wrote, ‘Spain would be pushed back to the time of Columbus.’ ‘Spain under clerical-fascist domination’, Murray argued, ‘will be a mass cemetery.’

  For all his public campaigning, Murray did not relish attention for its own sake, but his role in investigating the ‘murder’ of Scottish ILP volunteer Bob Smillie was to push him fully into the limelight.

  PART 3

  Spanish Stories, and Endings

  CHAPTER 12

  Murder or Circumstance?

  The Bob Smillie Story

  His lilting Scottish melodies could often be heard enlivening many difficult and monotonous hours. I can hear his voice now as he shouted slogans in Spanish from our trenches in the Aragon mountains across to the enemy lines. Was it merely coincidence that at this period 100 Spanish workers deserted from Franco?

  Bob Edwards, ILP contingent member and later Co-operative and Labour MP

  BORN IN 1917, Robert Ramsay Smillie was the grandson of Robert Smillie, a Larkhall miners’ leader who later became a Labour MP. Known as ‘Bob’, the young Smillie had grown up in a militant ILP land-working family, their left-wing politics as assured as their grinding poverty. James Maxton wrote of Smillie and his background:

  We knew the stock from which he came. We saw his father and mother living a strenuous existence on their little farm in Lanarkshire, toiling early and late on the soil, but still with surplus energy to devote to the socialist movement, to the unemployed, to the improvement of the conditions of the miners living around them.

  Smillie joined hunger marches as an 18-year-old. He opposed rearmament and war and opined that the establishment of world socialism was the only method of achieving peace. He worked to create an ILP version of the Young Communists’ League, resulting in the formation of the Guild of Youth.

  When the war in Spain began, Smillie threw himself into the fray. In October 1936, he broke off from a chemistry degree at Glasgow University to travel to Barcelona, where he joined the Executive Committee of the International Revolutionary Youth Bureau, and became John McNair’s assistant.

  Smillie transferred the energies he had ploughed into his work for the ILP across to the POUM. As James Maxton stated, he endorsed their perspective on the conflict in Spain, viewing

  the Spanish struggle not as one between capitalist-democracy and fascism, but rather as the struggle of the Spanish working class against the forces of fascism and international capitalism; with the hope of ultimate victory for the Spanish people, with the hope of the foundation of a Soviet Spain.

  In a letter home to fellow ILP member Dan McArthur, Smillie declared his loyalty to the POUM youth section on the grounds that they stood for ‘the social revolution and not for the democratic republic’. This placed him in direct opposition to the stated position of the Popular Front government, the Communist Party and his compatriots in the International Brigades.

  Smillie dedicated himself to his propagandistic and support roles in Barcelona, but when the ILP contingent of volunteers arrived in Spain in January 1937, he demanded to be sent to fight alongside them. Permission was reluctantly granted (McNair and others had reservations about letting such a young man enter the field of battle), and Smillie joined his colleagues in their journey to the Aragon Front. In action, he fought bravely, gaining the praise of POUM and ILP leaders, including Commander Georges Kopp, who wrote:

  We have had a complete success, which is largely due to the courage and discipline of the English [sic] comrades who were in charge of assaulting the principal of the enemy’s parapets. Among them I feel it my duty to give a particular mention to the splendid actions of Eric Blair [George Orwell], Bob Smillie and Paddy Donovan.

  At the end of April, Smillie and the ILP contingent travelled to Barcelona for a period of leave. The young volunteer was issued a permission document from a POUM official permitting his return to Scotland ‘for very grave family reasons, which in my judgement and because of his excellent record warrant his temporary absence.’ In the second week of May, Smillie began his journey home, heading north towards the Pyrenees. He was to attend a meeting of the International B
ureau in Paris on the 11th, before continuing his campaign work for the Guild of Youth with a speaking tour of Scotland. This plan suggests that the ‘grave family reasons’ may have been fabricated to ensure his smooth exit from Spain. Yet on 10 May, he found himself under arrest at Figueras. David Murray explained the initial reasoning given for Smillie’s detention:

  He had no written permit in his possession to leave the militia and to pass over the frontier. He had such a permit signed by the commander of the Lenin Division but had unfortunately forgotten it in Barcelona.

  Smillie later reported a feeling that the authorities had been ‘waiting for him’ in Figueras. After a custodial night in the increasingly volatile atmosphere of Barcelona, he was swiftly transferred to the Model Prison in Valencia. It was clear that Smillie had become a victim of the government’s POUM clampdown, as David Murray testified:

  Unfortunately, young Smillie was arrested at the exact time of the crisis in the Valencia government, and no definite steps could be taken to have him released during the period of flux.

  A police statement confirmed that Smillie had been detained on three counts: for lacking the certificate allowing him out of Spain; for carrying ‘documents’; and for having ‘materials of war’ about his person. All three charges were specious: Smillie did have the required pass but had left it behind as David Murray stated; the documents he carried were merely personal letters (including messages of love to his girlfriend Catriona that the republican authorities saw fit to translate); and he was in possession of two hand grenades, both of which were discharged and intended as war souvenirs.