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Griff Maclaurin: from Cambridge to Madrid’s University City

Post date: 31/01/2025

In issue No.50 of ¡No Pasarán!, historian Mark Derby explored the short life of New Zealand International Brigader Griff Maclaurin, drawing on the 20-year-long correspondence between his sister and Gwen Davies, his friend at Cambridge University.

Griff Maclaurin had been a brilliant mathematics student at Auckland University College in 1928-1931 and took up a postgraduate scholarship at St John’s College, Cambridge. Although initially of conservative views, he became deeply immersed in the radical politics of this feverish period and joined the Communist Party of Great Britain. In one of her letters to Griff’s friend Gwen Davies (later Koblenz), Joan Conway says her brother’s radicalisation stemmed from encounters with Nazism during a three-month tour of Germany in 19331. The following year he opened a leftwing bookshop in All Saints Passage, near the
university.

Maclaurin’s Bookshop was Cambridge’s first progressive bookshop and became extremely popular. One customer, the historian Eric Hobsbawm, considered it ‘the centre of left literature in Cambridge’.2 The orange-covered Left Book Club titles published by Victor Gollancz were a large part of its stock in trade. Gollancz later wrote that Griff’s ‘letters to us with their idealism and enthusiasm were a constant source of inspiration.’3

Gwen Davies, a friend of Brigader Griff Maclaurin from their days at Cambridge.

Gwen Davies was among Griff’s circle of friends at Cambridge. Raised in north Wales, the daughter of a professor of Celtic studies, she took a degree in botany at Oxford University in 1931 and joined the staff of the Low Temperature Research Station at Cambridge. There she became active in leftwing politics, meeting the poet John Cornford and the philosopher and publisher Maurice Cornforth, among others.

Griff Maclaurin (standing) with friends on the River Cam in mid-1936.

Soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Maclaurin was recruited to the International Brigades by CPGB General Secretary Harry Pollitt, largely on the basis of his experience with a First World War-era Lewis machine-gun while serving in the officers’ corps at Auckland Grammar School4. He arrived in Spain in October 1936 and was eventually placed with a small machine-gun unit of Britons attached to the Commune de Paris Battalion.

One of his British comrades, David Mackenzie, said Griff had ‘a splendid capacity for distracting our minds from the more unpleasant realities of life; from the small, kind ever-laughing face it would have been difficult to identify him as a military hero; but such he proved to be.’5

The machine-gun unit was stationed in Madrid’s University City, on the western side of the capital adjoining a small wooded area, the Casa de Campo. On the evening of 7 November 1936 Griff and three other machine-gunners, including fellow New Zealander Steve Yates, left the comparative safety of the university buildings to establish a defensive position within the wood.

Mackenzie later wrote: ‘The fascists were cleared out of it in the evening without much difficulty. Maclaurin with Steve Yates took their Lewis gun along the right-hand side of the wood. They had no one to carry their ammunition, and Maclaurin carried it all and his rifle as well. He was wounded almost immediately, but it was at the far end of the wood that his body was found, dead beneath a tree with the Moorish sniper whom he had shot down beside him. Yates continued alone with the machine-gun and the ammunition. He was the first to reach the gate at the end of the wood, giving covering fire as our men passed through it. When he was wounded he propped himself up against a tree and continued to fire his gun, firing from the hip at the Moors round the house, and he was found standing there days later so riddled with machine-gun bullets that his body fell apart when they tried to pick it up.’6

Another member of this unit was the young English poet John Cornford. After this effective but extremely costly defensive action he wrote to his fiancée, saying that Maclaurin had been ‘continuously cheerful, however uncomfortable, and here that matters a hell of a lot… if you meet any of his pals, tell them he did well here and died bloody well.’7

Maclaurin’s family was not aware that he had travelled to Spain, and did not receive news of his death until a month after it occurred. Although both parents were from politically conservative backgrounds, they were deeply proud of their son and became active fundraisers for the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, the main New Zealand organisation providing support for the Republican cause.

During the civil war, Gwen Davies also organised shipments of food, clothing and medical supplies for the relief of Spanish civilians and helped to resettle a group of Basque children in Cambridge. She later met Sidney Koblenz, a US Airforce sergeant stationed near Cambridge, through their mutual interest in Maclaurin’s Bookshop, which remained in business after its founder’s death in Spain. They married in 1947 and spent the rest of their lives in the US, where Gwen worked as a medical technician in Albany, New York8. She and Joan Conway evidently maintained a lifelong interest in the Spanish Civil War, and in leftwing and progressive issues in general.

Around New Zealand, memorials to local veterans of the Spanish Civil War have begun to appear in recent years. As reported in ¡No Pasaran! issue 3-2018, a plaque was recently unveiled for battlefield surgeon Doug Jolly in his home town of Cromwell. A number of New Zealanders, including Griff Maclaurin’s relative Max Maclaurin, share the opinion of Griff’s parents that this short-lived yet spirited and inspiring figure also deserves to be remembered in the city where he grew up and studied. They are planning to install a memorial plaque to him, perhaps at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, the country’s largest regional museum.

Maclaurin provided his own best epitaph as he left for Spain in September 1936. Farewelling his fellow New Zealander Paddy Costello from a departing train at London’s Victoria Station, he prophesied that he would have ‘a short life, Paddy, but a merry one’.9


Notes
1 J Conway to G Koblenz, 31 January 1977, unpublished correspondence.
2 Quoted in J McNeish, ‘The Sixth Man – the extraordinary life of Paddy Costello’, Random House NZ, 2007, p53.
3 Quoted in ‘Kiwi’, Auckland University Students Association annual, 1937, p81.
4 P Clayworth, ‘Kiwi Compañeros – New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War’, Canterbury University Press, 2009, p4.
5 D Mackenzie, ‘The Spearhead – Experiences with the First Brigade of the International Column in Spain’, unpublished manuscript, Edinburgh City Archives, c. late 1936, p20.
6 Ibid, p28.
7 J Galassi (ed), ‘Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound: the collected letters of John Cornford’, Carcanet New Press, Manchester, 1976, p185.
8 G Koblenz obituary, Albany Times Union, New York, 24 March 2010, and E Koblenz, personal comment.
9 McNeish, ‘The Sixth Man’, pp66-67.

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