Jim Jump applauds the publication of a new booklet about the rail and maritime workers who first fought fascism.

They say the past never goes away and is still with us. That couldn’t be more true of the rise of fascism last century.

Everyone hoped this evil creed had been stamped out for good with the defeat of the Nazi war machine in 1945. But the fascist beast and its toxic ideology of race-hate, ethno-nationalism, militarism and hostility to organised labour has not gone away. 

Sadly, this makes the RMT’s new booklet, ‘They Shall Not Pass’, all the more relevant and important today.

Published in conjunction with the IBMT, it tells the story of the railway workers and seafarers who in the 1930s resisted fascism at home and, in the case of the Spanish Civil War, took up arms to stop Hitler, Mussolini and General Franco crushing the elected government of Spain. 

What stands out is that these workers recognised the true threat of fascism well before their political masters did.

It was ordinary people who stopped the British Union of Fascists (BUF) from marching through our towns and cities.

And it was ordinary people, including scores of members of the NUR and NUS rail and seafaring unions, who joined the International Brigades to fight the fascists in Spain. There’s a plaque with 120 names on it proudly on display at RMT’s head office.

Within the British establishment there was considerable sympathy for the way Europe’s fascist dictators banned trade unions and violently suppressed political parties of the left.

BUF leader Sir Oswald Mosley was an aristocratic former Labour cabinet minister with rich and powerful friends.

As ‘They Shall Not Pass’ describes, Britain’s would-be führer came unstuck when he sued NUR general secretary John Marchbank for slander. The BUF leader won a technical victory, but was awarded a laughable farthing (a quarter of a penny) in damages and was left with a massive legal bill.

Mosley’s High Court humiliation came in 1936. Things got worse in October of that year at the Battle of Cable Street. This was when the Jewish population of Whitechapel joined forces with local dockers, trade unionists, communists and socialists to prevent the BUF’s antisemitic Blackshirts from parading through London’s East End.

The cry of the anti-fascists was ‘They shall not pass!’, the same one used by the defenders of Madrid, ‘¡No pasarán!’. Many of the protesters at Cable Street were among more than 2,000 volunteers from Britain who joined the International Brigades to fight in Spain.

IBMT Chair Jim Jump (centre) with RMT General Secretary Mick Lynch (left) and RMT Assistant General Secretary Eddie Dempsey at the union's annual general meeting in Hull in July. Jump is one of the co-authors of 'They Shall Not Pass', along with Brian Denny and Steve Silver.

This was no gap-year jaunt. More than 500 of them made the ultimate sacrifice. NUR member Ginger McElroy from Wishaw was killed at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937 after being hit by a dum-dum bullet. The bloody battle saw the British Battalion lose more than 150 men. But they held the line to stop Franco taking Madrid.

Fellow railwayman Alwyn Skinner from Neath lost his life in the Battle of the Ebro in the summer of 1938, when Hitler’s bombers pummelled the British Battalion on the rocky slopes around Gandesa. The battalion suffered 90 fatalities.

Readers of this 36-page booklet will be moved and inspired by the exploits of many individuals described in it.

Jim Prendergast, one of the leaders of the Irish contingent in the International Brigades, fought bravely at Córdoba, Jarama and Brunete. In the 1960s he was the NUR’s Marylebone branch secretary and led the campaign that broke British Rail’s colour bar that excluded black workers from senior posts.

Jack Coward, one of several Liverpool seamen to fight in Spain, was captured at Calaceite in 1938 but escaped and fought behind the lines with Spanish guerrillas. When he was re-captured, he pretended to be deaf and dumb and eventually made his way home from enemy Spain on a British ship.

Spike Robson, a ship’s fireman from South Shields, led the NUS crew of the Linaria on strike in Boston, Massachusetts, to stop explosive materials being shipped to Franco’s Spain. 

‘We will not take out the ship if it means helping to kill people in Spain,’ Robson declared.

Arrested on their return home, the men ended up in court, charged under the Merchant Shipping Act and facing prison sentences. Robson was blacklisted from the shipping industry as a result

It’s often said that union members stand on the shoulders of giants – in other words our predecessors who fought for the rights we enjoy today and the principles that still guide us. Delve into this booklet and meet some of those giants from the RMT’s past.

Jim Jump is the chair of the IBMT and a former editor of the NUS/RMT journal, The Seaman.

‘The Shall Not Pass’ can be ordered from the IBMT Shop for £5 plus p&p.

There was a full house in Eastbourne’s Grove Theatre on 18 May for an assortment of songs, film clips and spoken word on the theme of ‘Sussex and the Spanish Civil War’.

Organised by the IBMT-affiliated Sussex Brigaders Remembered and scripted by former IBMT trustees Mike Anderson and Pauline Fraser, the event attracted an audience of some 70 people. 

Anderson explained that the war in Spain had had a considerable impact on Sussex, with some 30 volunteers from the county enlisting in the International Brigades, seven of whom lost their lives. There were also several 'colonies' of refugee Basque children.

Those who died in Spain were Julian Bell (Charleston), Vincent Deegan (Brighton), Tom Elliott (Worthing), George Fuller (Eastbourne), Donald MacDonald (Brighton), Thomas Sheehan (Brighton) and Roy Watts (Hove). In addition, Sydney Holland (Petworth), a pilot in the Spanish Republic's airforce, was also killed in action.

Most of those present in the Grove Theatre joined folk legend Robb Johnson in singing ‘Valley of Jarama’ to remember the fallen volunteers. 

Robb wrote two new songs especially for the performance: ‘From All Four Corners of the Earth’ and ‘Where the Bloody Hell Have You Been?’ – a reference to the way Brigader George Wheeler was greeted by his family when he arrived home from Spain in April 1939.

The scene inside the Grove Theatre.

The audience also sang along with story-teller Jon Mason in a rendition of ‘Sussex By the Sea’ with words re-written in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War by Ernie Trory, the Communist Party organiser in Sussex.

The song’s lines include: ‘Far o’er the seas we wander, wide through the world we roam / Into the Spanish trenches, fighting for those at home.’

La Pasionaria’s famous farewell message to the International Brigades was recited by Sandra Carillo, a local activist in the Marea Granate movement of ex-pat Spaniards.

Sandra’s great-grandfather, Pedro Carrillo Rodríguez was executed by the fascists in 1940. Born in Maqueda (Toledo) in 1906, he was a member of the UGT union federation and had fought at Jarama with the 66 Brigada Mixta.

‘It’s an honour and a duty for me to be here tonight,’ said Sandra.

In the discussion at the end of the enthusiastically received presentation in Eastbourne, audience members said it was a shame that the story of the International Brigades was not better known by young people.

The International Brigade Memorial Trust's Chair, Jim Jump, told them that the the IBMT had recently created a range of online teaching aids and lesson plans to help school pupils find out more about 'this amazing chapter in radical history'. These educational resources were still being added to, he said.

Participants in 'Sussex and the Spanish Civil War', from left: Christian Hogsbjerg of Sussex Brigaders Remembered, Sandra Carillo, Mike Anderson, Pauline Fraser, Jon Mason and Robb Johnson. Behind them is an embroidered version of Picasso's 'Guernica' produced in 2017 by Brighton artist Nicola Ashmore and volunteers from local peace and anti-war groups.

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