A Scottish voice reached me through the wind – ‘Give me sunny Spain.’ ‘Aye, let’s go back,’ came another. They then made their way to their reserved carriages, some on stretchers. Tea with sugar was the first thing on their minds!
Sixteen of the wounded men were Scottish, and most had served in Spain for at least a year.
The communal praise heaped on the Brigaders by La Pasionaria and the people of Barcelona was echoed in Britain with a succession of welcome receptions and rallies, though none were endorsed by the government as was the case in Spain. Robert Walker, Bob Cooney and token Englishman Sam Wild led their Battalion down the platform at Victoria Station and out into the street to a rapturous greeting from a crowd of 20,000. In his speech to those gathered, Cooney turned his attentions to the non-interventionist prime minister:
British Battalion troops marching in early 1938. By the year’s end, they had taken part in their final procession, through the streets of Barcelona.
The British Battalion is going into action against Chamberlain for the defence of Britain. We gave a pledge to the Spanish people that we would do everything in our power here in Britain to forward the cause of Spain, of democracy, of liberty.
Meanwhile, Willie Gallacher MP set out the challenge ahead:
I speak on behalf of every section of the progressive movement in this country when I give you a welcome home. But a welcome home not to rest but to struggle harder than ever before to carry through to a conclusion the cause for which you have suffered so much.
Following the speeches, the Battalion, flanked by their audience, marched through London, laying a wreath on the Cenotaph for their fallen comrades, and delivering a petition to 10 Downing Street. Describing events, Tommy Bloomfield noted that the popular press were no more interested in praising the Brigade than they had been when he left for Spain:
When we arrived back in London we received no publicity except the report in the Daily Worker. The government wanted everything kept quiet. Sam Wild formed us into Battalion formation. He led us bearing our colours. He then placed our walking wounded in front of the Battalion marching on Downing Street. On reaching Downing Street a cordon of police halted us and said we could go no further. Our walking wounded split in two. Sam Wild marched through bearing our standard and told the inspector in charge that he was going to deliver our petition come hell or high water. The police didn’t care to have the stigma of batoning wounded veterans of Spain so common sense prevailed and we were allowed to deliver our petition.
From London, 90 Scottish Brigaders boarded a bus bound for Glasgow on 11 December. They were met by another colossal crowd, who cheered the men, clad in khaki uniform, to the City Hall for an official reception. Scottish National Party Secretary John MacCormick spoke to the special guests and reaffirmed the message that the battle was not yet over:
Our comrades have returned from Spain and though they have laid down their arms the fight goes on – the fight for freedom without which there is no civilisation.
More laconically, Sir Hugh Robertson, conductor of Glasgow Orpheus Choir, commented, ‘I want as a Scotsman to say “Aye, lads: I’m proud o’ ye this day.”’ Bob Cooney once again mounted the podium and demonstrated that he had taken heart from the reaction the returning Brigaders had received:
We have met the real Britain in coming back. The Britain of whom we had experience in Spain made us furiously determined that we would have no rest until this rotten government is swept from office.
There was a certain amount of regret among Brigaders, as Thomas Quinn told a Glasgow Herald journalist:
In one way we are very glad to be home again and to see our friends here, but I think that all of us feel that we would like to have stayed on and to have fought the war to finish.
Returned Brigaders including Dundonian Arthur Nicoll (foreground, right) tour Britain in search of support for the Spanish republic.
Eight of the returnees travelled onwards by train to Edinburgh and yet more adulation. At Waverley station, a sizeable crowd awaited their arrival, as well as several councillors and key figures from the Edinburgh Trades and Labour Council, the cpgb and various trade unions. The Scotsman relayed details of their arrival:
When the train arrived there were scenes touched with deep emotion on the platform when the men were welcomed by their relatives. The welcome they were given on the station roadways was loud and prolonged, the station ringing with the cheers of the crowd. The ‘Internationale’ and the ‘Red Flag’ were sung and accompanied by band.
Behind banners of support, the eight and their followers walked on to the Free Gardeners’ Hall in Picardy Place, where ‘both the lower and upper halls were crowded for a welcoming meeting, at which the former members of the International Brigade gave brief speeches.’
In Dundee, a crowd welcomed seven returning Brigaders at the West Station on 12 December. Accompanied by a piper, the men led the crowd to a rally at the City Square, though the local Communist Party fell foul of Dundee Magistrates for failing to gain permission for the gathering. Such local red tape was unlikely to stop men who had fought at Jarama, Belchite and the Ebro.
Similar receptions were planned for the wounded arrivals, due in Scotland on the 23rd. Steve Fullarton and Jimmy Reid, neighbours in Shettleston and comrades in battle, were provided with lodgings in London for the night of the 22nd. That evening Reid, in Fullarton’s words, ‘decided he wanted his pint’, and returned several hours later bearing news of a planned rendezvous the following day with a Glaswegian girl he had met. This would mean missing the 1pm train to Glasgow that Reid, Fullarton and Dusty Miller were booked onto. Miss it they did. At Glasgow Central a crowd had gathered, only to be left staring at the empty platform. Reid’s pint had robbed the three of their moment of glory.
Once settled at home, Brigaders sometimes found reintegration into normal life difficult. Help was unlikely to come from a British government that had recognised Franco as Spain’s sovereign leader in late February 1939, over a month before his conclusive victory. To emphasise their position, the Foreign Office sent out letters to all Brigaders to inform them
that the sum of £3. 19. 3d. has been expended from public funds in connexion with your repatriation to the United Kingdom on evacuation from Spain. I am to request you to be good enough to refund this amount to this department.
Gratitude, indeed, for men who had tried to halt the march of European fascism – considerably earlier than the British state did. The reaction among Scottish Brigaders was uniform to each and every letter of final warning that arrived; in some areas of Glasgow, a wartime shortage of toilet paper was never likely. Tom Murray replied for hundreds of men when he wrote to the FO:
I am sure it would not tax the resources of the British government to any greater extent to ignore my legal obligations, than it did to ignore its own legal obligations to supply the Spanish republic with arms and assistance.
Some letters arrived later than others; for Steve Fullarton, desperately trying to join the armed forces and once more stand up to Hitler and Mussolini, the timing was anything but impeccable:
This was typical of the fo of the day. Get that fiver off him. Two days before the Battle of Britain. Can you imagine? People were talking about what we were going to do when the invasion came. I had it in my mind I would desert to the Highlands.
Fullarton, displaying a sense of decency that the government appeared to be bereft of, soon overcame his hurt and joined the Royal Air Force. This, despite the wartime need for military servants, proved to be a struggle; the Shettleston man was one of many Scots Brigaders who suffered from a covert system of blacklisting due to their service in Spain. In all, from initially volunteering to being presented with his uniform, it took Fullarton 14 months to join the RAF. He was made to gather extra references and came under an uncommon level of scrutiny. If he was in any doubt as to the reasoning behind this, all became clear when an officer in charge of recruitment barked at him ‘Spain? Spain? You’ve been t
o Spain?!’ and launched into a diatribe against the International Brigades. In the end, Fullarton’s good character merited superlative references from his ex-employers and family doctor, though even the latter had to write ‘He has been in Spain. If this is no bar to recruitment he is in every way suitable to the RAF.’
Tommy Bloomfield suffered a similar fate when trying to enlist with the Navy, asserting that ‘we were victimised. When World War Two broke out I volunteered for the armed forces and was refused. No explanation was given.’ After pressure from Willie Gallacher, Bloomfield was eventually permitted to serve.
Chris Smith, prior to becoming a Brigader a member of the Territorial Army, learned that the ta had banned those who served in Spain from joining or rejoining. Smith regularly found plain clothes police officers following and questioning him as to his political activities. Similarly, in 1967 George Drever was informed by Special Branch that each and every military and career role or promotion he had missed out on had been down to his involvement in Spain and his political beliefs.
As Drever had found, this blacklisting crossed over into the world of work. Tommy Bloomfield remained convinced until his dying day that his time in Spain had, in the eyes of others, left him unemployable:
As I had been a rigger in the Royal Navy, I applied for a job of work in Rosyth dockyard as a rigger knowing I could splice any wire rope up to two inches over my knee. Three times I applied and was informed there were no vacancies. Yet the man living next door to me was given work there. During the war he served in the raf and was a Freemason. He could hardly walk with arthritis, he was blind in one eye and had a dicky heart. Good luck to him obtaining work. I needed work as well as him. But it seemed that as I had fought for democracy in Spain I must be a communist. I was fit to serve in the armed forces from 1939 to 1945 but not entitled to the right to work. If I’d fought for Franco I would have been given work.
Annie Murray still flying the flag half a century on.
They had gone from legendary status in Barcelona to pariah status in their own backyards.
Though ostracised by authority, not one Scottish Brigader displayed regret at his decision to go to Spain. All that Brigaders did rue was the eventual defeat of the republic, which most put down to Britain and France’s non-interventionism and the assistance given to the nationalists by Germany and Italy. Neither were they bitter, though there was continuing widespread anger at the inaction of the British government. George Murray’s pride was typical:
Looking back on the war after half a century, I would say the International Brigade was something unique. There was every nationality you could think of. I never had any regrets about what I did. My only regret was having a bullet through my chest. But no, no, I have no regrets. I’m quite proud of it.32
Tommy Bloomfield echoed Murray’s sentiments, though added a sombre note about what the republican Spanish were left to face:
Looking back on my time in Spain I can only say I am both humble and proud to have known and served with the cream of the workers and the believers in true democracy. My heart goes to the workers of Spain for when Franco was victorious I can imagine the countless men and women who were slaughtered throughout the country simply for being anti-fascist.
The advent of the World War Two was something of a moral, if resolutely pyrrhic, victory for the Brigaders, many of whom, as we have seen, had warned that the failure to make Spain ‘the tomb of fascism’ would lead to wider conflict. Indeed, that wider war validated Brigaders’ opinions that they were right to go and fight in Spain, as Bill Cranston averred:
I don’t have any regrets about going to Spain. I would go back again if I was in the same position. I think the cause was a worthwhile one. What we said came true when Hitler started World War Two. He proved that we were right in what we said about the dangers from fascism.
As Roddy MacFarquhar put it:
We were convinced that if we could win we could stop war spreading. Had we been able to win we would have stopped Hitler and Mussolini in their tracks.
Predating historians in their analyses, Scottish Brigaders were among the first to postulate the now widely accepted opinion that the Spanish war was not a civil one. As David Anderson later suggested, ‘it wasn’t a civil war. It was a war of the Spanish people fighting for independence against fascism.’33 Bob Cooney was of a similar opinion, and interestingly he even stated that in diverting Hitler’s attentions and resources, the Spanish war had been a positive thing:
It was not a civil war. It was Hitler’s and Mussolini’s first round of the Second World War, and a costly round it proved for them. It can be truly said that the defeat of Hitler started in Spain. His timetable of aggression was dislocated for three years and the world was alerted to the nature of fascism by the destruction of Guernica and other atrocities.
Cooney was not alone in this viewpoint; Jimmy Maley felt that:
One good thing to come out of the Spanish war is that they stopped the German army starting the other war sooner than it did. It delayed the big war.
Despite the difficulties faced in joining the British armed forces, a majority of Scottish survivors of the war in Spain were to fight in that ‘big war’. Many of the men were members of the CPGB, and by participating in World War Two they were defying the official instructions given by their Party, another representation of the absence of slavishness among Scots.
Donald Renton and John Londragan served in the Royal Artillery, while Eddie Brown served the Highland Light Infantry during the D-Day landings at Normandy. David Anderson and John Dunlop were in the Gordon Highlanders and Scots Guards respectively, and Bill Cranston served in Egypt for the duration of his five years in the army. Now experienced soldiers, many of the men excelled, although their political convictions were never far from the surface. Jimmy Maley, a member of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and then the Highland Light Infantry, served in Burma and India, where he became involved with communists recently released from prison and took part in a public debate on the causes of war with an army captain. Afterwards, Maley was given a prompt reproach by the military police.
Although now sporting the colours of a different conflict, after nearly a decade of war the British Battalion had played their part in finally defeating Hitler and Mussolini’s fascism. To the chagrin of International Brigaders and exiled Spanish republicans, though, Franco’s fascism was to remain as undisturbed by the Allied powers in 1945 as it had been in 1936. Their noninterventionism remained selective.
CHAPTER 17
‘Something to be proud of’:
Conclusions
Today as a pensioner, I live on social security but I’m the richest man in this world having known my comrades of the International Brigades, and the leaders of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement along with the outstanding men and women of my era. If I had my life to live over again I would do the same as there is no other way.
Tommy Bloomfield
There are an amazing number of men from Scotland here, every day you meet someone from home so there is really no feeling of isolation for us.
Alec Park
ON 29 MARCH 1939, the city of Valencia became the last significant pocket of republican resistance to surrender. Franco’s nationalists subsequently declared themselves to be the official government of Spain and an intense period of genocidal repression against republicans was instigated.
With the defeat of the republic came the defeat of a gargantuan Scottish effort that far outweighed the size or population of the country. Proportionally, Scotland sent more men to fight than anywhere else in Britain and arguably beyond. Nearly one third of them perished in Spain.
The aid movement mobilised on a scale not witnessed elsewhere. Scots, though suffering from some of the highest death rates and unemployment figures in Europe, gave time and money with boundless munificence.
Once in Spain, the Scottish contribution was similarly noteworthy. Scots were omnipresent in the highest ranks of the British Battalion
. Wilfred McCartney, George Aitken, Jock Cunningham and Harold Fry all rose to become commanders of the Battalion. Cunningham, prior to his controversial expulsion from Spain, was lauded by the Brigades leadership and CPGB, none more so than in a speech made by Harry Pollitt at a Unity Campaign meeting in March 1937:
One day we shall tell our children about the defence of Madrid, this epic story that can never die in the pages of world history. I think of Jock Cunningham from Coatbridge out in Spain, the British Chapayev, leading his men fearlessly and unafraid, dancing with death. A word of encouragement here, over the top there, bringing in a wounded comrade here. Ceaselessly moving among his men until everyone has become influenced with the mighty unconquerable spirit of a worker blessed with a fiery hatred of capitalism and fascism. This is Jock Cunningham: our Chapayev.
Bob Cooney, who became Political Commissar to the entire British Battalion from April 1938 onwards, was similarly revered. Peter Kerrigan portrayed Cooney as
another about whose work it is impossible to speak too highly. Through the whole of his two months without a break of any kind and in every action, his steadiness has been a sheet anchor for others.
Tom Murray claimed that Cooney was ‘more responsible than any other single individual for the splendid morale and military efficiency of the Battalion.’ The Aberdonian was also immensely popular among regular Brigaders. Such was his devotion to them, he found himself at one point demoted to the role of rifleman for, said Brigades authorities, ‘exhibiting “rank and filist” tendencies’. Scottish defiance of officialdom in Spain had surfaced once more.
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