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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.

This year’s Len Crome Memorial Conversation features a discussion between three leading historians of the Spanish Civil War: Paul Preston, Helen Graham and Richard Baxell.

They will be talking on the topic:
Public support and governmental obstruction: differing British responses to the struggle of the Spanish Republic.

The IBMT-organised event will take place from 2pm to 3.30pm on Saturday 9 November both online and ‘in person’ at the Marx Memorial Library, 37a Clerkenwell Green, London EC1R 0DU.

All three participants are prolific authors and internationally renowned experts on the Spanish Civil War and the International Brigades.

Paul Preston’s latest book is ‘Perfidious Albion: Britain and the Spanish Civil War’ (The Clapton Press, 2024). Richard Baxell’s latest is ‘Forged in Spain’ (The Clapton Press, 2023). Helen Graham’s sixth book, provisionally titled ‘Lives at the Limit’ will be interwoven biographies of five people who passed through the war in Spain.

Len Crome Memorial Conversation is named after the Lancashire GP Len Crome who became the chief medical officer of the Spanish Republic's XV Army Corps, including the 15th International Brigade. The annual event has been running since 2002, first as a lecture, then as a conference and now as an online conversation.

Attendance at the library or online is free, although the IBMT is recommending a donation of £10 to support the Trust's educational and commemorative work. Book your ticket here via Eventbrite.

Richard Baxell (top left), Paul Preston (top right) and Helen Graham speaking at the 2023 Len Crome Memorial Conversation.

The 2023 Len Crome Memorial Conference, which took place on 11 November 2023, is now available to watch online.

The conversation between leading historians on the Spanish Civil War Helen Graham and Paul Preston, with Richard Baxell in the chair, charts the long roots of the Spanish Civil War.

Helen, Paul and Richard trace the conflict's origins back to the First World War – not only with attempts to wipe out the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 but also to double down on any socially levelling reform inside the developed industrial heartlands of Europe, including Britain.

Paul Preston is one of the world’s foremost historians of the causes, course and consequences of the Spanish Civil War. He is the IBMT’s Founding Chair.

Helen Graham is Emeritus Professor of modern European history at Royal Holloway University of London and is the author of ‘Interrogating Francoism' and ‘The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction’. She is also an IBMT Patron.

Richard Baxell is the author of 'Forged in Spain'. He is a research fellow at the LSE and the IBMT's Historical Consultant.

The video also features Peter Crome, who discusses his father’s life and legacy.

To watch the previous Len Crome Memorial Conferences online, go to the IBMTNews Len Crome playlist on YouTube.

This year’s Len Crome Memorial Conference will be an online conversation between leading historians of the Spanish Civil War, Helen Graham and Paul Preston, with Richard Baxell in the chair.

Organised by the IBMT, the free event takes place on Saturday 11 November 2023 from 2pm-3.30pm. Register here.

It is generally understood that the war of 1936-9 in Spain was a Europe-wide conflict, in terms of state power politics, the rise of fascism and ordinary people’s anti-fascist engagement. This phenomenon has been explained by a number of historians, including Paul Preston and Helen Graham as a ‘European civil war’. 

In this conversation with Richard Baxell, they chart the war’s long roots. These go back at least to the First World War – not only with attempts to wipe out the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, but also to double down on any socially levelling reform inside the developed industrial heartlands of Europe, including Britain. 

From left: Helen Graham, Paul Preston and Richard Baxell.

The First World War had meant the massive mobilisation of ordinary people across the continent as soldiers and home-front workers, and afterwards they demanded not only political change but also levelling social change. New industrial cities were growing up or expanding everywhere and were perceived as a  threat to the pre-1914  power elites of Europe/Britain, who still hoped for ‘business as usual’ after 1918.  

It is this picture which explains why, when Spain’s military tried to stifle the country’s new, democratically elected and socially reforming government, it wasn’t only Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany that wanted them to win, but also the British establishment and much of France’s too.

Paul Preston and Helen Graham and Richard Baxell will trace these developments to show how they led to a situation where not only fascist dictatorships but also democratic states in Europe largely preferred a Franco victory in the Spanish war. 

In the end this would come with a Nazi price tag, one that soon forced Britain and France to fight another world war, the one that completed the destruction of their imperial pre-eminence in the world. 

Given that the Second World War might potentially have been avoided, had Britain especially made different decisions over Spain, then we can also say that the war of 1936-39 wasn’t only European in its reach, but global too.

Len Crome, born Lazar Krom in 1909 in Latvia, then part of Imperial Russia, trained as a doctor in Edinburgh and was a GP in Blackburn in 1936 when he volunteered to go to Spain. He rose to the rank of major in the Spanish People’s Army and headed the medical services of the mainly English-speaking 15th Brigade and the mainly German-speaking 11th Brigade. He served in the British Army during the Second World War, earning a Military Cross for his bravery at Monte Cassino. After the war he became an eminent pathologist in London and, until his death in 2001, was the chair of the International Brigade Association.

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