Homage to Caledonia

by Gray, Daniel.

  Suspicions over the death of Bob Smillie were expressed in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, first published in April 1938, in which he referred to Smillie as ‘perhaps the best of the bunch’ among the ILP contingent.25 Orwell felt he had died ‘an evil and meaningless death… like a neglected animal’ and was sceptical in the extreme as to what caused it, writing ‘perhaps the appendicitis story was true… [but] people so tough as that do not usually die of appendicitis if they are properly looked after.’ Orwell’s take on proceedings was written before the release of the ILP’s official report into Smillie’s death, which, to an extent justified his comments. Rather than offering an alternative explanation for the death, Orwell’s words stood to reinforce the ILP’s official line: Smillie had been the victim of a tragic case of neglect.

  That official line was reached following extensive investigatory work by David Murray, who took statements from inmates, medical staff and wardens in the Model Prison, as well as from patients, nurses and doctors at the provincial hospital. He also interviewed the Military Fiscal and staff at the Office of Public Safety, the Ministry of Justice and the SIM. With his journalistic background shining through, Murray even carried out interviews at the mortuary and the cemetery where Smillie was interned. His report was completed in February 1938, and published in the New Leader newspaper on 11 March.

  Reflecting the position that David Murray had taken from the outset, it held that Smillie had been arrested not for political reasons but for failing to carry a discharge certificate with him when attempting to leave Spain. However republican authorities had sought to establish whether Smillie had played a part in POUM agitation, prolonging his stay in prison and belatedly adding a political element to his incarceration. The report made it clear that Smillie was perfectly innocent of any wrongdoing and suggested that had he lived, he would have been released. The report concluded:

  We consider that Bob Smillie’s death was due to great carelessness on the part of the responsible authorities which amounted to criminal negligence.

  Interestingly, an earlier version of Murray’s findings, included in a July 1937 letter to John McNair, included ‘intent’ as a possible motive for the neglect shown to Smillie when his illness had become serious. After hearing evidence, Murray was confident that there had been no deliberate delay in treating Smillie. ‘There was’, he wrote, ‘no secret about the manner of his arrest, his place of imprisonment, the type of illness, the location of the hospital and the place of the burial.’

  Questions still hang over the probity of this conclusion. It has been suggested that Murray removed the ‘intent’ part of the argument so as to avoid reigniting tensions on the republican left while the civil war was still being fought. He had been the man closest to the case, and in later years he consistently maintained that there was no sense in the argument that the Spanish would want to kill the young grandson of a titan of the trade union movement. In 1955, Murray, now a Liberal, responded to a letter in the Evening Times that once again cast doubt over Smillie’s fate, replying for what must have seemed like the millionth time:

  Young Robert Ramsay Smillie was not ‘captured and thrown into prison’. On the way home for a speaking tour he was detained at Figueras because his papers were not in order. It happened to be a troublous time so that the detention was not out of the way. He took peritonitis in the Model Prison in Valencia, died in the General Hospital in that city and was buried in the local cemetery. It was all very sad but it could have happened to anyone.

  His adult life barely begun, Smillie had been laid to rest in a land he had sought to defend from fascism and bring revolution to. A Valencian doctor wrote to his father in moving recognition of his sacrifice:

  Your son is buried in the beautiful land of Valencia, a land of brilliant sun and of wide and glorious scenes. His body rests in a land where love of liberty and of democracy are part and parcel with communal life. Now that he is dead, he has the gratitude of the Spanish people, who will never forget those who left their good and peaceful life in their own country to separate themselves from their families and to join the defenders of liberty and independence in Spain.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Scots Scarlet Pimpernel:

  Ethel MacDonald

  If this journey does not make me do something worthwhile, nothing will. I feel that my future centres round here. I am optimistic. I am alive and I am prepared to risk everything in order to be alive. I am here and I shall not return from this land of struggle and heroism in our cause without making an effort to serve.

  Ethel MacDonald, Radio Barcelona speech, March 1937

  ETHEL MACDONALD’S STANCE on the case of Bob Smillie arose from her own experiences in Spain. MacDonald was invited to the country in October 1936 by the CNT-FAI trade union federation, owing to her work with the anarchist United Socialist Movement, another Scottish party with political interests in the civil war.

  The USM was formed in 1934 by Guy Aldred, a leading British anarchist, along with MacDonald, John Taylor Caldwell and anti-parliamentarian members of the ILP. Based in the Bakunin Hall on Glasgow’s Stirling Road, the USM was an anarcho-socialist party. Their ideology borrowed heavily from the theories of William Morris, with a belief in workers’ councils and direct action over democratic political parties. Over the course of the civil war, they held meetings on the subject in Glasgow and Edinburgh and hosted exhibitions of Spanish anarchist art. Aldred had planned to send a ‘USM Anti-Parliamentary Delegation and Expedition’ to Spain in September 1936, to join up with anarchist militia groups and enter the military fray. However, the USM found gathering funds for the ‘expedition’ difficult. They mounted a plea for money in their own Regeneracion newspaper on 3 October:

  Many readers could help us. Some could advance all the money needed. The delegation must leave within one week. Will comrades make a special effort, by loans and donations? If this delegation and expedition is delayed unduly, the Anti-Parliamentarians will prove themselves to be as futile and as contemptible as the Parliamentarians.

  Donations proved insufficient and in February 1937 Ethel MacDonald was still awaiting the arrival of her comrades, as she remarked in a letter to Aldred:

  Do you remember the proposal about sending a battalion of 50 anarchists from Glasgow? I think you had better start getting your list ready. But they must be anarchists or anti-parliamentarians! This is essential.

  Bereft of the financial clout enjoyed by large membership parties such as the CPGB, the USM’s efforts ultimately came to nothing. MacDonald and her friend Jenny Patrick were destined to be the only USM representatives in Spain.

  Ethel Camilia MacDonald was born in Bellshill in 1909. A working class woman of some erudition, she became local ILP secretary in her teens, and became fluent in French and German. Aged 16, she had been sent by the labour exchange for a waitressing job in Dumfries. On arrival, finding that it did not exist, she solicited the advice of Guy Aldred, a locally renowned activist. Impressed by MacDonald’s revolutionary zeal and political acumen, Aldred appointed her secretary for his Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation. She took on the same position in the USM upon its inception and was to serve Aldred and the cause until her death from multiple sclerosis in 1960.

  MacDonald and Jenny Patrick, Aldred’s wife, were summoned to Barcelona to work in the CNT-FAI’s foreign language information centre, and later give nightly English-language political broadcasts on Radio Barcelona. They travelled to Spain in early November 1936. In her diary, Patrick recorded the joy felt by the two upon their arrival in Barcelona:

  Tuesday, 3rd November was the most exciting day in both of our lives and I don’t think we’ll ever forget it. We handed in our papers and after they realised we were comrades, they were terribly nice to us. They asked us if we had money and we told them the truth that we were broke. They took us to a restaurant and we had a wonderful time. Everyone was bright and cheerful and happy. So naturally we were the same. We felt full of enthusiasm. This was revoluti
on.

  Writing in the Sunday Mail on 5 December, MacDonald could not contain her own early zest for the vigour of Catalan life:

  In the main square, the Plaza de la Republica, the white walls of the Generalitat, the government offices, glistened in brilliant sunshine. Birds were singing in the trees and the sky was the most beautiful blue that I have ever seen. Civilian soldiers dressed in their inevitable dungarees and little red and black Glengarry bonnets and smoking endless cigarettes, strolled casually in Las Ramblas and the Via Durruti or chatted to the girl soldiers in the Plaza Catalunya. We had difficulty deciding which were young men and which were girls. They were dressed exactly alike, but as we drew nearer we saw that all the girls had beautifully permed hair and were strikingly made up.

  Despite this fervour, the women initially struggled to find a practical role in fomenting revolution as they had wished. They were also troubled by financial difficulties, a CNT loan having failed to materialise. In a joint letter to Guy Aldred, the pair outlined their anxieties:

  Perhaps things may brighten tomorrow and be OK. You know how bad things seem sometimes on first impressions and then come alright. Anyhow we intend to stick it out, if we can get anything at all to do, whether useful or not, as we don’t want to return like bad pennies. It would be more pleasant if we felt we had some sort of niche, could really be of some use.

  MacDonald wrote in her diary (later serialised in the Bellshill Speaker) on 20 November of her plans to become ‘a speaker, an able and intelligent speaker and not just one who speaks’. Yet it was through the written word that MacDonald, along with Patrick, first found ‘some sort of niche’ and, indeed, prominence. Their crowning glory as journalists occurred during May 1937, when they became probably the first foreign writers to report the internecine street fighting rocking Barcelona. In the Barcelona Bulletin, circulated around Glasgow, MacDonald and Patrick’s eyewitness account startled the left in Scotland and beyond. Dated 5 May, their report was graphic:

  The trouble broke out on Monday afternoon. The civil guards seized the telephone building by force. As the move was quite unexpected, they succeeded in disarming the militiamen in charge there, and so gaining control. All during the night there was firing in the street, and we had a good view from the hotel windows. As the day [Tuesday] wore on the firing became terrific: the police were firing from their building further up the street, and from nearby houses, and the CNT were replying from their HQ, from the balconies and from the roof. The noise is terrible, and already there have been many killed and wounded.

  For her own part, MacDonald had embarked upon her quest to become ‘an able and intelligent speaker’ in January, beginning work as a presenter on the CNT-FAI-run Barcelona Radio. Her nightly broadcasts achieved the substantial feat of becoming an anarchist version of Franklin D Roosevelt’s comfy ‘fireside chats’ in America. Indeed, so pleasing were MacDonald’s tones, she courted unlikely support from that country in the form of regular fan mail, as the Glasgow Herald reported:

  A newspaper collection of Ethel MacDonald’s Radio Barecelona speeches, published in Glasgow on May Day 1937.

  A prominent news editor in Hollywood says that he has received hundred of letters concerning Ethel MacDonald, stating that the writers, in all parts of the USA and Canada, enjoyed her announcements and talks from Barcelona radio, not because they agreed with what she said, but because they thought she had the finest radio speaking voice they had ever heard.

  MacDonald covered a wide range of topics relating to left-wing politics in her transmissions and displayed an ability to disseminate complex ideas in coherent and lively language, as demonstrated in this segment from a speech chiding the British government’s ban on volunteers to Spain and attempting to incite retaliatory action:

  Are you, English-speaking workers, prepared to let this tragic force which means the rape of Spain go on? Are you prepared to lend yourself to this mockery? Are you willing to be fooled longer in this fashion? If you are men and women, if you sense class struggle, you will permit no ban on volunteers.

  MacDonald’s orations were often critical of the communist-influenced republican government and the parliamentary route it embraced. In a discourse on Spain’s attitudes to trade unionism, she pronounced:

  There is no doubt that the magnificent struggle of the Spanish workers challenges the entire theory and historical interpretation of parliamentary socialism. The civil war is a living proof of the futility and worthlessness of parliamentary democracy as a medium for social change.

  Denouncing the democratic course being pursued by the republican government was a brave move on MacDonald’s part, and she soon found herself vilified by the communists and in grave danger of arrest. MacDonald and Patrick’s words in the Barcelona Bulletin placed both women in peril, and MacDonald aggravated the situation by helping to arm militiamen and women in their Barcelona street fights. After Patrick returned to Scotland on 24 May, MacDonald was forced into hiding, though she continued her work for the anarchist militias, smuggling food and letters to prisoners and assisting the escape from Spain of men wanted by republican authorities. The Bellshill woman’s troubles earned her the soubriquet of ‘The Scots Scarlet Pimpernel’, though that notoriety came at a cost; MacDonald was eventually captured and imprisoned on several occasions, firstly for failing to renew her residence permit, then, just days after her release, for ‘visiting, harbouring, and associating with counter-revolutionary aliens’. MacDonald later described to the Glasgow Evening Times how even her first arrest had been politically motivated:

  My arrest was typical of the attitude of the Communist Party. In Scotland the group to which I am attached has always been in complete opposition to the Communist Party. In opposing their propaganda we have always had to face and deal with their fundamental ignorance and brutality. In Spain, their approach is the same. Assault Guards and officials of the Public Order entered the house in which I lived late one night. Without any explanation they commenced to go through thoroughly every room and every cupboard in the house. After having discovered that which to them was sufficient to hang me – revolutionary literature etc. – they demanded to see my passport. On this being shown they informed me that I was in Spain illegally, although I entered Spain quite legally.

  In prison, MacDonald enjoyed the sense of comradeship among inmates, though she sensed the malevolent influence of Soviet techniques of repression on their incarceration:

  The spirit of the comrades in prison is good. Persecution and imprisonment of revolutionists is not something new to Spain. Even persecution by so-called Communists is not new. The treatment meted out to the revolutionists in Russia today beggars description. That can be expected from the present regime in the Socialist fatherland. But that in Spain, whilst their comrades and brothers are struggling at the fronts against the fascist enemy, revolutionists should be arrested on such a scale is a scandal that brings discredit on all those who permit such to take place without making protest. Revolution should mean the end of prisons, not the changing of the guard.

  Amazingly, from her cell MacDonald continued to run an information network enabling sustained agitation against republican suppression. She recounted her insurrectionary work in a Christmas 1937 interview given to the Sunday Mail:

  I used to collect packets of letters from the other prisoners and smuggle them out with my own in the cans in which my food had been brought into prison. Several persons brought in my food but none of them knew they were taking out letters. The cans always landed in the hands of the same man and he knew what to do with them. By means of this channel, too, we managed to organise a hunger strike in every prison in Barcelona in which there were anarchist prisoners. I also spent time arranging how, when one of us got out, we would help the others to flee the country. Everything was cut and dried. Street plans were prepared and everyone knew exactly what to do and where to go.

  A pamphlet on Spain produced by one of Glasgow’s anarchist splinter groups in support of the CNT-FAI. />
  MacDonald’s eventual release, however, was obtained not by these clandestine activities, but through the intervention of ILP man Fenner Brockway. Despite Brockway’s assertion at the time that ‘she is an anarchist and has no connection with our party’, while on a visit to Spain he visited the Minister of the Interior in Valencia to request that MacDonald be charged and tried or released. Accordingly, on the evening of Thursday 8 July, MacDonald was released from prison.

  Brockway advised the now notorious ‘Scots Scarlet Pimpernel’ to head straight for Britain and safety. Never one to opt for the easy option, she remained in Spain, determined to carry on in her ‘effort to serve’. MacDonald then ‘disappeared’ for several weeks, triggering press speculation in the UK as to her exploits and whereabouts. Her anxious parents made repeated overtures to the British Consulate in Spain for assistance in locating their daughter. The Glasgow Herald reported on 2 August that, despite her poverty, MacDonald’s mother would ‘gladly sell her furniture to raise money to bring her daughter back home if only she could get contact with her.’ The MacDonalds’ concerns were heightened courtesy of a menacing letter they received from one Helen BS Lennox, speculating that MacDonald could have been struck down by the same forces that she had accused of killing Bob Smillie:

  The Secret Service operating today in Spain comes by night and its victims are never seen again. Bob Smillie they didn’t dare to bump off openly, but he may have suffered more because of that. Your Ethel certainly believes his death was intended. She prophesised it before his death took place, and said he would not be allowed out of the country with the knowledge he had. What worries me more than anything is that Ethel has already been ill and would be easy prey for anyone trying to make her death appear natural.

  This letter cruelly played upon the fragile state of MacDonald’s mother. A self-proclaimed psychic, she duly became convinced of her daughter’s death. Mrs MacDonald told the Sunday Post that she was convinced Ethel’s ghost had visited the family home, confessing, ‘As I have gone about my housework this week I have repeatedly fancied I heard a voice calling “Mother”.’