News and Blog

A multinational special interest group has been set up to share and exchange information about the blockade-runners, seafarers and dockworkers and their organisations who supported the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39.

Drawn from organisations in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, the group says it wll have an international perspective on maritime workers’ involvement on the side of the Spanish Republic.

This article appears in the latest issue of the IBMT Magazine (issue 2-2017), which IBMT members receive in the post. Non-members have to wait until another issue is published before the previous issue is posted on this website. The article was written in 1975 by International Brigader Frank Farr, then living in London, though previously from Leicester. Unpublished until now, it is in the IBMT Archive at the Marx Memorial Library in London. Farr’s papers, including a diary of his time in Spain, were donated to the Trust in 2016 by his family.

This week marks the 80th anniversary of the arrival of nearly 4,000 refugee children from Spain’s Basque Country, along with several hundred adult carers, in what remains the largest influx of refugees to Britain in one day.

They arrived in Southampton on 23 May 1937, having sailed from Bilbao on the Habana (pictured) to escape Franco’s bombing campaign in northern Spain – which included the razing of Guernica.

By Marshall Mateer (IBMT Film Coordinator)