Marking the 40th anniversary of the unveiling of the International Brigade memorial in London’s Jubilee Gardens, IBMT Chair Jim Jump looks back at the drama behind its installation…

Linger by the International Brigade memorial on London’s Southbank and you’ll soon notice tourists stopping to find out what this imposing piece of public art is all about. Standing four metres high, it’s the only sculpture or memorial in Jubilee Gardens, a green oasis facing onto the Thames and squeezed between the London Eye and the Royal Festival Hall.

The memorial today with its inscription inspired by Cecil Day Lewis's poem 'The Volunteer'.

As these curious tourists read the inscriptions, some, especially Spaniards, are clearly surprised. How come a memorial of this sort, dedicated to a cause still considered controversial in some official and rightwing circles, should be located on a prime site in the heart of the capital?

It’s a good question. Little do most people know the politics and cliff-hanging drama that led up to its unveiling 40 years ago on 5 October 1985.

The impetus for a national memorial emerged in the years following Franco’s death in 1975 and the process of restoring democracy in Spain.

Through the International Brigade Association, the veterans had, until Spain’s often fraught transición, concentrated on campaigning against the country’s brutal dictatorship and on behalf of its many political prisoners.

Now, with the approach of the 50th anniversary of the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1986, they could devote efforts to a national memorial to their more than 500 fallen comrades and to all those anti-fascist volunteers who had, as the memorial in Jubilee Gardens states, ‘left these shores’ to go to Spain. These were carefully chosen words to include all the Irish, Cypriots and those from the dominions and colonies who didn’t count themselves as ‘British’.

Supporters in Scotland had already led the way. In August 1980, Glasgow City Council raised the landmark Pasionaria memorial to the International Brigades. Created by Liverpool sculptor Arthur Dooley, the figure of legendary Spanish Republican leader Dolores Ibárruri faces south across the Clyde, arms outstretched.

Something equally as impressive was needed nationally. And in the leftwing Labour-run Greater London Council, the Brigaders found friends, notably leader ‘Red’ Ken Livingstone, chair Illtyd Harrington and arts committee chair Tony Banks. The GLC agreed to provide a site for the memorial in Jubilee Gardens, which it owned and was located next to its headquarters in County Hall.

The International Brigade Memorial Appeal (IBMA) was set up and began raising the necessary funds, including an £18,800 grant from the GLC.

Six leading sculptors were asked to submit ideas for the memorial, and in December 1984, the commission was awarded to Ian Walters, creator of, among other works, the bust of Nelson Mandela on London Southbank and the statue of Harold Wilson in Huddersfield.

Sculptor Ian Walters (left), with his maquette for the memorial, and (from right) Brigaders Bill Alexander (International Brigade Memorial Appeal chair) and Jimmy Jump (IBMA Secretary).

Meanwhile, Red Ken was becoming a thorn in the side of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The GLC hoisted, for example, a massive banner on top of County Hall, clearly visible across the river from the Houses of Parliament, with a running total of the growing number of unemployed in London.

Thatcher was not amused, and she characteristically went for the political nuclear option, announcing in 1983 that she would abolish the GLC. Two years later, royal assent was given to the Local Government Act, which on 31 March 1986 dissolved the GLC and its powers were distributed to the London boroughs.

County Hall was to be sold off – it’s now a leisure hub for attractions such as the Sea Life London Aquarium and London Dungeon – and Jubilee Gardens was eventually handed over to a specially-formed charitable trust.

Thatcher’s attack on the GLC galvanised campaigners. At the meeting of the IBMA on 8 January 1985, appeal chair Bill Alexander said it was now ‘essential to hold the unveiling ceremony while the GLC is still in control’. Illtyd Harrington urged it to be held ‘the sooner the better’, the meeting heard.

Committee members of the International Brigade Memorial Appeal inspect the unfinished sculpture in Ian Walters’s studio in Battersea. From left are Brigaders Robert Walker (partly hidden) and Joe Monks, Betty Birch, Solly Kaye and Ann Mildwater.

With the clock ticking, plans for an unveiling on 19 July 1986 were scrapped, and Ian Walters was told to speed things up for the new deadline in October 1985.

The new deadline was met, though even after the unveiling, uncertainty still hung over the memorial’s future.

‘It is intended to hold a public event at the memorial on 19 July 1986, 50th anniversary of the fascist revolt,’ wrote Bill Alexander in the International Brigade Association’s newsletter.

‘But the GLC, whose many-sided and generous support made the memorial possible, will have been replaced by a government-appointed quango who will control the Southbank,’ he said. ‘The character and form of the event cannot therefore yet be decided.’

5 October 1985: Michael Foot MP with his hand on the memorial shortly after he unveiled it. From his left to right are: Norman Willis (TUC General Secretary), Brigader Jack Jones, Tony Banks and Communist Party General Secretary Gordon McLennan. With her hand on the plinth is Dame Janet Vaughan and, next to her, Bill Alexander.

Thankfully, not only did the 1986 event go ahead, but a commemoration has taken place in July ever since. And, with excellent relations with the Jubilee Gardens Trust, the IBMT is confident that the volunteers will continue to be remembered at the memorial for many years to come.

We need your help to identify a commemoration from the past. If you have any information, please contact us.

Do you remember this commemoration at the International Brigade memorial in Jubilee Gardens on London’s Southbank – or can you help pinpoint the exact year it was held?

The images are taken from a video shot by David Hill, son of London Brigader George Hill. David doesn’t have a record of the year in question, but wants to know now for a film he is putting together about his father, who is pictured above (top row, centre).

The Jubilee Gardens memorial was unveiled in 1985, and it is thought that David’s video dates from one of the years immediately afterwards, but no later than 1990.

Featured in the photos is Bill Alexander (middle row, in pink shirt), who headed the International Brigade Association at the time.

Among other Brigaders who were filmed at the event, though not pictured here, are Charlie Hutchison, Jimmy Jump, Lou Kenton, Johnny Longstaff, David Marshall, Jimmy Moon and George Wheeler.

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.

The IBMT's commemoration at the International Brigade memorial in Jubilee Gardens on London's South Bank on Saturday 6 July saw speeches by PCS General Secretary Fran Heathcote and historian Richard Baxell.

As is customary and led by IBMT President Marlene Sidaway, wreaths were laid and there was a minute's silence in honour of the more than 500 volunteers from Britain and Ireland who gave their lives in Spain and in memory of the 2,500 volunteers who served in the International Brigades.

Led by folk duo Na-Mara, everyone sang 'Valley of Jarama' and the event ended with a rousing rendition of 'The Internationale'.

In her contribution, Fran Heathcote noted the worrying rise of the racist far-right in Britain, in the form of the Reform party, which had gained 4 million votes in the general election held two days previously. The anti-fascist example of the International Brigades was therefore needed today more than ever.

'Europe and indeed the UK are heading at a startling rate towards fascism,' she said, 'with far-right parties sweeping up millions of votes. We need to get out into our communities and workplaces to spread the resistance to fascism. The parallels with the 1930s are there for all to see.'

Fran Heathcote.

IBMT Historical Consultant Richard Baxell spoke about the experience of the International Brigade prisoners during the Spanish Civil War.

In particular, he drew from the biography of Battersea volunteer George Wheeler, 'To Make the People Smile Again', which, among other things, describes the appalling conditions endured in the San Pedro de Cardeña prison camp.

The mood was lightened when he recounted the way that Wheeler and the other prisoners, were forced by violent guards to chant 'Fran-co! Fran-co!'. They did so with gusto, but chorusing 'F*** you! F*** you!' instead.

Camilo Morán, aged 4, and mother Noelia laying a wreath on behalf of the Spanish Communist Party. Looking on is Richard Baxell.

There was an emotional send-off for Na-Mara – Paul McNamara and Rob Garcia – who have announced they are giving up touring and playing live gigs and 16 years of doing so. As this would be their final performance at Jubilee Gardens, IBMT Secretary Megan Dobney presented them with flowers in the colours of the Spanish Republic.

One of the songs performed by Na-Mara was 'The Bite'. Introducing it, McNamara explained that the words were inspired by a reference in George Wheeler's autobiography to the small piece of wood he would put in his mouth before going into battle as something to clench while bombs and bullets landed around him.

IBMT Chair Jim Jump rounded off proceedings by underlining the importance of the IBMT's work, pointing out that memorials in Spain were still subject to attack and, more generally, there were moves to erase the role of the Brigaders from the 20th century's long war against fascism.

'In the IBMT we're fighting back with our schools project, providing teaching aids and lesson plans so that pupils can be taught about the International Brigades and the Spanish Civil War.'

Thanking the wreath-layers, he singled out Isabel García, Deputy Consul at the Spanish embassy in London. He said the IBMT applauded the efforts of the current Spanish government, through its Law of Democratic Memory, to recognise the crimes committed against the supporters of the Spanish Republic.

He went on: 'I was struck by the words of your prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, while visiting Franco's grotesque former mausoleum at the Valley of Cuelgamuros earlier this year, when he said "Sin memoria no hay democracia" – there can be no democracy without memory.'

Among those present in Jubilee Gardens were family and descendants of International Brigaders Felicia Browne, Jimmy Burns, Noel Carritt, John Cornford, Len Crome, Jack Edwards, Otto Estensen, Harry Fraser, George Green, Nan Green, Edwin Greening, Jimmy Jump, Lou Kenton, Johnny Longstaff, David Marshall, Patrick O’Sullivan, Cyril Sexton, Hugh Slater, Alex Tudor-Hart, Rob Wardle and Tom Wintringham.

All photos are © Andrew Wiard. See this link for more photos from the commemoration.

The IBMT’s national memorial and sculpture by Ian Walters is in Jubilee Gardens, near Waterloo Station in London SE1, and it needs your help!

We were alerted by the Jubilee Gardens staff in December last year to damage to the grouting on the base of the memorial – it’s probably wear and tear but we need to get it repaired to avoid any further deterioration – and preferably before our annual commemoration on Saturday 6 July 2024.

Grout in need of repair on the national memorial in Jubilee Gardens.

We have a quotation for the work – £1,980 – so can you help? Can you donate, say, £20? Or more of course!

We will publish the names of everyone who responds to this appeal unless they wish to remain anonymous.

There are more than 100 memorials to the volunteers in Britain and Ireland, but the national memorial is the only one that commemorates all the 526 men and women who were killed in the Spanish Civil War.

Erected in 1985, the memorial is an important piece of public art and a fitting tribute to the International Brigades. Please help us preserve it.

We welcome donations by cheque, sent to 37a Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R 0DU, or by PayPal, adding the code NatMem in the note box.