International Brigade Memorial Trust
Saturday 26 April saw the unveiling of the Newham International Brigades Memorial in the Old Spotted Dog ground of Clapton Community Football Club (212 Upton Lane, London E7 9NP). Kevin Blowe of Clapton CFC tells the story behind the memorial…
Since launching our International Brigades-inspired away kit in 2018, we have wanted to mark the debt of gratitude owed to those who volunteered to join the fight against fascism in Spain.
We are grateful for the many new friends we have made along the way and it gives us great pride that CCFC has been able to finance a significant memorial to those who aided the fight for the Spanish Republic between 1936 and 1939.
IBMT President Marlene Sidaway unveils the memorial featuring lines from the poem 'I Sing of my Comrades' by her late partner and International Brigader David Marshall, who was a long-time Newham resident.
In March 2019, the club had asked to site a memorial in West Ham Park, but our proposal was rejected by the City of London Corporation.
After securing the Old Spotted Dog Ground in 2020, the plan shifted to installing it inside our ground, but a combination of the ongoing pandemic and then the need to have the ground ready for men’s and women’s first team games meant further delays.
Now, after years of planning, the Newham International Brigades memorial is being unveiled today.
The significance of 26 April is also that it marked the anniversary of the ‘carpet bombing’ of the Basque town of Guernica by combined German, Italian and Spanish fascist forces, which became the subject of Picasso’s famous painting. This finally convinced the British government to allow refugee children to travel to Southampton and a number of these children later went on to become professional football players in England and Spain.
The club asked local firm Rodwell Memorials, based in Manor Park, to create the memorial in red granite, which was ordered in September 2024.
In February 2025, volunteers began work on the concrete base, which was laid by some of the team from Hackney Bumps, an outdoor skate park in Clapton that we previously worked with to raise funds for Gaza Sunbirds and Pal Gaza.
The memorial pays special tribute to those from the area around the Old Spotted Dog who made that journey, whether to take up arms or to tend to the wounded.
With the help of the International Brigade Memorial Trust we have so far identified 16 volunteers. As well as changes in the boundaries and administration of the area means that our list may have some omissions.
Billy Bragg performing at the unveiling.
Newham was not created until 1965 and births before that would have been registered to the borough of West Ham. Volunteers born in the area may also have only been known by their last address before signing up.
If you do know of any further volunteers from the area then please let us know, or inform the IBMT on admin@international-brigades.org.uk. You can search for further volunteers in the IBMT database.
Fred Adams
1911-1994
Transport & General Workers’ Union
Born in West Ham, Fred Adams was a builder’s labourer, who fought at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937. He received two thigh wounds and was repatriated on medical grounds after eight months in Spain.
Joseph Caleno
1912-1963
Communist Party
Originally a boot repairer by trade, Joe Caleno spent 13 months in Spain and was cited for bravery at the Battle of Brunete. After sustaining an injury, he was sent home. Though born in Leicester, in 1939 he was living and working in West Ham Lane, Stratford, as a shopkeeper and tobacconist.
Percy Cohen
1901-1974
Transport & General Workers’ Union
Stratford-born Percy Cohen served in Spain for 18 months as an ambulance driver before being repatriated in August 1938. His occupation was given as a provision merchant.
Max Colin
1912-1997
Young Communist League
Born in Stepney, Max Colin lived in Rosebery Avenue, Newham. He was a driver and mechanic, and served in that capacity for 10 months in Spain. He was wounded at the Battle of Brunete in the summer of 1937.
Charles Cormack
1912-1938
Communist Party
Born in Forest Gate, where he lived at 28 Vanisittart Road, Charles Cormack was killed on 27 August 1938 in the Battle of the Ebro on his 26th birthday. He had been in Spain for five months. He worked as a driver before joining the International Brigades.
James Cormack
1910-1991
Communist Party
James was the brother of Charles Cormack and they arrived together in Spain in March 1938. Born in Lambeth, he worked as a coach painter and also lived at 28 Vanisittart Road. He was wounded in the Battle of the Ebro in August 1938, losing three fingers, and returned home four months later. After the war he lived in Field Road, Forest Gate.
Cecil Cranfield
1906-1976
Labour Party
A former lightweight amateur boxing champion, Cecil Cranfield was born in Camberwell and worked as a salesman. His address was given as 194 Romford Road, Forest Gate, when he joined the International Brigades. He was a machine-gunner in Spain, where he remained for eight months, and was wounded in January 1938 at the Battle of Teruel.
George Degude
1910-1937
Communist Party
Born in West Ham, George Degude lived at Newington Hall Villas, Church Street, Stoke Newington. He arrived in Spain in February 1937 and was an ambulance driver. He sustained a fatal head injury at the Battle of Brunete in July 1937 and died soon afterwards.
Edward Dickinson
1903-1937
Industrial Workers of the World
Born in Grimsby, Edward Dickinson was a salesman and gave an address at 13 Upton Lane, Forest Gate, though he had a wife and daughter in Melbourne, Australia. He arrived in Spain in December 1936 and was captured at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937 while second-in-command of the British Battalion’s machine-gun company. He was shot on 13 February 1937 after protesting over the shooting of a fellow prisoner.
Gerrard Doyle
1907-1970
Communist Party
Gerrard Doyle was born in Limerick and was a driver and moulder. He gave his address as 2 Vale Road, Forest Gate. He served in Spain for 17 months and was wounded in fighting at Jarama and at Brunete in February and July of 1937. In March of the following year he was captured at Calaceite and was held at the prisoner of war camp at San Pedro de Cardeña, near Burgos, until returning home in October 1938 in a prisoner exchange with Italian troops.
Thomas Duncombe
1913-1938
Communist Party, National Union of General & Municipal Workers
Born in West Ham, Thomas Duncombe had an address at 37 Rosher Road, Stratford, when he arrived in Spain in February 1938. He was a labourer and was listed as missing, presumed killed, at Gandesa on 3 April of that year.
Leslie Huson
1907-1938
Communist Party, Transport & General Workers’ Union
Metallurgist Leslie Huson, born in West Ham, emigrated to Canada when he was 18 but returned home and was living in Clerkenwell when he joined the International Brigades in February 1938. He survived for only two months, dying of pneumonia in hospital in Valls, Catalonia.
David Marshall
1916-2005
Young Communist League
Arriving in Spain in August 1936, David Marshall, a civil servant from Middlesbrough, was one of the first volunteers in Spain. He was wounded at Cerro de los Ángeles, near Madrid, and repatriated in January 1937. After service in the British Army, he became a carpenter with Joan Littlewood’s drama company at the Theatre Royal in Stratford. He lived at 37 Reginald Road, close to West Ham Park, where there is a memorial bench to him.
John O’Connor
1915-1999
Communist Party, National Union of Railwaymen
Steel fixer John O’Connor, born in Poplar and living at 269 Upton Lane, Forest Gate, arrived in Spain in February 1938 and served for 10 months in the International Brigades. At the Battle of the Ebro in the summer of that year he was a cartographer and lookout with the British Battalion.
Pat O’Mahoney
1890-?
Canadian-born Pat O’Mahoney was a veteran of the Great War and lived at 137 Geere Road, West Ham. He was a nurse/masseur and arrived in Spain in February 1937. He was wounded at the Battle of Jarama later that month and sent home in May.
Gordon Siebert
1910-1990
Labour Party
Gordon Siebert was a clerk, born in West Ham. He arrived in Spain in October 1937 and did not return home until the end of the Spanish Civil War in April 1939, having been imprisoned for disciplinary offences.
IBMT Chair Jim Jump (foreground, in blue shirt) reads out the names of the Newham volunteers.
Students from the East 15 Acting School sang songs from the Spanish Civil War.
A banner of Picasso's Guernica was on display for the unveiling ceremony. It was created by Daisy Price Fernández, whose father was executed by the fascists early in the Spanish Civil War.
More photos from the event here:
Robbie MacDonald writes…
Italian volunteers in the International Brigade and resistance to fascism in the past, present and future were highlighted at an event in Greater Manchester.
Members of the IBMT-affiliated North West International Brigade Memorial Group were among speakers at the event called Resistance Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow held at Salford's Working Class Movement Library.
The event brought together various organisations to mark Italy's liberation during the Second World War and also this year's centenary of the murder of Italian socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti by fascists in 1924. The event was well-supported by the Italian community across northern England and others.
Matteotti had warned about fascism in various speeches in Italy and visited London in the spring of 1924 to warn Italians here too. But after returning to Italy, he was kidnapped and murdered in Rome in June,1924. His body was hidden outside the city, adding to the rising fear of violence and terror, and not discovered until August.
An exhibition about Matteotti was held in London this year and he is the focus of a host of new books too. But contemporary fascism and far right movements in Italy and across Europe today were also discussed at the Salford event.
Organisations involved included the National Association of Italian Partisans (Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d'Italia or ANPI), the INCA-CGIL advice service, the Italian Association of Christian Workers (ACLI) and the Partito Democratico political party, which has members in northern England.
Rob Hargreaves (left) and Stuart Walsh (second from left) speaking at the event in the Working Class Movement Library.
Speakers included Simone Rossi, chairman of ANPI in London, and Giulia Sirigu of the Partito Democratico. The ANPI was formed as an association for Italian partisans and supporters. Today, membership is open to all who sympathise with its aims, including young people and those beyond Italy. In Britain, the ANPI is keen to expand its activity. Like the IBMT, it promotes awareness of both historic and contemporary events and issues, and welcomes new members.
North-west IBMT member Stuart Walsh, who is also involved with the Working Class Movement Library in Salford, welcomed guests and highlighted the library, which has a huge archive of left-wing and progressive material representing 200 years of history. The collection was founded in the 1950s by Edmund and Ruth Frow and was moved to its current site near the University of Salford in the 1980s. Its collections include International Brigade and Spanish Civil War material.
Rob Hargreaves, another north-west IBMT group member, spoke about the Spanish Civil War and the role of Italian volunteers in the Garibaldi Battalion of the International Brigade. He highlighted events including the Garibaldi Battalion's defence of Madrid and other key battles. At times, Rob said it was like a 'civil war within a civil war', with Italian volunteers on the republican side facing Mussolini's troops fighting for Franco.
Rob also gave a wider history of the International Brigade and the Spanish Civil War, including volunteers from Britain, Ireland and other countries. He also explained the IBMT's activities today.
Speaking after the event, Giulia Sirigu said: “We received very positive feedback and we hope the event becomes the first of a long series to celebrate the principles of anti-fascism, freedom and international solidarity. We thank all the speakers who took part and the Working Class Movement Library, which is a significant space. Last but not least, we thank members of the Italian Democratic Party in northern England for making the event possible in an historical moment when the principles of Italian and international resistance are much-needed. We would also love to bring the Matteotti exhibition to Greater Manchester.”
The north-west group has had a busy year of events and projects across the region including in Oldham, Manchester, Salford, Ashton, Burnley, Kinder Scout and Wigan. A recent event at Wigan Museum discussed George Orwell in Wigan and Spain with speakers from the IBMT and the Orwell Society.
Here's the speech given by IBMT Chair Jim Jump at the commemoration on 7 October 2023 at the memorial to the International Brigaders from Stockton-on-Tees…
It’s a great honour to be able say a few words here on behalf of the IBMT during this our Annual General Meeting weekend in Stockton-on-Tees.
This is a town with with a proud history of anti-fascist struggle – like the 3,000 men and women who chased Mosley’s Blackshirts out of town in the Battle of Stockton almost exactly 90 years ago on 10 September 1933.
Several of the Teessiders at Market Cross on that day would later travel to Spain to fight Franco’s fascists.
They knew that fascism was a uniquely dangerous creed, with its toxic mix of ethno-nationalism, racism and militarism – evils that are still with us today.
In some ways they were ordinary people. Looking at the Teesside volunteers, they were scaffolders, merchant seamen, labourers, carpenters, clerks, foundry workers and dockers.
In other ways they were far from ordinary. They were, in the words of Ken Loach, ‘the cream of their generation’ and they didn’t simply appear out of the blue.
Natalie Thorp (left), great niece of William Carson, and Liz Estensen, daughter of Otto Estensen, under the memorial to the International Brigades in Stockton's Wasp Nest Yard that names them and six other men from the town who went to Spain.
Pictured above, Jim Jump raises the IBMT banner under the Stockton memorial.
These Teessiders were men whose political education had been forged in those battles against home-grown fascism, against the grinding state-enforced poverty of the 1930s, in the unemployed workers’ movement, in the hunger marches, in their communist and labour party branches, in the YCL and the Labour League of Youth.
What also makes them extraordinary is that they were willing, and in some cases did, lay their lives on the line. Nine of the 24 Teesside men made the supreme sacrifice…
…Four of them from Stockton: George Bright, Ron Dennison, Myles Harding and Bert Overton.
The others were Thomas Carter, Martin Durkin, Bob Elliott, David Halloran and John Unthank.
To mangle the words of Christy Moore’s ‘Viva La Quince Brigada’, ‘Let us all remember them today.’
Or to steal a slogan adopted by trade union campaigners for safety in the construction industry, one that chimes with the values of the International Brigades, ‘Remember the dead. Fight for the living.'
The men and women who went to Spain warned – and they were proved right – that there would be a world war unless fascism – in the form of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini trampling over Spain’s elected Popular Front government – unless fascism was stopped on the battlefields of Madrid, Jarama, Brunete, Aragón and the Ebro.
The British government had other ideas. It preferred to play footsie with the dictators in the hope that they would turn their guns on the Soviet Union.
Dressed up as neutrality, Britain’s policy of so-called non-intervention doomed the Spanish Republic by denying its government the right to buy arms to defend itself.
Let us never forget that these Men of Munich, Neville Chamberlain and the other appeasers, preferred to see a Franco victory than the survival of a progressive government in Spain.
Lots of lessons there for today, not least that most in our establishment will aways serve their class interests rather than the national interest. And they will tell lies in doing so.
At the Stockton commemoration: IBMT Scotland Secretary Mike Arnott holds the Scottish Contingent banner. Also pictured (from left) are IBMT Secretary Megan Dobney and IBMT Trustee Dolores Long.
These Teesside volunteers knew better – as did all the 2,500 from Britain and Ireland who went to Spain between 1936 and 1939, whether as soldiers, sailors, pilots, medics, nurses, doctors or administrators.
Five hundred and thirty of them gave their lives, and we remain humbled by their sacrifice and thank them for their inspirational example of international solidarity and anti-fascism.
We honour also all those lucky enough to survive the war in Spain. Many continued the fight against fascism in the Second World War – and indeed for the better world that they were defending in Spain.
And I want to leave you with the words of two of those who fought on until 1945.
The first is Johnny Longstaff. In the Second World War he joined the London Rifle Brigade. He later recalled his feelings before battle in North Africa:
I knew that some of my friends would die… I knew that others would be wounded and possibly lose a limb… I had not lost the scent of battle, the smell of blood, the stench of the bloated dead, the cries of the wounded… Once again I would be seeing fear in men’s faces … and I recalled how bravely the Republican Army and International Brigades had fought even though ill clad, ill armed and hungry and with little else but high morale and a will to win… Now, in a few days’ time, I would be fighting the same enemy.
Finally, we have the words of David Marshall, who took part in the Normandy landings and the liberation of Belsen.
As a dole office clerk in Middlesbrough, he had witnessed at first hand the humiliating poverty and obscene inequalities of the 1930s – and knew that another world was possible.
This is what he wrote in one of his poems:
They came from every corner of the earth
So many men from distant lands
Who took to arms in the defence
Of Spain’s Republic.
Madrid the magnet that drew us all
Along slow roads to Spain – at last a star
For desperate men, sensing the gathering storm
And we that fought to warn a watching world
Were called false prophets by appeasers
Remember the dead and fight for the living. ¡No pasarán!
