Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died 50 years ago today [20 November]. Jim Jump looks back at his blood-soaked rule and toxic legacy on Spain today.

‘Spaniards, Franco has died,’ came the announcement 50 years ago on Spanish TV. If there was any truth to the widely-held story that Barcelona immediately ran out of cava, the corks would have been popping behind closed doors. Most Spaniards held their breath on 20 November 1975, fearful of what might happen next. 

After nearly four decades of brutal dictatorship, reactionary forces dominated the country’s institutions and the generalísimo himself had boasted that everything was being left ‘well tied up’. 

Confounding expectations, however, King Juan Carlos appointed a government that steered Spain towards free elections in 1977, the first since the Spanish Republic. In 1981 he helped face down a botched coup attempt by diehard army and civil guard units, who briefly seized the Cortes, the Spanish parliament. In the following year the PSOE socialists – the dominant party in the Republic’s Popular Front government – won the general election.

Today Juan Carlos, who abdicated in favour of son Filipe in 2014, is again at the centre of controversy. His autobiography praises Franco’s ‘intelligence and political sense’. But it says nothing in 500 pages about the victims of Franco, nor the scars that the Spanish Civil War have left on Spanish society.

Publication of the memoir comes at a time of heightened political tensions in Spain. Far-right Vox is surging in the polls. In half a dozen autonomous regions the party props up right-wing administrations fronted by the more mainstream Popular Party (PP) – which is itself a haven for Franco apologists. The approaching anniversary of the dictator’s death has also seen anti-immigrant fascist groups on the streets of Madrid giving Nazi salutes, singing Francoist anthems and waving SS-inspired flags.

Though many have applauded Juan Carlos’s role in Spain’s transition to democracy, they often overlook the tide of popular agitation that was also forcing his hand. Hailed as a triumph of peaceful top-down politics, the transición was far from bloodless. Hundreds died in political violence, including terrorist attacks by a shadowy far-left group, Grapo, that is now known to have been heavily penetrated by Francoist secret police.

Hearses with the bodies of communist lawyers killed by fascists in 1977 pass through crowds in Madrid.
Wiki Commons

Among the worst atrocities was the assassination in 1977 of five communist lawyers by fascist gunmen in Madrid’s Atocha Street. More than 100,000 people attended their funeral – one of the first mass demonstrations since the Caudillo’s death. This was followed by strikes and displays of solidarity across the country. A few weeks later the PCE communist party was legalised.

The blood on Franco’s hands never dried. After launching the military uprising that sparked the country’s civil war in 1936, he climbed to power over the dead bodies of more than 150,000 summarily-executed Republicans, leftists and trade unionists. Their toll easily outnumbered the victims of revenge attacks against supporters of the coup. 

Victory in 1939 was secured courtesy of troops, aircraft and weapons sent by Hitler and Mussolini. When their planes mercilessly bombed Guernica, Barcelona and Madrid, the world was shocked. But in characteristic Perfidious Albion fashion, the British government chose to appease the fascist dictators by covertly favouring Franco with an arms embargo on the Republic – all under the guise of ‘non-intervention’.

Even when the war ended, the systematic torture and killings continued in Franco’s vast network of penal camps. In 1940 in Madrid alone there were 30 prisons housing 100,000 Republican prisoners, a quarter of them on death row. And so it went on, year after year, with the terminally ill Franco signing the last five death warrants as he was about to climb into his death-bed.

In Britain, veterans of the International Brigades, who had fought so bravely during the civil war, kept up their struggle in other ways. The International Brigade Association helped organise frequent protests and embassy pickets. The IBA worked with socialist lawyers to send observers to trials of political prisoners along with food for their families. Others went further. Dublin-born Brigader Bob Doyle, for example, used family trips to Spain to take money to the the anti-Franco underground and on one occasion scattered leaflets on a Madrid bus and among football crowds before making a swift getaway.

There had been a glimmer of hope at the end of the Second World War that Franco’s regime, by then an international pariah, might be toppled. But the US cavalry rode to the rescue, finding in Franco a dependable anti-communist stooge during the Cold War. Generous long-term loans began in 1950 and three years later the US was handed air and naval bases in exchange for more economic and military aid. 

Spain today is a vibrant, open society, though one with all the familiar social problems of advanced Western liberal democracies. Scratch the surface, however, and historic divisions open up and old attitudes forged by 40 years of censorship and dictatorship lies re-emerge.

It wasn’t until the start of this century – a full quarter century after Franco’s death – that the unofficial pact of silence that accompanied the return to democracy was broken. Younger people began asking what had happened to their grandparents during the war, why they didn’t have a grave and why no-one dared speak about it. Soon they found out the awful truth that Spain is a country covered with mass graves of Republicans. There were – and still are – thousands of them – including ones with remains of International Brigaders whose bodies were dug up and dumped after Franco won the war.

The man who initiated the first exhumation was Emilio Silva. He was trying to find the remains of his grandfather in the village of Priaranza del Bierzo in north west Spain. But in the process he launched a social movement of Spaniards demanding to know the truth about the past. ‘What I wanted was to bury him with my grandmother and go back to my life as a journalist,’ Silva recalled in a recent interview. ‘I thought I was going to return to how things were before finding the mass grave, but everything became unstoppable.’ 

Many thousands of murdered Republicans have since been given proper burials, though it is estimated that the remains of more than 100,000 of Spain’s ‘disappeared’ still lie unidentified in the Spanish earth.   

Anniversary cover of Spain’s satirical magazine El Jueves is headlined ‘Happy 50 years without Franco’ and shows the dictator holding the leads of Vox leader Santiago Abascal and the Popular Party’s rightwing head of the Madrid community, Isabel Ayuso.

Propelled by this mass movement for the recovery of historical memory, the PSOE-led governments of José Luis Zapatero and current prime minister Pedro Sánchez have made worthy efforts to help Spain come to terms with the crimes of Francoism. Memory laws have acknowledged old injustices and addressed the issue of mass graves. Streets glorifying fascists have been renamed. Franco’s body was removed from the grotesque mausoleum he built for himself with Republican slave labour north west of Madrid. Exiles, International Brigaders and their descendants have been welcomed as Spanish citizens.

Unsurprisingly Vox and the PP have resisted all these moves, with regional authorities led by them rolling back memory laws and refusing to identify and protect mass graves. Yet, as one historian has pointed out, Spain is the only country in western Europe where it is possible to randomly dig a hole in the ground and run the risk of unearthing human remains. Meanwhile those who call for an end to this scandal are accused of stirring up old hatreds.

Bill Alexander, former commander of the British Battalion in Spain, noted proudly after the country’s return to democracy that anti-Francoists in Britain had ensured that Franco and his underlings were never accepted by the British people. Their campaigning had ‘remembered the heroic struggles of the Spanish people and recognised that only the end of Francoism could bring freedom’. Sadly, the toxic legacy left by Franco has still not been properly expunged and Bill’s words remain true to this day.

Jim Jump is the IBMT Chair. This article also appears in today's Morning Star (20 November 2025): https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/struggle-against-francos-legacy-continues

Words spoken by IBMT Chair Jim Jump in Belfast City Hall on 3 October at the start of the Trust’s Annual General Meeting weekend…

The great Spanish poet of the 1930s, Rafael Alberti, said the International Brigades had blood that could sing across frontiers.

Where better than in Belfast and in Ireland to celebrate that spirit that says that some things are more important than the frontiers, borders and boundaries that can divide us?

The Spanish Republican leader Dolores Ibárruri – better known as La Pasionaria – captured that same spirit in her farewell message to the Brigades: 

Communists, Socialists, Anarchists, Republicans – men of different colours, differing ideology, antagonistic religions – yet all profoundly loving liberty and justice. They came and offered themselves to us unconditionally. They gave us everything – their youth or their maturity; their science or their experience; their blood and their lives; their hopes and aspirations – and they asked us for nothing. 

About 250 Irish men and women joined the International Brigades to fight fascism in Spain, mostly as soldiers, but also as sailors or medics. One in four of them was killed.

There were three nurses. Let’s name them:
Mary Elmes, from Cork, where there is a bridge named after her,
Ruth Ormsby, from Dronmore West, Sligo, who tragically died in Spain,
Aileen Sparling, from Roscrea, Tipperary.

Around 50 volunteers came from Belfast, plus another 30 or so from the North. Men like:

Albert Fulton, a plumber, who went to Australia to work on the railways in Queensland. Arriving in Spain he gave an address in Belfast in Alexandria Park Avenue. He fought and was wounded in the Battle of the Ebro, in the machine-gun company of the British Battalion of the 15th Brigade. This was the legendary Quince Brigada, which also contained the American and Canadian battalions.

Frank Edwards, from Antrim, a schoolteacher and member of the Irish Republican Congress, who fought in the English-speaking company of a French battalion. He was wounded near Madrid, but was soon back in action in Extremadura, leading a company in the 20th International Battalion.

Henry McGrath, from Tobergill Street, off the Shankill Road. A merchant seaman, he first served on a Spanish Republican warship, then joined the British Battalion and fought at the Ebro. He was killed near Corbera on the last day the battalion saw action, 23 September 1938.

Jim Jump: Some things are more important than the borders that divide us.

One of his comrades in that battle was Jim Straney, from John Street, off Divis Street. Another IRC member, he was working in a factory in Birmingham when the Spanish Civil War broke out. He fought in 15th Brigade’s Anti-Tank Battery in Aragón. Then he joined the British Battalion and was killed near Gandesa on 31 July 1938.

One last name, this time not from Belfast or the North, but I want to mention him for personal reasons: Jack Nalty, from Ballygar in Galway, an oil depot foreman and IRC member. He was my father’s commanding officer in the machine-gun company at the Ebro. Jack was a fine leader of men and popular among them. He was killed, like Henry McGrath, near Corbera on 23 September 1938 and received a posthumous citation for bravery.

Let us remember these men and women. Let us remember them all.

Finally, we should not forget that the Spanish Republic was a ray of hope in those dark years of the 1930s – a progressive government elected to power while other countries in Europe were falling under the fascist yoke. 

‘At last a star for desperate men’, wrote an English poet who was one of the men who travelled to Spain to join the Brigades. 

Look around today. We see 1930s-style social deprivation and inequality. Militarism and religious and ethno-nationalism are on the rise. Hospitals, women and children are being mercilessly bombed and killed in their thousands. And the drumbeats of world war grow louder.

This would all sound depressingly familiar to the volunteers of the International Brigades. And this is why, in the IBMT, we do all we can, in schools, trade unions, political parties and the wider community, to make sure the example and inspiration of the International Brigades will never be forgotten and will be passed on to future generations.

¡Viva la Quince Brigada! ¡No pasarán!

[Photos © Kevin Cooper Photoline NUJ]

Hundreds gathered at the International Brigade memorial on London’s Southbank on 5 July for the annual commemoration of the 2,500 volunteers from Britain and Ireland who took part in the fight in Spain against fascism from 1936-39.

Speakers included Gawain Little, General Secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions, and Meirian Jump, Director of the Marx Memorial Library in London – and a granddaughter of one the British volunteers.

IBMT Executive Officer Helen Oclee-Brown opens proceedings next to the International Brigade memorial in Jubilee Gardens, London Southbank.

There was music from Maddy Carty, and wreaths were laid from various organisations and individuals, including the Spanish embassy in London, the Basque Children’s Association UK, IB Cymru, Oxford International Brigade Memorial Committee, train drivers’ union Aslef, Marx Memorial Library, Communist Party of Britain and the London branch of the PCE Spanish Communist Party.

Gawain Little praised the heroism and sacrifice of the volunteers, along with the ambitions of that generation of activists to create a world without exploitation and class divisions.

Those who went to Spain were there to push back the tide of fascism that would soon engulf much of Europe, he said. 'They were there to defend Spanish democracy and the young Republic. But most of all they were there because of an ideal, a grand vision, a belief that the working class, united across borders, could together build something incredible – a society fit for our children and grandchildren.'

Maddy Carty.

Meirian Jump described the Marx Memorial Library’s current project to digitise its Spanish Civil War archive – the largest in the country – and eventually make the collection freely available online. There were also plans to redevelop the library itself to create space for, among other things, exhibits about the volunteers who went to Spain.

On a personal note, she told the gathering that, aged just six months, she had been present at the unveiling of the Southbank memorial along with her twin sister Clara.

Gawain Little.

Her grandfather, Brigader Jimmy Jump, had been the secretary of the appeal committee that raised the memorial and wrote a poem about the occasion.

Part of the poem said: ’When I am gone / and you are grown / here is something to boast about / to make you feel proud / something to shout out loud. / You will not recall this day / you do not remember it now / but when you are grown / when you have children of your own / you may bring them here to play and / pointing to the date carved in stone / will say / ‘My sister and I were here that day.’

Meirian Jump.

She went on: 'And so here I am—almost 40 years later—with my own child, my wonderful four-year-old son, Victor Alan Jump.’

Jump praised the vital role played by the IBMT in ensuring we continue to speak to our children—through educational resources, memorial events, conferences, and publications.
She added: ’We know history is not neutral. It is a battleground—a contested space. The terms "fascism" and “appeasement” are often cynically deployed today to justify foreign wars, and the legacy of the Brigaders is distorted by Cold War and anti-communist narratives.

Antonio Casado Rigalt lays a wreath for the Spanish embassy.

Mick Whelan, General Secretary of the train drivers' union Aslef after laying a wreath. IBMT Secretary Megan Dobney and President Marlene Sidaway (partly hidden by memorial) clap and look on.

‘But this is our history. And we must hold onto it. Understanding the past is essential if we are to change the future. History is a weapon in our hands.’

In his address, IBMT Chair Jim Jump welcomed Antonio Casado Rigalt, Political Counsellor at the Spanish embassy. He said the Trust applauded what the Spanish government was doing to help the cause of historical memory in order to heal the wounds of repression and restore posthumous justice to those whose only crime had been to support democracy.

‘There is, however, unfinished business for us in Spain,’ he added, in the form of up to 500 bodies of British and Irish International Brigaders in unknown and unmarked graves across the country.

He went on: ‘I’m happy to say we’re working well with the Catalan government in their efforts to locate and identify – with the help of family DNA – all those International Brigaders who fell in the Battle of the Ebro – more than 90 of them from the British Battalion.’

Jim Jump.

That should be a model for the rest of Spain, Jump added. Sadly it wasn’t. ‘We have a continuing stand-off with Madrid City Council over plans to build a waste facility on or near a mass grave of 450 International Brigaders, several of them British, at Fuencarral cemetery.

‘In other regions of Spain, under the influence of the ultra rightwing Vox party, Francoism is being excused and rehabilitated, and memory laws are being torn up.’

Thelma Ruby, aged 100, widow of Canadian volunteer Peter Frye, acknowledges the applause for her.

The IBMT would counter these challenges – along with rising ‘sinister trappings’ of fascism across the world, such as racism, ethno-nationalism, bans and censorship, militarism, the slaughter of civilians and genocide, by keeping alive the inspirational story of the International Brigades.

‘Their story, ‘ he declared, ‘is one of anti-fascism, of international solidarity and of men and women whose blood, in the words of Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, could sing across frontiers.

Singing 'The Internationale', from left: Stuart Walsh, Manuel Moreno and Colin Carritt.

All photos: © Andrew Wiard. More photos viewable here.

IBMT Chair Jim Jump reports…

The ‘Echoes of Spain’ mosaic in London’s Portobello Road now has two plaques explaining the significance and origins of the memorial.

Located under the Westway flyover in the heart of the famous street market, the mural depicts the links between the Spanish Civil War and the Notting Hill area of West London. Several local volunteers joined the International Brigades and many Spanish Republican exiles settled in the neighbourhood.

One of the plaques is a key, indicating the various people and events that appear in the mosaic. A second plaque records that it was unveiled on 18 October 2005 by Spanish ambassador Carlos Miranda and International Brigade veteran and IBMT President Jack Jones.

The new plaques have been funded by the Westway Trust, which has worked with a group of local activists who help look after the memorial. One of them, Manuel Moreno, son of local Republican refugees, says the group has plans to add three further plaques and a QR code linking to more information. 

‘We want to give details about the International Brigades, the Basque refugee children and the Spanish Republicans who fought in the British Army in the Second World War, many of whom made this part of London their home.’

He added: ‘We also want to remember Eddie Adams, a prominent local progressive activist, who was the driving force behind the memorial.’

Manuel Moreno: plans for additional plaques.

Titled ‘They shall not pass – Echoes of Spain – 1936-1939 – Ecos de España – No pasarán’ and measuring five metres in length and more than two metres high, the mosaic pictures Portobello Road itself, on which are ‘Aid Spain’ campaigners and a red flag with the hammer and sickle, while the road disappears into a horizon of Basque mountains. 

In the centre is the Gernikako Arbola (Tree of Gernika), with bombs raining down on it and, further right, the Habana, with a refugee children crammed on the deck. 

Elsewhere are some of the volunteers in the International Brigades from North Kensington, which includes Notting Hill, historically a working-class area, but now one with extensive pockets of expensive housing. 

Also in the foreground is Mari Pepa Colomer (full name María Josep Colomer i Luque), among the first Spanish women to qualify as a pilot. She served with the Spanish Republic’s airforce during the Spanish Civil War and chose to live in England after the war.

The mosaic was created by students of Kensington and Chelsea College under the direction of artists Maureen Pepper and Barbara Gorton. Its dedication reads: ‘This mosaic commemorates the Spanish refugees who fled fascist Spain and those men and women from Kensington who fought in the International Brigade and supported the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39 against Franco and his fascist allies.’

Words spoken by IBMT Chair Jim Jump at the unveiling of the memorial to the Doncaster International Brigade volunteers on 12 February…

First a big thank-you to Councillor David Shaw, former councillor Tosh McDonald and everyone at Doncaster City Council who has made this excellent memorial possible.

Eighty-eight years ago today, 12 February 1937, the British Battalion of the International Brigades went into action for the first time in the Jarama valley, south-east of Madrid. The battalion paid a heavy price: 150 men were killed, including one of the volunteers from Doncaster, Herbert Tagg of King’s Road, Doncaster. He was 43 and left a widow and three children.

Sheffield’s Daily Independent reported the death under the headline ‘Doncaster man killed in Spain fighting’, mentioning also a Leicester man, Fred Sykes, who was living in Sheffield before he travelled to Spain.

The report said: ‘Both men met their death in the decisive battle at Jarama on 27 February, when the British Battalion of the International Brigade successfully resisted the attempt of Franco’s forces to break through the Madrid-Valencia road.’

The report went on to say that in his last letter home Tagg wrote: ‘Here there is a fine army, a fine people and a fine purpose. I don’t want to come back until fascism is beaten.’

There is memorial olive tree behind an information board about the International Brigades.

Herbert Tagg was a miner, born in Oakerthorpe, Derbyshire. He had worked in collieries in the Mansfield area and been politically active for many years, including receiving three months hard labour after being arrested on a strike picket.

On that sense he was typical of many volunteers – working-class political and union activists who resisted the wage cuts of the 1920s and 30s, took part in Hunger Marches and rent strikes and fought Britain’s home-grown fascists.

They were, as folk director Ken Loach has said, ‘the cream of their generation’.

In the IBMT’s records there are 16 volunteers who went to Spain who were born or who died in Doncaster or who were living here when they set off to join the International Brigades.

There may well be more. The records are often patchy. Many gave false names or temporary addresses. They were after all defying their own government, which threatened to prosecute them for fighting in a foreign war.

Of the 2,500 volunteers from the British Isles, the fatality rate was more than one in five – 530 of them died in total.

But there must have been a lucky star over Doncaster at that time. Out of the local volunteers, only Herbert Tagg made the ultimate sacrifice.

Like him, six others were miners. We should name them all.

Hector Barber, born in Doncaster in 1906, was a wood saver canvasser in the coal mines and a member of the Yorkshire Miners’ Federation. He was wounded in the Battle of the Ebro in the summer of 1938 and spent several weeks in hospital in Vich. He is listed as a ‘Good comrade’ in the British Battalion files. He died, aged 78, in Doncaster in 1985.

Jack Foster, born in Hemsworth, lived in Grange Road, Moorends, Doncaster. He served in the John Brown Battery in Spain and is believed to have died in 1953.

Steve Gilks was born in Chesterfield and gave an address in Mansfield Crescent, Shelton. He died in Sheffield, aged 50, in 1951.

Charles Giles was an unemployed miner when he arrived in Spain, giving an address in Greendyke Lane, Doncaster. He was medically discharged in March 1937 soon after enlisting. However, he served in the West Yorkshire Regiment during the Second world War and was taken prisoner by the Japanese in Malaya in 1942. He died, aged 51, in Doncaster in February 1957.

Harold Horbury was born in Doncaster in 1904 and was a colliery surface worker. He gave an address in Barnsley when he arrived in Spain. He served in the British Battalion in the battles at Jarama, Brunete, Belchite, Aragón and Teruel and in the 15th Brigade’s kitchen from May 1938 until returning home in September of that year. He died in Barnsley in 1974, aged 70.

Tom Nottingham was born in Grimethorpe, but during the Spanish Civil War was living in Doncaster, where he died in 1960, aged 56. in Spain he was captured when the British Battalion was ambushed by Mussolini’s troops at Calaceite in March 1938. He was a prisoner of war for 10 months at the notorious San Pedro de Cardeña prison camp near Burgos before returning home in an exchange for Italian POWs.

The other nine Doncaster men were:

Frank Ayres, born in Doncaster, was a railway worker and active trade unionist. Aged 29, in 1925 he visited the Soviet Union as chair of Doncaster Trades Council. He spoke three languages and in Spain worked at Valdeganga hospital at Albacete and at Uclés hospital, in Cuenca. He also fought with 129th Artillery Division. He married a Spanish nurse, Anita de Ginar, both moving to live in Battersea, London, in 1939. He died, aged 86, in retirement in southern France.

Clockwise from left: Ralph Nicholas, Herbert Tagg, Clarence Wildsmith, Eugene Fogarty, Hector Barber, Tom Nottingham being greeted by his daughters on his return home, Thomas McNulty and Harold Horbury.

Eugene Fogarty was born in Washington DC and was a medic in Spain, working for seven months at Villanueva hospital. After the war he was a nurse at St Mary’s Hospital, London, until 1950 when he left for a similar position in Doncaster, where he died, aged 68, in 1968.

Thomas Greenfield’s service details are sketchy, but he gave an address in Catherine Street, Doncaster, when he arrived in Spain. 

William Hooton was a Doncaster-born painter. His service was brief and he was repatriated in May 1937. He emigrated to Australia in 1959, where he died seven years later, aged 67.

Thomas McNulty was born in Hanley, Staffordshire, but died in Doncaster, aged 71. He was a merchant seaman and fought with British and Lincoln Battalions at Brunete, Quinto, Belchite and Fuentes de Ebro.

Ralph Nicholas was a motor mechanic, born in Hitchen, but was living in Doncaster when he went to Spain in January 1937. He was wounded at the Battle of Brunete in 1937 and again at the Ebro in the following summer. It is not known when he died.

William Parlett was a labourer, born in Sunderland, but who died in Doncaster in January 2000 at the age of 88. He was taken prisoner at the Battle of Teruel in the winter of the 1937/38 and was a held at the San Pedro de Cardeña prison camp. In the Second World War he was decorated for his service in the merchant navy, which included the Arctic convoys to Russia.

Edward Whittaker was a fitter and mechanic, born in Pontefract in 1906, and known to be living in Doncaster in 1939 soon after he arrived back from Spain. He died in Doncaster, aged 84. In Spain he served as a company armourer.

Clarence Wildsmith was an electrician and billiard hall manager, born in Barnsley. His address was in Worcester Avenue, Wheatley. He fought with the 15th Brigade’s Anti-Tank Battery. He died in Doncaster, aged 83, in October 1988.

Today we remember these 16 men and all those who fought alongside them in Spain. We remember too all those who supported them at home as part of a mass ‘Aid for Spain’ movement. The movement showed – not for the first or last time – that millions of ordinary British people had more sense than their government at the time. 

They knew that fascism, that Hitler and Mussolini, had to be defeated in Spain or else there would be another world war.

By contrast the Conservative-led national governments of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain were keen on appeasing the fascist dictators.

Their policy of ‘non-intervention’ was designed to facilitate a Franco victory in Spain. Such was their hostility to the progressive Popular Front government of the Spanish Republic that they were prepared to sacrifice democracy in Spain – as well as in Czechoslovakia – in the hope that the fascist dictators would leave the British Empire alone and instead attack the Soviet Union. 

There are many lessons here for today. Fascism has not gone away. Nor has the predilection of many liberal democracies to side with fascist or authoritarian regimes rather than with progressive governments and forces.

While in Doncaster, talking about the Spanish Civil War, we must mention one of its favourite sons, Rodney Bickerstaffe, former Unison general secretary and trustee and patron of the IBMT. 

He would have been proud to have been here today.

Rodney’s mother-to-be, Pearl Bickerstaffe, a Doncaster lass, was a children’s nurse in Thorp Arch. Still in her teens she compiled an extraordinary scrapbook about the war in Spain. The scrapbook’s two volumes were a prized family possession. This meant that Rodney carried Spain’s tragedy in his heart and knew about the heroism and sacrifice of the International Brigades and how, as his mother told him, the world should have listened to their warnings. 

Then, when Rodney became active in the trade union movement, his hero and mentor was Jack Jones, general secretary of the mighty Transport & General Workers’ Union, who had fought in the Battle of of the Ebro with the British Battalion.

Rodney was a founding trustee of the IBMT and later one its patrons. 

The IBMT keeps alive the memory and spirit of the men and women who fought fascism and defended democracy in the Spanish Civil War. Their example of International solidarity and anti-fascism, as the inscription on our national memorial on London’s Southbank puts it, ‘inspired the world’.

The final word today should go to one of the Doncaster volunteers, Tom Nottingham. The Doncaster Gazette reported his return home on 16 February 1939. A photo shows him with fellow volunteers Ralph Nicholas and Clarence Wildsmith being greeted by supporters including Mr AE Hall, Doncaster divisional Labour Party chairman, and Mrs Tagg, widow of Herbert Tagg. 

Soon afterwards he wrote a full-page article for the Gazette headlined ‘Ten months in Franco prison’, telling of his time as a POW. He concluded by saying: ‘It has been a big ordeal and I feel very weak through having insufficient food for so long – I lost 31lbs during my imprisonment – but I would go out and fight again if the call came, in the interests of democracy against fascism.

Supporters at the unveiling on 12 February, including David Shaw (right), Tosh McDonald (fifth from right) and Jim Jump (back, centre).

Poet John Cornford and writer Ralph Fox were among 13 British and Irish International Brigaders remembered at an international symposium in Lopera, the town near Córdoba where they were killed during fighting 88 years ago.

Seven of the 13 killed were Irish, reflecting the high proportion of volunteers from Ireland in the 145-strong English-speaking No.1 Company of the mostly French Marseillaise Battalion that took part in the Battle of Lopera in December 1936. 

Until the creation of the British Battalion at the of the month, British and Irish volunteers were assigned to separate units in French and German battalions.

The symposium saw sculptor Frank Casey reunited with his relief portrait of John Cornford. He created the memorial in his studio in St Albans and it was shipped to Spain, where it was unveiled in 2019 in Lopera’s Jardín de los Poetas Ingleses (Garden of the English Poets).

This was the first time that the Scottish-born sculptor had seen his bronze tribute to Cornford – a Cambridge graduate and the great grandson of Charles Darwin – who died on 28 December 1936, the day after his 21st birthday.

Frank Casey beside his memorial bust of John Cornford.

Also commemorated in the town’s memorial garden is the novelist and biographer Ralph Fox, who was killed on the same day, aged 36. He was a renowned journalist, novelist, and historian, best remembered as a biographer of Lenin and Genghis Khan.  

The occasion was an international congress in Lopera on the International Brigades and the Battle of Lopera on 13/14 December. It brought together experts and writers on the International Brigades from several countries.

They included French historian Rémi Skoutelsky, Giles Tremlett, author of ‘The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War’ (2021) and local historian José Luis Pantoja Vallejo – the congress convener – who with brother Antonio has written a detailed study of the battle ‘La XIV Brigada Internacional en Andalucía’ (2006).

Ralph Fox is pictured (centre) on the poster for the event in Lopera.

There was also a session on the memory of the International Brigades, with representatives from memorial groups in France, Poland and Spain taking part, as well as IBMT Chair Jim Jump from Britain. Another speaker was Harry Owens of the Friends off the International Brigades in Ireland.

Speaking about how the volunteers are remembered in Britain, Jump said that interest and admiration for them remained high, with new books being written about then and new memorials being raised in their honour.

Jim Jump (standing) addressing the symposium, with pictures of John Cornford and Ralph Fox projected behind him.

‘They are held in great esteem for being the first Britons to fight fascism and for being proved right by history,’ he added.

Frank Casey said he was delighted to again see his memorial to John Cornford. ‘It’s in the right place, so near to where he died among the love trees.’

Casey is also known for creating the Blockade Runners Memorial in Glasgow in tribute too thew merchant navy crews who continued to sail ships to Spanish Republican-held ports despite attacks by German, Italian and Francoist planes and submarines.

This poem by John Cornford (above) dates from 1936, shortly before his death. It is dedicated to his girlfriend Margot Heinemann.

Heart of the heartless world,
Dear heart, the thought of you
Is the pain at my side,
The shadow that chills my view.

The wind rises in the evening,
Reminds that autumn is near.
I am afraid to lose you,
I am afraid of my fear.

On the last mile to Huesca,]
The last fence for our pride,
Think so kindly, dear, that I
Sense you at my side.

And if bad luck should lay my strength
Into the shallow grave,
Remember all the good you can;
Don’t forget my love.

Jim Jump reviews ‘Spanish Sky Spreads Its Stars: The story of the Thälmann Battalion and the first Germans in armed struggle against fascism’ by Ewald P Schulz (International Brigade Commemoration Committee, Belfast, 2024).

More than 4,000 Germans fought in the International Brigades or in the anti-fascist militias and other Spanish military units during the Spanish Civil War. Over 1,000 of them gave their lives.

Their story is recounted in this booklet by Ewald P Schulz, a Berlin-based lawyer and journalist who is active in the KFSR, the IBMT’s sister organisation in Germany. The booklet’s title is taken from the song ‘The Thälmann Column’ by composer Paul Dessau and his wife Gudrun: ‘Spain’s sky spreads its stars over our trenches / And the morning already greets from afar’.

Usually known as the Thaelmann Battalion in Spain, the battalion was named after Ernst Thälmann, leader of the KPD German Communist Party. He was arrested as soon as Hitler took power in 1933 and executed on the Führer’s personal orders in Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944.

As Schulz points out, the German volunteers differed from their British, Dutch, French and Scandinavian counterparts in that they were effectively homeless. Many were already in exile from Nazism and those who travelled to Spain from Germany could also not return home.

The same was true for the battalion’s Austrians following the Anschluss of March 1938, when Germany marched into Austria.

The decision to fight fascism in Spain – on occasions pitted against the airborne Condor Legion sent by Hitler to help Franco’s rebels – had a special meaning for the German volunteers.

‘For the first time they had the opportunity to stand up to the fascists and to oppose their violence,’ he writes. 

Between 60 and 70 per cent of the German volunteers were communists, the rest mostly social democrats, anarchists or supporters of other left organisations. ‘They were all united by the conviction that Spain should not suffer the same fate as Germany.’

Three Germans are given brief biographies. Hermann Drumm, a miner from Saarland in south-west Germany, was a member of the SPD social democrats and became a company commander before being killed, aged 38, at Belchite in September 1937.

Käthe Hempel (1911-1966) was originally from Waldheim, a town west of Dresden. In the summer of 1936 she was living in Switzerland, from where she cycled to Barcelona to take part in the planned People’s Olympiad, which was being organised as an anti-fascist alternative to the Berlin Olympics. She was a communist and served as a nurse in Spain.

Alois Weisberger (1904-?) was another miner from Saarland and was one of the few members of the Catholic Centre Party to join the Thälmann Battalion. The party, indeed, had voted in favour of Hitler’s Enabling Act that gave the Nazi leader untrammelled powers. After the war in Spain, Weisberger was interned in France and in 1943 handed over to the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp.

The German volunteers fought in all the great battles of the war in Spain: the defence of Madrid, Jarama, Guadalajara, Brunete, Teruel and the Ebro. Having no homes to go to after the International Brigades were stood down in September 1938, the Germans, along with the Austrians and Czechs, took up arms again in January 1939, bravely covering the flight of refugees towards the French border as Franco’s forces advanced through Catalonia.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the booklet is the account of what happened to the surviving Thälmanns after the war. Interned by the French in a network of camps, some managed to secure visas to Britain, Mexico, the Soviet Union and the US. Others were recruited to French labour battalions. Those still in the camps following the French surrender to the Germans in 1940 were sent to concentration camps, where many perished, or escaped to join the French Resistance.

After the defeat of Nazism in 1945, contrasting receptions awaited the veterans in West and East Germany. In the Federal Republic, they fell foul of the state’s official anti-communist ideology, which included the banning of the KPD in 1956.

While former members of the Condor Legion received pensions for their service in Spain, there was no such recognition for those who had fought fascism and Nazism in Spain.

In the GDR the International Brigade veterans were officially honoured. They served in leadership roles in the East German army as well as in the country’s police and in government positions. 

Some, Schulz acknowledges, were regarded with suspicion during the Stalin era, above all any who had lived in Western countries before returning to Germany. A few lost their jobs and were unjustly persecuted, such as prominent writer Walter Janka.

In contrast with West Germany, however, the volunteers in Spain entered the cultural canon of the GDR. ‘Countless books, songs and films were published. Streets were named after Spanish fighters. Medals were awarded and every child learned about the war in Spain at school.’

Born in 1968 in West Germany, Schulz says he only found out about the Thälmanns after 2000. Most older left-wingers in the FRG first came across their story through the songs of singer-composer Ernst Busch, two albums of which were released in the 1980s.

The songs had been recorded in Barcelona in 1938 with the help of an International Brigade choir. Some of the recordings were released in New York in 1940 under the title ‘Six Songs for Democracy’, with American actor, singer and civil rights campaigner Paul Robeson writing in the sleeve notes: ‘Valiant and heroic was the part played by the International Brigade in the glorious struggle of the Spanish Republic.’ 

Schulz’s text for this booklet is based on a talk he gave in 2023 as part of Belfast’s annual Féile an Phobail (People’s Festival). The event was hosted at the Shankill Library by the IBMT-affiliated International Brigade Commemoration Committee. The booklet also includes tributes to Manus O’Riordan, the son of Cork Brigader Michael O’Riordan, and Belfast-born volunteer Paddy McAllister.

Copies of the booklet can be ordered from the IBCC for £6 plus £2.50 p&p within the UK. Contact Lynda Walker of the IBCC for more details.

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!

Jim Jump reviews ‘Architects of Terror: Paranoia, Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain’ by Paul Preston (HarperCollins, 2023). The review appears in the current issue of the IBMT magazine ¡No Pasarán!

Before the Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 there were no more than 6,000 Jews living in Spain and the Communist Party was tiny. Yet the plotters who launched the coup that started the war declared they were fighting, not the Spanish Republic’s elected government, but a Jewish-masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy. Their enemy was an ‘Anti-Spain’ responsible for every disaster that had beset the fatherland, from the Muslim invasion to the loss of empire.

Such an interpretation of Spanish history may have been chronologically bizarre, as Paul Preston notes in this characteristically powerful and chillingly entertaining book*. But it proved highly effective in justifying and generating enthusiasm for the uprising that brought General Franco to power and in the process killed half a million Spaniards and inflicted misery and exile on countless more.  

Antisemitism has deep roots in Spanish history, going back to the expulsion of the Jews in 1492 and the Catholic Church’s efforts in the Inquisition to ‘cleanse’ the country of non-believers. Then, early in the 1930s came the publication of the fabricated antisemitic text, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which supposedly showed Jewish plans for world domination. The forgery found fertile ground among the enemies of the newly installed Republic, having already been seized upon by Hitler and the Nazis to underpin their antisemitic creed. Its influence in Spain outlived the Third Reich. Twelve editions were published, alongside many other antisemitic tirades, during the Franco dictatorship that lasted until the generalísimo’s death in 1975. 

As the tide of the Second World War turned against the Axis powers, efforts were made to deny that antisemitism had been central to Francoist propaganda. Preston demolishes the myth that paints Franco as a saviour of Jews during the Holocaust. Up to 35,000 Jewish refugees did manage to pass through Spain to safety during the Second World War, many of them clandestinely. Others were turned away at the border or imprisoned, and Jewish relief organisations were banned. A few heroic Spanish diplomats – in Berlin, Bucharest, Budapest and Sofia – took unilateral initiatives to save hundreds of Jewish lives. But consular protection for Sephardic Jews in Greece was refused (at least 45,000 were sent from Salonica to Auschwitz), Franco did nothing to save hundreds of Jews with Spanish nationality in Nazi concentration camps and German Jewish refugees were handed over to the Gestapo.

Several prominent Republican politicians were freemasons. The Catholic Church hated them and so did Franco, though for him it was personal. They were ‘the great invasion of evil’ and, he wrote in 1962, ‘atheistic traitors in exile, delinquents, swindlers, men who betrayed their wives’, the latter categorisation a thinly concealed swipe at his father, who was a mason and a womaniser.

His antipathy to the left was just as pathological. In 1938, with the civil war still raging, the Caudillo authorised funding for Dr Antonio Vallejo Nágera, head of the military psychiatric services, to find the ‘red gene’ that linked Marxism with mental disorders and moral degeneracy. The premise was that left-wingers were polluting the pure Spanish race with Jewish strains. Nágera’s team of investigators included two German scientific advisers and tests were carried out on captured International Brigaders and Republican women prisoners.

The foul lunacy of the Jewish-masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy theory – a classic case of ‘fake news’, according to the author – is brought to life via mini-biographies of six of its ardent adherents, each with their own chapter. They are a motley and unsavoury crew. There is the police chief and intelligence agent Mauricio Carlavilla, who kept a portrait of Hitler on his desk until retirement in 1957 and who was the author of several diatribes, including ‘Sodomitas’, which set out to link homosexuality with communism. 

The influential priest and author Juan Tusquets began compiling lists of Jews and Freemasons well before the Civil War and, at the cost of innumerable lives lost and ruined, continued his work within the Sección Judeo-Masónica of Franco’s military intelligence agency. Just as well-placed in Francoist circles was the poet José María Pemán, who extolled the brutal murder of Republican supporters in the reign of terror that followed the 1936 uprising. The war was necessary to protect the Virgin from being Russian or Jewish and ‘had been sent by God to teach Spaniards a lesson, to permit them to purify themselves, to leave behind their past sins and errors, and to reach the end pure and cleansed’.

Perhaps even more crazed was the aristocratic, polo-playing sadist Gonzalo de Aguilera who, as Franco’s press officer during the civil war, would explain to foreign correspondents in perfect English (his mother was Scottish) that, like plague-ridden rats, the Spanish masses had been infected with the virus of Bolshevism. He blamed this on sewers and modern plumbing, which had allowed too many of these ‘animals’ to survive. A vicious bully and toadying snob, he almost certainly sexually abused his daughter Magdalena over several years. The end of his life was fittingly and gruesomely tragic. By 1964 he was seriously paranoid and liable to fits of wild rage. In one of these, he shot dead his two sons at the family estate. He was locked up in an asylum in nearby Salamanca, where he died in the following year.

The final profiles are of two generals in Franco’s rebel army: Emilio Mola and Gonzalo Queipo de Llano. Both professed to be waging a crusade to save Spain from, as Queipo de Llano put it, ‘Marxist hordes’ and ‘the [Jewish] race that propagates communism, hoards gold and aspires to subjugate the world’. Mola was cold-bloodedly responsible for the murders of some 40,000 civilians in northern Spain. Queipo de Llano, Franco’s corrupt military strongman in Seville, was a bombastic psychopath who oversaw the murder and rape of thousands of Republican supporters in the working-class districts of the city. 

Mola died in a plane crash during the Civil War, while Queipo de Llano lived until 1951. Of the trio profiled by Preston who survived until Spain’s return to democracy, only Carlavilla seems to have stuck to his ideological guns, though his final years were spent in a sordid room in a Madrid lodging house. Tusquets and Pemán by contrast tried with some success to deny and downplay their pasts. Preston’s devastating new book will hopefully make sure that, in posterity at least, they won’t get away with it.

Main picture: Franco and Hitler meet in Hendaye in 1940. Photo: Heinrich Hoffmann/Cc-by-sa-3.0-de