International Brigade Memorial Trust
Jim Jump writes…
Apart from working in the food industry in the 1930s, what do bakery worker Basil Abrahams from London’s East End, Bristol cook William Dempsey, Fulham milk roundsman Les Gibson and Hartlepool chef Herbert Riding all have in common?
They were among the dozens of bakers and food and hospitality workers who volunteered to fight fascism in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. In fact they were the first Britons to take up arms against Hitler and Mussolini.
This was a time when Britain’s Conservative leaders were appeasing military aggression in Europe and Africa. They hoped the fascist dictators would turn their firepower on the communist Soviet Union.
Many of those who joined the legendary International Brigades gave their lives. They included Malcolm Smith, a baker from Dundee, who was killed in the summer of 1938 in the Battle of the Ebro. He had destroyed one of Mussolini’s tanks with his machine gun and was known as a brave and extremely loyal comrade.
Another to die was bakery worker Nathan Steigman, from Whitechapel, in London’s East End. As a Jew, he understood full well the unique danger that fascist ideology posed. He fell early in 1937 at the Battle of Jarama, near Madrid, one of 150 Britons to die in the battle.
Hitler and Mussolini poured troops and airplanes into Spain, where the jackbooted General Franco was trying to crush the country’s elected government.
The Spanish Republic was supported by a coalition of liberals, socialists and communists. It was building schools and hospitals and giving new rights to workers and women – things that were hated by the fascists and reactionary forces in Spain.
Clockwise from top left: Basil Abrahams, William Dempsey, Herbert Riding, Les Gibson, Herbert Riding, Malcolm Smith and Nathan Steigman.
All this was happening when the world was in the aftershock of the financial crash of 1929. Unemployment was high, poverty was rife and people around the world wanted answers to their economic woes.
Some were seduced by lies that blamed Jews, foreigners and communists for the crisis. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Others knew better. Some 2,500 volunteers went from Britain to join the International Brigades. The remains of 530 of them, including Malcolm Smith and Nathan Steigman, lie in the olive groves, vineyards and pine-clad hillsides of Córdoba, Jarama, Brunete, Teruel, Belchite and the Ebro.
Who were these men and women – who mainly served as nurses – willing to die for a cause in a foreign land? Most were young working-class trade unionists and political activists. Many had helped organise hunger marches and rent strikes. Several had fought fascist Blackshirts on the streets of our major cities. All of them watched in horror as fascism in Europe toppled democracies, persecuted minorities and banned unions.
In Spain, with its Popular Front government resisting a fascist uprising, many Britons saw their chance to fight back. Their cry was ‘¡No pasarán! ’ – ‘They shall not pass!’ – the same slogan that was used when protesters stopped the Blackshirts marching through Whitechapel in October 1936 in what became know as the Battle of Cable Street.
The courage and sacrifice of the International Brigades remain an unprecedented example of international solidarity – one that we must remember today.
Why? Because they were the first Britons to confront the rise of modern fascism, whose hateful creed mutates with each generation. In the 1930s they attacked Jews, later Commonwealth immigrants, now Muslims. The threat has not gone away and still has the potential to divide and weaken the working class.
In 1939 the British political establishment finally woke up to the danger of fascism, though too late to save Spain. The Second World War, which the International Brigade volunteers warned would be inevitable unless fascism was stopped in Spain, began in September that year, just five months after Franco’s army marched into Madrid.
Outside of the labour movement, the International Brigade volunteers never got the thanks and recognition they deserved. They were spied on as ‘reds’ by MI5, blacklisted at work and vilified as hopeless romantics and communist dupes.
The International Brigade Memorial Trust keeps their memory alive. We work with teachers and students so that this story can be taught in schools. We look after more than 100 memorials to the volunteers in all our major towns and cities around the country.
Just as we remember the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the Chartists and the Suffragettes, so we must also preserve the legacy and values of those who fought fascism when most of the rest of the world looked the other way. ¡No pasarán!
This article first appeared earlier this year in The Foodworker, journal of the Bakers, Food & Allied Workers’ Union. Jim Jump is the IBMT Chair.
