spain
Newly-released papers reveal that many more Britons than was previously estimated left the UK for Spain “to defend democracy”
13.07.11 - 12:27 -
British members of the International Brigades in Spain. Marx Memorial Library
1,500 more Britons came to Spain in the 1930s to fight against General Franco’s fascist regime than was previously thought. MI5 files published online last week by The National Archives show the names of more than 4,000 British people who signed up to do battle against the Spanish dictator.
Before the publication, it had been widely believed that 2,500 volunteers from the United Kingdom participated.
The newly-digitalised documents from the UK’s counter-intelligence and security agency show the movements of British men and women who left for the frontline in Spain with The International Brigades, military units made up of socialist, communist and anarchist volunteers from different countries, who travelled to Spain “to defend the Second Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War” between 1936 and 1939. The files were released last week to coincide with the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the war. What is the social and historical importance of these files?
“They tell us that despite the British Government's opposition to supporting the democratically-elected Spanish Republic, there was sufficient support in Britain for its struggle against Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, and that 4,000 men and women were prepared to leave Britain in order to travel to Spain and risk their lives for it,” renowned historian Richard Baxell, tells SUR in English. “The latest estimate is that about 530 were killed in Spain.”
Baxell says that before the digital files were published, most analysts came to the conclusion that 2,500 Britons were involved in the Civil War, due to the “copious records already in the public domain in Spain, Britain and Russia on those who joined the International Brigades.”
However, this figure is now boosted by MI5’s record of those who were not officially part of The International Brigades but who left the UK for Spain and who were being secretly monitored. “They (intelligence officials) were keeping a close watch on members of the Communist Party and on ports and train stations at this time.
“Volunteers were told to purchase weekend return rail tickets from Victoria railway station to Paris, which did not require a passport. At the railway station somewhat ineffectual efforts by the British Special Branch would be made to dissuade the volunteers from travelling,” says Baxell.
“One volunteer described how, ‘Victoria Station was as thick as flies on the ground with special agent men and detectives, you could tell by their huge boots…But they could do nothing about it.’
“Some volunteers were followed, and the Communist Party and Dependents’ Aid offices were kept under surveillance, but little was done seriously to prevent the volunteers from going. Tommy James remembers that though ‘the CID fellows at Dover favoured us with a searching look’, no attempt was actually made to prevent them leaving. John Longstaff, who served as a runner with the British Battalion, remembered encountering a degree of hostility from a plain-clothes policeman, but little else.”
Volunteers
Who were these British people who left their homes and families to fight for democracy in a foreign country? “They were overwhelmingly working class, mainly from the large cities of Great Britain and Ireland. They would have heard of the Civil War mainly via the press and political meetings. To join, the applicant would contact their local Communist Party who would then forward them to London for an interview on their suitability,” Baxell confirms.
Amongst the notable volunteers was Jack Jones, the Liverpool docker who went on to be General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union. But as the files demonstrate, not all those who were being monitored by MI5 were ‘working class heroes’.
Orwell
Old Etonian author, George Orwell, listed under his real name Eric Blair, is registered by the Security Service as a “writer fighting in Spain”. His signing of the Joint Peace Manifesto and his alliance with the French Communist Party whilst living in Paris was used as evidence by intelligence agents for monitoring him.
Indeed, they continued to track the socialist novelist’s activities after his best-sellers ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ were published and they recorded his death in 1950. The classic ‘Homage to Catalonia’ is based on Orwell's experiences in the war.
Notable volunteers. George Orwell writes about the war in ‘Homage to Catalonia’
George Orwell, whose name appears on the recently published MI5 files, wrote the best-selling book ‘Homage to Catalonia’ as a personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War. The first edition was published in 1938, but it was not released in many parts of the world, including the United States and France, until the early 1950s.
The author was nearly killed in 1937 when he was shot through the throat by a sniper. In the book he writes that people frequently told him a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive, but that he personally thought “it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.”
In Chapter 12, Orwell says “I hope the account I have given is not too misleading...consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan...beware of my partisanship and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events. “And beware of exactly the same things when you read any other book on this period.”
