International Brigade Memorial Trust
IBMT Historical Consultant Richard Baxell used his talk at the Trust's July 2024 commemoration in London's Jubilee Gardens to share the story of Battersea volunteer George Wheeler …
I’d like to talk to you today about a British volunteer, who lived just down the road from here. He was one of many who were taken prisoner by Franco’s forces during the Spanish Civil War. Some of you will have known him; others will have known of him. His name was George Wheeler.
George’s mother was an unpaid domestic worker, his father a door-to-door salesman and a Socialist. George always saw himself as an antifascist, though he was not political in a party sense. He was much more interested in sport, excelling at football, swimming and, in particular, boxing.
A photograph of a young George taken from his memoir, ‘To Make the People Smile Again’.
In the spring of 1938, the 24-year-old was living with his mother in Battersea and working as a wood machinist. Incensed by the British Government’s support for non-intervention in Spain, which George could see was clearly working in favour of Franco’s Rebels, he decided to join the fight against fascism.
Following a brief interview in London by a senior member of the Communist Party, he was accepted into the International Brigades, despite his lack of military experience. George travelled to Spain in a group that included the Liverpudlian Jack Jones, arriving on 27 May 1938.
It was not an auspicious time to join the fight, for a huge Francoist offensive launched earlier in the year had smashed through Republican lines, splitting the Spanish Republic in two. As Bill Rust brutally summarised in his history of the British in Spain: ‘The 1938 … recruits had no illusions; they knew they had come to face death.’ [Bill Rust, ‘Britons in Spain’, p. 104.]
Nonetheless, George joined Number 4 Company of the British Battalion on 30 June. His first combat experience came the following month when the British Battalion was part of the huge Republican offensive across the River Ebro.
In the full heat of the Spanish summer, bombed and shelled remorselessly, George fought alongside his comrades in the International Brigades and the Spanish Republican Army to try to retake the territory lost in the spring. He fought at Corbera, at Hill 481 near Gandesa and at the aptly named Hill 666.
After a brief stay in hospital due to an infection, George rejoined the battalion in September to participate in its final action on Spanish soil. As you probably know, it was nothing short of a disaster. Only a matter of hours from being withdrawn, many volunteers were killed or wounded, while George and a number of his comrades were surrounded and taken prisoner by Franco’s troops.
As George will have been well aware, many International Brigaders taken prisoner by the Nationalists were never heard from again. So when he and the other prisoners were lined up against a wall with their hands tied behind their backs, one can only imagine what must have been going through their minds.
But to their great relief, this was not to be their fate; Mussolini’s pressure on Franco to exchange captured International Brigaders for Italians probably saved their lives. Instead, they were taken away and locked up in the nearby city of Zaragoza.
Knowing what happened during the war that followed, we should not be surprised at the terrible treatment George and the other prisoners were subjected to: that they were transported for several days, crammed into cattle trucks; that the POW camp, in a decaying monastery near Burgos called San Pedro de Cardeña was, to all extents, a concentration camp; that the conditions were overcrowded and insanitary, proving a fertile breeding ground for fleas, lice and disease; that the food was woefully inadequate, George described it as a mixture of ‘stale bread and table scraps’, which looked like pigs’ swill; and that that violence was endemic, with prisoners viciously beaten with wooden sticks for the slightest reason, or for none at all.
Prisoners of war filing through the gates at San Pedro de Cardeña.
It is almost impossible to imagine how awful the day-to-day experiences must have been. Understandably, many must have wondered whether they would ever see their homes again.
And yet, even in these darkest hours, prisoners showed astonishing courage, finding ways to maintain their humanity, to resist: they practised sports, such as football and boxing (much to George’s delight); they played chess, with pieces carved out of old bits of soap or dried bread; they held political meetings and ran education classes; and a clandestine newspaper, The Jaily News, lampooned the camp and its authorities.
Mockery is, of course, a powerful form of resistance.
When one of George’s comrades, Morrie Levitas, was ordered to read out fascist propaganda, he deliberately mispronounced words, skipped punctuation and added random pauses, reducing the prisoners to laughter and the guards to fury.
When prisoners were instructed that, when saluting, they must bellow ‘¡Fran-co!’, in two distinct syllables, George described how they subverted the order:
With volume and enthusiasm we English-speaking prisoners shouted ‘Fuck You!’
The guards would come in among us swishing their sticks and yelling ‘¡más fuerte!’ – much louder. And with even greater gusto we would respond with, ‘FUCK YOU! . . . FUCK YOU!’ [George Wheeler, ‘To Make the People Smile Again’, p. 155.]
After three months in San Pedro, in early January 1939, news finally arrived that George and 76 other British prisoners were to be released. However, freedom did not immediately beckon for George, only another prison in San Sebastián. It was not until April – after the end of the civil war – that he was finally released. This response to freedom was actually written by one of George’s fellow prisoners from Nottingham, but I suspect it holds true for all of them:
That day was surely one of the greatest of my life. I simply cannot convey all of the feelings and emotions which I experienced: relief at having come safely through the dangers of war, joy at being on my way home, excitement at the prospect of seeing my family again, sorrow over the certain defeat of the Republic, anger that the Fascists had been allowed to triumph because of the timidity and dual standards of the western democracies, and deep sadness at the loss of so many friends and comrades who would never be leaving Spain but lying for the rest of time in shallow graves in her dusty soil. All of these emotions and others welled up inside me, but no regret at having committed myself to a cause which I felt to be a just one. [Walter Gregory, ‘The Shallow Grave’, p. 152.]
Richard Baxell speaking in July 2024 in London's Jubilee Gardens.
You will be pleased to know that George recovered from his experiences in San Pedro and continued his fight against fascism during the Second World War where he was posted, bizarrely, to Sierra Leone. After being demobbed he returned to a quiet civvy life with his wife, Winnie, who he had married in 1940. George lived to a grand old age and, to his delight, his account of his time in Spain, ‘To Make the People Smile Again’, was published in 2006.
Today, we remember George and all the other open-eyed volunteers.
