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Weekly Worker 643 Thursday October 5 2006
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Intriguing cameos
Dave Douglas reviews: North West TUC members 70th anniversary of the Spanish civil war pp18, £1.50
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This is a timely and quite remarkable little book in “homage to the victims of Franco”, produced to mark this 70th anniversary of the Spanish civil war. The editorial is by Brian Bamford, secretary of Tameside TUC and the Northern Anarchist Network, who seems to have been responsible for putting it together. Stuart Christie, who, in the tradition of the international brigadistas, was responsible for the last attempt to assassinate Franco, writes the introduction.
The work is very much a rank and file creation: it has no standard view of the war or the composition and worth of those who volunteered to fight it. Neither is it a single work: rather it is a collection of intriguing cameos of the people of the north-west of England who put their lives on hold, or at risk, and set off to fight. Central drafts come from the diary of international brigader Ralph Cantor and Pedro Cuadrado, Catalan socialist now in exile, but there are a host of reflections and insights from the ordinary working people who were part of this selfless mission.
The pamphlet gives us a sketch plan of the formative years prior to the fascist coup and invasion. The development of the Spanish labour movement, the formation of the anarchist CNT and socialist UGT union confederations, and the forces of the state and church and rightwing ideologues who formed their opposition and oppression. It tells us something of the conflicting political parliamentary and extra-parliamentary forces of the right and left. It takes us to the events of 1936 and all that followed.
Most illuminating though are those cameos: ‘Manchester volunteers for Spain - who were they and why did they go?’; ‘Salford’s Spanish war volunteers’; ‘Oldham, Rochdale, Tameside, Bury, Bolton and Stockport lads’; ‘Account of Stalybridge girl - Lillian Urmston’s part’; ‘North West women in Spain’. There is something qualitatively different from more formal and academic accounts in these short, staccato insights into the volunteers. Quick shots back through time, their politics, their visions, their pasts and hopes for the future. Their fate.
The Manchester list was made up of mostly Communist Party or Young Communist League members, but also members of the Labour Party, Independent Labour Party, Socialist Party of Great Britain, along with syndicalists and simple trade unionists - some fighting alongside or with the anarchists of CNT or with the POUM (Workers Party of Marxist Unification), before being moved into the international brigades. The list of names and occupations and roots in those familiar north-west towns brings home with utter clarity how deep internationalist and solidarist sentiment for the Spanish working class and anti-fascism was.
There are longer pieces - ‘Sam Wild, the Ardwick volunteer’ recounts the experiences of a seafarer amid the desperate poverty of many of the countries he visited, which brought him into socialist struggle. He was first involved with the unemployed workers’ movement, before going off to fight in Spain in December 1936.
Ralph Cantor’s story is taken from his unpublished diary. He had been a militant from the YCL and the Jewish Lads Brigade. His is an earthy, non-PC, working class insight into the moans and concerns and complaints of the fighters - against commissars and other nationalities. He was only 21 when he was killed.
Pedro Cuadrado, a fighter with the Catalan Republican Guard from 1936-39, writes now with hindsight as an exile in Bolton, Lancashire. Although from a strongly CNT family, he was not himself an anarchist, as he “didn’t understand that philosophy”, but describes himself instead as a “trade unionist”.
Other than the direct sources - oral histories, diaries and accounts - the pamphlet draws on archive material from Moscow, as well as files and reports kept on most of the combatants in the brigades: some of the events and heroic, selfless actions of the volunteers were noted and reported back and they provide a useful footnote.
