Homage to Caledonia

by Gray, Daniel.

  David Murray was immediately assigned to the case of his ‘brither Scot’ by the ILP. By the time Murray visited Smillie in his barren cell at the Model Prison, the young Scot had talked his way into a further, more serious charge of ‘rebellion against the authorities’. This charge arose when, in questioning, Smillie had naively admitted to being in the POUM building during Barcelona street fighting on 3 May. That he had played no active part in the skirmishing did not matter; association was enough to merit an indefinite prison term. Police suspicions of Smillie had been heightened by sensationalist press coverage in Britain and Spain, and the communist-influenced authorities began to think that they had captured a figure of great importance to the POUM and ILP (despite the fact Smillie played a vital role in the youth wings of both parties, at 20 years old he had not yet reached anything like the highest echelons of power). Though Smillie was arrested prior to the main wave of repression against the POUM and their associates, he could not escape the repercussions of the embittered political climate outside the prison walls; the increased charges against him reflected that much.

  ILP efforts to secure Smillie’s release had begun the moment news of his arrest emerged. On 11 May, John McNair appealed to the British consulate for help and continued to lobby them over the following weeks. David Murray also looked to the consulate for assistance, but ended up frustrated and convinced, as we have seen, that the British authorities were inherently pro-nationalist. The POUM also swung into action, lobbying the Spanish authorities and producing a replica of Smillie’s original exit certificate, though all they received in reply from the police service was a perfunctory note stating that nothing could be done. Murray and the POUM engaged a solicitor, Vincente Martinez Ubreros, to work on the case. Ubreros and Murray were successful in gaining access to Smillie, and visited him several times in prison, where Murray also met with deserters Donald, Mudie and Sneddon.

  Murray wrote to the ILP leadership in late May to convey his exasperation at coverage of the Smillie case in the New Leader, and to reason that the arrest of the man had arisen due to misunderstandings:

  In spite of the foolish New Leader comments, Smillie carried no documents and was arrested purely by chance. He and his Barcelona and London friends have been his own worst enemies and I promise them all a good kick in the pants. The military police recognises that the whole thing is a piece of nonsense but the ‘secret’ police are said to be engaged in investigating the circumstances.

  At this stage, it appeared that an end to the case would swiftly follow; yet as June began, Smillie was still in detention without charge. Not wishing to prejudice the case or give the nationalists an opportunity to spread negative publicity, the ILP chose to remain outwardly quiet on the matter. However, behind the scenes, James Maxton and the party head office pleaded for help from the Spanish Ambassador in London and asked other figures in the labour movement to do the same.

  On Friday 4 June, Smillie complained of stomach pains that were to worsen over the weekend. On Sunday 6th, he finally received medical attention, albeit from a fellow inmate who was a qualified doctor. But as the week progressed, Smillie’s condition deteriorated rapidly, until his cell-mate, a Spaniard named Vincente Rodriguez, insisted that the Scot be taken to the prison hospital. Smillie was diagnosed with appendicitis. Ward congestion meant he could not be operated upon. Hearing of his friend’s decline in health, David Murray travelled to Valencia from his office in Barcelona on 11 June. By the time he arrived in the city, Smillie had been transferred to Valencia’s provincial hospital. Arriving out of hours and with no medical records, he was left unattended for some time and subsequently fell into a coma. Murray was informed that Smillie was conscious and had indicated that he did not wish to receive any visitors. When on the evening of Saturday 12th June a doctor finally examined him, it was found that, owing to congestion in his lower abdomen, he could not be operated upon. What happened next was described in a note written by Murray after the event:

  Smillie came in [to the theatre] about 11pm. Doctor against operation as already too late. Bob got up out of bed, staggered and fell, hitting his head. Was dead two hours after arrival. Advanced peritonitis.

  However, as Smillie breathed his last, Murray remained unaware of the young Scotsman’s plight. On Sunday 13th, he wrote to Minister of Justice Manuel Irujo asking him to intervene in Smillie’s case ‘either to procure immediate release of the prisoner or to expedite the legal investigation and trial’. He also penned a fairly upbeat letter to Smillie himself, again emphasising that the clearing of misunderstandings brought on by the detainee would prompt an annulment of charges:

  Robert Smillie MP, grandfather of Bob Smillie.

  You seem to have been bent on giving all the wrong answers to the questions put to you. You would have been out long ago but for your own actions and those of your well meaning friends. You have been accused out of your own mouth – due, of course, to your faulty knowledge of Spanish, and to your misunderstanding of the question put to you. The whole business is an unfortunate mistake.

  On 14 June, convinced he was just a few more meetings away from obtaining Smillie’s release, Murray travelled to the Model Prison only to be greeted with the news of his death. That morning at 10am, Robert Ramsay Smillie, not yet 21 years old, had been buried in a wooden casket at Valencia’s giant main cemetery. It was left to Georges Kopp to pay tribute to Smillie in a letter to his parents:

  You have by this time heard of the sad and untimely fate of your son, Robert. He was one of the most gallant soldiers in the regiment which I commanded. It is a duty and a privilege to express to you my sympathy, and to assure you that Bob always carried himself bravely and courageously in and out of the firing line. You can be proud of him.

  From the moment news of Smillie’s fate became public, conspiracy theories about the circumstances of his arrest and death began to mount. From the beginning, David Murray insisted that Smillie had been arrested on a technicality and then died of natural causes, although he did admit that the republican authorities were slow in treating him, with fatal consequences. Murray was repeatedly forced to deny the accusation that Smillie had been arrested and murdered because he held secrets the republicans did not want revealing, and for his collusion with the POUM. On 30 June he wrote to John McNair:

  The opinions which are widely current that Robert Smillie was arrested due to a suspected connection with secret conspiracies and planned outrages is quite unfounded. Accusations that the prisoner was ill treated and finally shot are completely untrue.

  In a message to Eileen O’Shaughnessy the next day, Murray reported:

  All kinds of rumours are circulating; that he had bombs, papers from Franco and even that he was going to blow up churches. Others state that he was shot and buried secretly. The facts are that he was arrested for having no discharge papers on him. He had neither documents nor bombs and there never was any prospect of a charge along these lines.

  Alex Smillie, Bob’s father, initially accepted Murray’s account of events. On 28 July, he wrote, ‘I am well satisfied that my son died from one of these causes which human beings cannot avoid’, and Murray wrote to John McNair, ‘The Smillies are bearing up very well… you must remember they are not fushionless Sassenachs and thus not easily beaten.’

  Yet by the winter of 1937, Alex Smillie had begun to doubt Murray’s version of events. He now believed the accusations made in newspaper articles by Ethel MacDonald that his son had been targeted by the secret police and executed. Characteristically open and frank, in responding to Smillie senior’s misgivings Murray pledged to answer ‘anything within the orbit of my personal knowledge or experience.’ He continued:

  I am convinced, and this I can affirm on oath, that Bob died a natural death. All my observations and impressions lead me to this conclusion. Judgement is a human thing and liable to error, but in spite of every curious and mysterious circumstance, I am convinced that Bob was never ill-treated nor was he done to death.

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bsp; Coming from a man as honourable as Murray, this statement was not to be taken lightly. ‘I am sorry to have to bring these matters up,’ he continued, ‘but complete openness is the only thing to counter the wild and unfounded statements which are gaining currency.’ Despite this avowed candidness, Alex Smillie now accused Murray of suppressing relevant facts. At an ILP conference in February 1938, he aired his grievances in public, heckling Murray as he spoke from the podium. Testing his patience further, a delegate also approached Murray and accused him of being a spy for the Daily Express. Murray wrote to John McNair:

  I had no intention of mentioning the Smillie case except to say that a report was on the way. Alex Smillie immediately jumped up and shouted that if I were to be allowed to speak he would demand the right also then he went on to shout about ‘suppression’. I had to go to another meeting and I told our local lad to tell Alex that I had not intended to refer to Bob’s case. He said to the Motherwell chap ‘you don’t know the lies David Murray has been telling me’.

  Murray contacted Smillie the day after the conference, again emphasising that nothing had been kept from him. In reply, Smillie claimed that the true facts of the case were hidden in Murray’s file, destined never to appear in any reports. This supposition was based on perceived inconsistencies between Murray’s early comments on Smillie’s death and official reports later released by the ILP stating that it had been a tragic accident:

  I am not pursuing this case gladly, but I have a duty to the boy who, according to your first statement in Barcelona, was ‘murdered’ by the people in charge at Valencia… you completely fail to draw the conclusions from the evidence which everyone else draws who has seen it.

  Smillie wrote that he had initially delayed coming forward with his suspicions because of his high regard for Murray and loyalty to the ILP. Highly regarded or not, Murray still faced the task of once again refuting Smillie’s accusations, and he duly obliged, in impassioned terms:

  I insist that I have consciously tried to get to the bottom of the whole matter, that I have suppressed nothing, that I have added nothing and that I thoroughly believe what I have stated. I do not for a moment deny that individuals were guilty of gross neglect and carelessness and I do not believe there was any conspiracy to get Bob, to ill treat him, and then to do away with him.

  Of particular vexation to Murray was the charge by Alex Smillie and others that Bob had been a political prisoner, thus hypothetically paving the way for his ill-treatment at the hands of the republican secret police. Having visited the Model Prison, though, Murray was able to affirm to Alex that

  his imprisonment was no secret and all the particulars were entered quite openly into the books of the Military Fiscal. I saw them and he was purely a military prisoner.

  A pamphlet in remembrance of Bob Smillie.

  While Murray believed that Smillie’s incarceration was prolonged as a consequence of political events, he was adamant that the initial arrest had been purely down to military factors, namely the homeward bound Scot misplacing his discharge certificate. Smillie had fallen victim to the republican authorities’ clampdown on desertion from active service in Spain. Alex Smillie continued to doubt his version of events, though ultimately he decided not to take the case further. He later contributed to the ILP’s official report on the case.

  Alex Smillie’s suspicions were undoubtedly stoked by the conspiracy theories that gained credence in left-wing circles, many of which still make for intriguing reading today. Belgian POUM commander Georges Kopp, himself arrested on 19 June 1937, did not make an official statement on the matter until January 1939. Kopp was adamant that Bob Smillie had been kicked to death by the SIM. During his own cross-examination by the SIM, Kopp claimed to have noticed a filing cabinet containing dossiers on figures suspected of working for or with the POUM. On being left alone in the room, he had investigated further and seen that among them there was a file on Bob Smillie. Upon Kopp’s release in late September 1937, he decided to burgle the fairly unsecure unit in which he had been questioned, and take possession of the Smillie file. Having done so, he pored through the details of the file before sending it to his mother in Belgium for safe-keeping, though it was never to arrive there. According to Kopp, it contained around 200 pages of statements detailing a cross-examination of Smillie undertaken by SIM agents on 12 June. In his January 1939 statement, he attested that, during this examination Smillie had been informed

  that a fascist plot had been discovered in England and that the ILP was compromised in it; that the English police had found out that Fenner Brockway and John McNair were mere fascist agents, actually on the pay-roll of the Gestapo; that the POUM was a fascist organisation too and was about to be crushed.

  Smillie was then asked to sign a statement condemning the POUM and the ILP. He replied that he was happy to sign any statement against fascism upon the production of evidence of the POUM/ILP plots. Smillie had refused to sign a number of statements placed in front of him by the SIM agents, until the police told him that he would have to be ‘taught to behave better’. The final statement in the file, by a doctor, stated that the ‘teaching’ had rapidly got out of hand, necessitating Smillie’s urgent transfer to hospital. Kopp recounted:

  The doctor states that Bob had the skin and the flesh of his skin perforated by a powerful kick delivered by a foot shod in a nailed boot; the intestines were partly hanging outside. Another blow had severed the left side connection between the jaw and the skull and the former was merely hanging on the right side. Bob died about 30 minutes after reaching the hospital.

  In the context of David Murray’s official verdict that Smillie had died from peritonitis, these were startling allegations which directly contradicted it. The story also fitted in with Murray’s initial report of Smillie having ‘a bang on his head’, albeit not from a fall. But could all those inmates of the Model Prison who told Murray they had witnessed Smillie’s illness and deterioration have been lying? And how could Kopp’s memory be so precise after a brief glance at 200 pages of reports in Spanish? Also, where had the Smillie dossier disappeared to?

  Well before Kopp’s statement was issued, Ethel MacDonald had fanned the flames of conjecture with her own hypothesis. On her return from Spain in November 1937 after a spell as representative of the United Socialist Movement (USM), she did her utmost to convince the public that Bob Smillie had been murdered, alleging that the secret police had assassinated him in cold blood. Many in Spain at the time also believed this, to the extent that even ILP insider Charlie Doran was convinced Smillie had been shot. MacDonald also claimed that Smillie had been secretly buried under a different, possibly Belgian, name. Her accusations infuriated the ILP leadership. John McNair summed up the mood when he wrote to party member Hugh McNeill, ‘Ethel MacDonald knows nothing about the case of our Comrade Bob and my feeling is that this cheap publicity is both uncalled for and painful.’

  A letter to McNair of January 1938 shows how David Murray worked to counter her statements and question their veracity:

  Ethel MacDonald has been quite a trouble and my tactics are to choke her off. I corrected her second article for the Sunday Mail. It was full of errors – Bob’s age, my visit to Spain, in fact everything. I might have let it go and then slammed her but once a thing appears in print any amount of contradiction will not remove the impression.

  MacDonald also insisted that Smillie had been carrying out anti-communist activities on behalf of the POUM. Murray worried that ‘this is just what the Communist Party is looking for as a cause for action’; in MacDonald’s words, they would find justification for reprisals against the POUM. Her contentions, though, were never really taken as statements of fact; the greatest damage they caused was in adding to the rumour-mongering surrounding Smillie’s death.

  Perhaps MacDonald’s claims of wrongdoing would have gained more credence than they did had she eschewed the political angle and focused on medical issues alone. Here, there were a number of apparent inconsistencies. In
a letter to Alex Smillie, Dr A Ferrer, the consultant with responsibility for Bob following his arrival in Valencia Hospital, confirmed that the patient had died from acute peritonitis. Dr Ferrer had taken the decision that ‘it was pointless to operate, and it only would have made his condition worse.’ Smillie’s plight was already, in his view, irreversible. His death had been one of those ‘very unfortunate events that we all wish would never happen.’ Ferrer claimed that when Smillie had left the prison hospital he was ‘very satisfied with his treatment, to the extent that when he was discharged… he shook the [prison] doctor’s hand and had a smile on his face.’

  This directly contradicts the statements of other witnesses, who claimed Smillie left the prison hospital in a dire condition, rendering an exchange of pleasantries unlikely. David Murray was told by Model Prison inmate John Mudie that prior to his transfer to the provincial hospital, Smillie’s face had been a ‘terrible red’, and his entire body ‘practically useless.’ He was clearly in an advanced state of neglect, largely because, said Mudie, the ‘prison official doctor apparently did not want to do anything’ (the POUM even claimed that the communist secret police had effected this delay and hence caused Smillie’s death). Further, the stricken Smillie had left the prison hospital under his own steam, as Murray wrote in his initial report, ‘The prison authorities were guilty of grave neglect. Bob was not taken or carried to the hospital but was compelled to stagger there himself.’

  It seems clear that Smillie was in no fit state to bid a fond farewell to the prison hospital and its staff. While this does not disprove the fact he died of peritonitis, it does show that certain aspects of the official statement on Smillie’s death were questionable. It is easy to see why Alex Smillie and others felt that all was not as it seemed.