Bob Cooney recites 'Hasta la Vista, Madrid!'

Thanks go to Tommy Campbell of the IBMT-affiliated Aberdeen XV International Brigade Commemoration Committee for coming up with this gem from Aberdonian Brigader Bob Cooney.

Here is Cooney reciting his poem 'Hasta la vista, Madrid!' during a radio interview, which Tommy thinks probably took place just a few years before hid death in 1984. The sound quality is not perfect, but this is more than compensated by the emotion in Cooney's words and delivery.

The poem was written for a reunion of Brigaders at the Cora Hotel in London in 1965 and first appeared in print in a 1978 tribute to a fellow Brigader, folk-singer and construction worker, 'Bill Feeley, Singer Steel Erector, International Brigader'.

It was also published in the 2006 anthology, 'Poems from Spain: British and Irish Brigaders on the Spanish Civil War', edited by current IBMT Chair Jim Jump.

Cooney was the British Battalion's commissar at the 1938 Battle of the Ebro and author of the Spanish Civil War memoir 'Proud Journey', which was published by the Manifesto Press and the Marx Memorial Library in 2015.