RECRUITMENT OF THE VOLUNTEERS
How did the International Brigades begin? They followed a complex history of Soviet political strategy in which Stalin’s intention from 1934 was to focus on bolstering the defence of the Soviet Union as opposed to supporting world revolution. Following the Spanish uprising Stalin found himself having to consider the security of the Soviet Union, the threat of fascist domination of Spain and the need to avoid offending Britain and France as potential allies against the expansion of Fascism. He acted slowly and with caution, from an assessment of the situation from agents in the field to a domestic propaganda campaign, to diplomatic and humanitarian actions and then to the shipment of military equipment and personnel from October 1936 onwards.
It was at an extraordinary meeting of the Politburo on 26th August 1936 that the possibility was raised of helping the Republic by the creation of an international volunteer corps. Spanish historian Angel Viñas suggests that the two features which accelerated the discussions were the deterioration of the Republic’s military situation and the fact that the promises by Hitler that Germany would not get involved in Spain proved to be false when Franco had appealed to Hitler for help.3 Such a mobilisation of foreign support could be organised through the communist parties in other countries and eventually the Comintern was given the task of setting this up.
Two early volunteers from Ammanford.
Jack Williams and Sammy Morris
Courtesy Terry Norman
The first Welsh volunteers tended to be unemployed miners who had found jobs in other parts of the country. Some attempted to get to Spain independently since the apparatus for sending men to Spain from Wales was not really in place until the beginning of December 1936. Some men had been enthused with a crusading zeal when taking part in the hunger marches to London and the Communist Party of Great Britain encouraged volunteering and recruited intensively throughout December 1936. South Wales miners were well used to acting in an “extra-Parliamentary” manner and began to respond to the recruitment drive. In fact most of the Welsh volunteers were members of the Communist Party and district recruiting officers worked discretely at first and then secretly after February 1937 when recruiting for Spain became illegal.
Each of the volunteers has a slightly different story to tell. Some left without telling their families to avoid upsetting scenes. For example, Tom Jones of Rhos, who knew his family would be upset if he revealed where he was going, told his mother and two sisters he was going to Colwyn Bay for the weekend. Lance Rogers of Merthyr Tydfil left the house without saying a word to his parents or to anyone. Leo Price of Abertridwr had put his daughter to bed and described how it was the hardest thing he ever did to leave her and go. He travelled to Caerphilly and stayed the night with his sister and avoided his wife.7 Often the routes they took varied, but there was a fairly common pattern. The organisational centres in South Wales were in Cardiff, mainly at the rear of shops in Charles Street and Castle Arcade. The early volunteers travelled more directly and more freely until the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870 was applied to Spain.
Leo Price
Courtesy Dick Felstead
Tom Jones
Courtesy Marx Memorial Library
Lance Rogers
Courtesy RGASPI, Moscow
HOW THEY GOT TO SPAIN
Usually men would be interviewed about their motives for volunteering and their political affiliations; some would be rejected because of their lack of previous military experience or on medical grounds. Those accepted would meet on the weekend in Cardiff, looking very conspicuous in their cheap suits, and were escorted on the journey to London where they were taken to the secret meeting place for the Welsh volunteers, a café in Denmark Street. Here they were questioned again about why they wanted to go. Motivation, physical fitness and experience were all important features. The gatherings of men in Paris presented a variety of backgrounds from miners, seamen, and labourers to intellectuals, writers and artists.
Some of the early volunteers from Wales had a fairly uneventful journey into Spain compared to those who travelled later. For example the three Ammanford volunteers, W.J. Davies, Sammy Morris and John Williams, crossed the border from Perpignan without the police checking their passports. Most later volunteers found their journey restricted and had to do it the hard way – walking the goat trails over the Pyrenees. Many of the volunteers from Wales would reach Paris with a weekend tourist ticket which required no passport. They travelled from Victoria Station in London, where members of the Special Branch would interrogate them and rather half-heartedly try to persuade them to change their minds.
In France the approach was usually more relaxed. Will Lloyd left the Gare du Nord with Bob Condon, both from Aberaman, on what he called a “troop train” with wooden seats, and wives and sweethearts were saying goodbye to their men. They still had to be careful since they seemed to be accompanied throughout the journey by people trying to listen to conversations. Lloyd had a more direct journey across the border, by lorry to Figueras, then to Barcelona with a march through the city before moving on to the base at Albacete.
Jim Brewer was an ex-miner from Rhymney who had studied at Ruskin College in Oxford University. He describes how he tried to get his fellow travellers to be more careful and not to congregate while waiting at Victoria Station and realised that a Special Branch detective followed them on the train to the café they stayed at in Paris. Yet on the train the sympathetic gendarmerie did not approach them for their passports as they did for other visitors. Having been met in Paris volunteers were normally taken to various cheap hotels and given some French clothes to aid their disguise. Their money would be taken off them and each was given ten francs a day. They would leave for Spain from the Gare du Nord, accompanied by a guide, each man carrying his belongings in a brown-paper parcel. Their destination was normally Perpignan or Beziers.
Will Lloyd
Courtesy RGASPI
Jim Brewer
Courtesy Tamiment Library
Jack Roberts had volunteered for Spain soon after returning from the 1936 hunger march. Having first been turned down for not having military experience, he tried again in January with unemployed Abertridwr miner, Wyndham “Windy” Watkins. They were off this time with a London address to find and a boat to catch to France followed by the train to Perpignan.
They were accommodated in a house with six other volunteers, including Alun Menai Williams of Penygraig and Tom Picton of Treherbert. Picton was a product of the fighting spirit of the coalfield in more ways than one, but sadly was to be shot in prison in Bilbao in 1938. Wandering the streets of Perpignan the group, apart from Roberts and Williams, was picked up by gendarmes and imprisoned for 15 days. Roberts and Williams were taken to the British consulate in Marseilles but were regarded as lawbreakers and so received no help. They managed to find their way back home to Britain after a plea to the Clerk of Caerphilly Urban District Council resulted in their being sent enough money to get back home.
Billy Griffiths of Llwynypia in the Rhondda was enjoying the power, status and responsibility that came with an ever-widening circle of political activity.13 Yet in March 1938 he volunteered, resentfully at first, for Spain at a time when recruits were desperately needed following the losses at Teruel and the Aragon retreats. His task was to build up party strength and discipline. At Paddington Griffiths met up with Jack Jones of Blaenclydach and then were helped to find digs for the night.
Jack 'Russia' Roberts
Courtesy Dick Felstead
Alun Menai Williams
Courtesy Alan Warren
Tom Picton
Courtesy Robert Havard
Billy Griffiths
Courtesy RGASPI Moscow
Thora Silverthorne of Abertillery remembers standing with a group of fellow nurses in their uniforms outside Victoria Station and being given a great send off with bunches of flowers by people waving banners and wishing them a good journey. “We were done up in little round nurses hats, blue macintoshes, black shoes and stockings” She and Margaret Powell were Welsh nurses who volunteered through the Spanish Medical Aid Committee which by August 1936 had already sent medical aid to Spain. Thora’s first task was to clean up with her colleagues a huge house in Granen, near Huesca. This old doctor’s house, which contained only dirt and rats, was to be scrubbed to house an operating theatre and wards.
Thora nursed in Huesca and other fronts and sometimes worked up to 20 hours a day. She was admired for her kindness and sense of humour and regarded as “outstandingly competent” and a “first class theatre nurse”.
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Sarah Silverthorne is in the middel assisting Doctor Alexander Tudor Hart in an operation in Spain. Courtesy Imperial War Museum
Margaret Powell was born at Cwm Farm, Llangenny, and lived on a small Welsh hill farm. Having trained as a nurse and, after finishing midwifery training, she was accepted by the Spanish Medical Aid Committee and left for Spain in early 1937.
In Benicassim she worked in an old farmhouse in which the slaughterhouse was used as an operating theatre. As was usual in the field hospitals the conditions were primitive and the medical teams worked miracles with operations, anaesthetics, sutures and sterilising.
Margaret served as a frontline nurse in Aragon, Teruel and the Ebro and assisted in thousands of operations, often performed in the light from a cigarette lighter. She was described as “sincere, disciplined and hardworking…conscious of her duty as a communist”.(MA) Before her return she was interned in a French concentration camp
In the photo on the left Margaret Powell is in the back row on the left. She is seen here in Aragon in May 1937. Courtesy Ruth Muller, Margaret's daughter.
ALBACETE
The city of Albacete in south-east Spain is a modern commercial and industrial centre. It was the headquarters of the International Brigades and here volunteers were taken for training after their entry into Spain. At first the arrangements were hopelessly inadequate and the town seemed ill-suited to accommodate the influx of volunteers. Recruits would be marched into the bullring, the focus of the town’s autumn fiesta, interviewed and registered. Early experiences indicated a lack of organisation, discipline and commitment, low morale, poor equipment and the uniforms from as many different countries as the volunteers. Many were kitted out in khaki uniforms, French steel helmets and cavalry bandoliers, but the brown boots were the best.21 Laurie Lee talks about little formal discipline and parading through the streets to keep warm, holding up clenched fists and shouting newly-learned slogans such as No pasaran (they shall not pass) and Muerte las Fascistas (Death to the Fascists).22 As the barracks overflowed and public buildings such as the bullfighting arena were taken over, men were sent out to other nearby towns.
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At Albacete at first there was indeed a lot of drilling and marching. The building up of discipline in the ranks was a chaotic process and sometimes the day was a long one from six in the morning until six in the evening. Weapons and equipment were scarce and varied in quality. Will Lloyd says he was given a wooden stick until two days before going into action when he was given a rifle – about 60 years old. Leo Price was given one with a barrel “four feet long”. Most of the guns would not fire anyway, he said, and at the end of the training he felt more confused than at the beginning.24. Then there was the machine-gun they took apart but no one knew how to put it back together again. However, there was no one better than a Welsh miner to dig a good trench, and apparently no one better than Jack Roberts on a machine-gun. Yet, his comrades claimed jokingly that when he used a rifle the fact that he was left-handed made his aim rather unpredictable.
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The Bullring Albacete today.
Photo - Author
The Gran Hotel, Albacete was the headquarters of the Brigades
Photo - Author
Steps down to underground shelter in the centre of Albacete
Photo - Author
Volunteers training at Albacete
Courtesy Tamiment Libraray
A street in Madrigueras today Photo - Author
A Pilon (water trough) in Madrigueras which the Brigaders would have used during their stay. They are said to have had a bath even when there was a layer of thin ice.
Photo courtesy Juan Carolos Talavera, Mayor of Madrigueras,
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Above is a photo of the site today.
Photo - Author
Tucked away in a courtyard is what was a cinema which the Brigaders attended. Notice the balcony in the second photo.
Photos - Author
On the left is the church in Madrigueras today (Photo - author)
.The church was used by the volunteers for cooking and some of the local residents have memories of this from their childhood.
Photo of the church in 1930 is courtesy of Juan Carlos Talavera, Mayor of Madrigueras..
MADRIGUERAS
Madrigueras, a small village with three cafes and a small cinema (still partially intact and serving now as a garage area behind a row of houses), had been taken over by the British for training. Amid poverty and squalor stood what had been a large, beautiful church but was now ransacked and burnt out and used for cooking and transport. The story was told that the priest had hidden in the belfry and taken pot shots at the villagers in the square. Two brothers had climbed the belfry, disarmed him and hanged him.
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Training was of a very elementary standard and only a few rifles were available. Locals who were children at the time showed me the two firing ranges on the edges of the town. However, as time went on, weapons - Russian rifles, anti-tank guns - and other equipment began to appear. Fred Copeman, later to become commander of the British Battalion, arrived in Madrigueras when the British 16th Battalion was being formed. Copeman describes how only a few rifles were available – at one time six rifles between 700 men. Obviously the amount of practice available was severely restricted until new Russian rifles arrived, which he regarded as poor but, in the circumstances, a godsend. Lewis machine-guns which were first issued were replaced by German Maxims mounted on wheels. s.
Jack Roberts, along with Leo Price, both of Abertridwr, on arrival at Madrigueras came face to face with the man Roberts called “the mad Taff” – Tom Picton, the 52 year old mountain fighter from Treherbert and former Navy light heavweight champion. Sitting awkwardly astride a mule and holding his clenched fist high, Picton boasted that, despite his imprisonment in Perpignan, he had managed to get to Spain before Roberts. Tom’s stay in Spain was a colourful one and his Battalion records indicate frequent indiscipline and drunkenness.
Jack Roberts’ memories of Madrigueras are vivid He recalls the poverty of the village with its dusty plaza, narrow exits, iron balconies and monumental church. The increasing anti-clericalism had closed the church and the peasants watered their mules at the well in the centre of the village and tilled and planted with ancient tools.
The day was long with reveille sounded at 5.30am and after a cold water wash and a breakfast of coffee and dry bread, the men fell in at 6.45. There was parading on the village square, morning drill, the political commissar’s pep-talk and manoeuvres over open country and wheat fields and lots of digging of holes. Food was plentiful as was the ever-present olive-oil and the proverbial saying “No hay mal que el aceite no cure” (“there is no ill that oil cannot cure”) was never more real.
It was Leo Price who insisted one day that he had his rice on a separate dish to which he added goat’s milk to produce the tastiest rice pudding he could remember (“Arroz con leche” – “Rice with milk”). He was also a frequent visitor to a café in Madrigueras owned by a lady called Matilda and her husband Leon. The day before he left for action at Teruel they let Leo sleep in their bed and gave him a special breakfast of eggs, tomatoes, bread, grapes, orange and coffee.
The locals were similarly kind to Harry Stratton who was billeted with five other comrades in a hay loft belonging to a peasant family who often invited him in the house. When some British soap arrived from home the men found it was in great demand by the locals in return for a traditional Spanish tortilla. Some of the larger houses and buildings in the village were used for Brigade headquarters and hospitals.
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My visit to Madrigueras revealed a strong interest by local historians in the presence of the British and an historical route has been produced for visitors. Many thanks to Alfredo Alcahut Utiel and Caridad Serrano for their tour of the town. (Pictured on the right) Caridad has written an online book of oral histories on Madrigueras – “Recuerdalo Tu” (http://www.brigadasinternacionales.org/images/stories/Documentos/recuerdalo)
The historical route starts at the Ramon y Cajal square which was given the name 'Red Square' during the Civil War. As well as the older and smaller houses which were used to house the volunteers and other soldiers many of the 19th century stately homes were use as headquarters and hospitals for the Brigades.
Some of these can be seen in the photos on the right Some graffiti from the men can still be seen on some of the inside walls.
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Other features in the town include the memorial to Battalion Commander Tom Wintringham and a drawing from one of the Brigaders.
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