FORGED IN SPAIN
By Richard Baxell
Clapton Press. 407 pages. £16.99. ISBN 978-1-913693-33-6
Reviewed by Jim Burns
Richard Baxell wrote Unlikely
Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle Against
Fascism (Aarum Press, 2012), described by Paul Preston as “the
definitive work on the British volunteers”. Numerous names
were mentioned in it, but as a
general history encompassing the stories of up to 2,500 participants, it out
of necessity could only sketch in brief references to their backgrounds and
other relevant details. In Forged in
Spain he takes a closer look at a number of individuals who, for one
reason or another, were involved in events in Spain between 1936 and 1939.
Not all of them fought for the Republic. Peter Kemp joined General Franco’s
forces and served as an officer with the Spanish Foreign Legion, a
notoriously hardbitten unit. But the others in Baxell’s book were fiercely
anti-Fascist and mostly fought with the Communist-organised International
Brigades. An exception was Stafford Cottman, who was alongside George Orwell
in the anti-Stalinist POUM (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unity) militia.
Cottman, born in 1918, was a member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), a
left-wing group with ties to the POUM. Baxell says about forty ILP members
went to Spain to fight with the POUM. Before going to Spain Cottman had been
a member of the Guild of Youth, the ILP’s junior wing but later moved to the
Young Communist League (YCL) which seemed more dynamic and determined to
practically oppose fascism. He never joined the Communist Party. Cottman was
eighteen when he arrived in Spain in January 1937 and, after being kitted
out with a make-shift uniform, he was given a “German Mauser rifle, not a
bad gun in itself, but rendered almost useless by its age, having been
constructed at the end of the previous century”. Two weeks basic training
followed and he was then posted to a POUM unit occupying a position
“overlooking the road between Huesca and Zaragosa”. As Baxell points out,
the POUM were said to be Trotskyists by the Communist Party and were
therefore never the recipients of arms and ammunition from Russia. Both were
in short supply, hence Cottman being issued with the old Mauser rifle.
The British ILP volunteers saw only a limited amount of action in Spain, and
it soon became evident that they were likely to be arrested as, in May 1937,
fighting broke out between Republican Government troops and anarchist and
POUM supporters in Barcelona. In June the POUM was officially banned.
Cottman and Orwell had to make a quick exit into France. A detailed account
of their adventures is in Orwell’s
Homage to Catalonia, of course, so I’m only mentioning them here. Back
in Britain Cottman worked for the Aid Spain movement, and when Britain went
to war in 1939 he originally registered as a conscientious objector on
political grounds, feeling that “the war was a capitalist enterprise and
that the working class should stay out of it”.
In 1940, however, he joined the RAF,
trained as a rear-gunner, and took part in several bombing raids over
Germany. He was “permanently invalided out of
flight crew and retrained as an airfield controller” because of a
burst ear drum. After the war Cottman worked for BOAC and was based in air
traffic control at Heathrow. He joined the Labour Party and became involved
in trade union activities. Baxell says that he “remained an ardent socialist
and a passionate anti-capitalist, eschewing unnecessary consumption”. He
died in 1999. It’s worth noting that Cottman had been consulted by Ken Loach
during the making of Land and
Freedom, his film about the Spanish Civil War.
On the other side of the fence, or rather the firing line, was Peter Kemp, a
man who might well be described as “larger than life”. Born in 1915 in
Bombay he was the son of Sir Norman Kemp, a one-time High Court judge in the
Indian Colonial Service. Kemp was educated at the private Wellington College
where he met Giles and Esmond Romilly, who both fought with the Spanish
Republican forces. Unlike them, Kemp was a dedicated anti-communist and when
the war started he decided to enlist in Franco’s army, initially as a member
of a Carlist regiment. Later, he transferred to the Spanish Foreign Legion,
reputedly “the toughest unit in the Spanish army” with “a well-founded
reputation for brutality as much as for military prowess and fearless
bravery”. Like the International Brigades on the Republican side they were
used as “shock troops”. Kemp was wounded while serving with the Spanish
Foreign Legion.
When the war ended he returned to England and, though rejected for military
service because of his wounds, eventually found his way into the Special
Operations Executive (SOE) which had been formed to carry out clandestine
excursions into enemy-held territory. In due course he would be parachuted
into Albania, Poland, and Thailand. I’m summarising Kemp’s adventures and
it’s well worth reading Baxell’s more complete account of them. On his
return to civilian life Kemp “took up selling insurance for Canadian
Imperial life Insurance”, employment in which he seems to have been quite
successful, though it must have been a curious contrast to his wartime
activities. But he clearly couldn’t settle down. In 1956 he was in Budapest,
in 1961 in the Belgian Congo. Other trips, working as a reporter, took him
to Vietnam and to Nicaragua. Baxell quotes from a report by a
fellow-journalist who referred to encountering Kemp in the rain forests of
Central America and described him as “a tall, stooped Englishman, now
entering his seventies, wearing a well-tailored safari suit, with a shoulder
bag full of essential kit, such as maps, a pipe and tobacco, a bottle or two
of beer, and a paperback copy of
Right Ho, Jeeves”. There’s no doubt that Kemp still saw communism as the
key threat, and he sought out anti-communists wherever he was. He died in
1993.
I’ve spent a little time with two contrasting individuals, each doing what
they thought was right in the circumstances, and the rest of Baxell’s
subjects tend to be more closely aligned with the International Brigades and
the British Communist Party. Malcolm
Dunbar and Peter Kerrigan were, in Baxell’s words, representative of “the
two wings of the British Communist Movement in the 1930s : one,
middle-class, university educated and a member of the London aesthetic set;
the other a tough working-class engineer and Trade Unionist from Glasgow”.
Malcolm Dunbar, born in 1912, was the son of Sir Loraine and Lady Dunbar. He
was educated at Repton in Derbyshire, moving to Christ’s College, Cambridge
in 1930 to read history and economics. Others in Cambridge at that time,
included David Haden-Guest, Julian Bell and John Cornford, all of them later
in Spain with the International Brigades. When he left Cambridge in 1933
Dunbar made a living in London as a journalist and photographer, “working
with a number of leading dance companies, such as Ballet Rambert”.
He went to Spain in January, 1937, and joined the International
Brigades. By February he was in action at the Jarama River, where the
British Battalion suffered particularly high casualties. Dunbar was wounded.
When he returned to the Battalion he was quickly promoted and became
commander of the British anti-tank battery.
There’s no doubt that Dunbar was highly respected for his military skills
and personal courage, but Baxell states that he wasn’t liked as a person :
“The sensitive, highbrow and intensely private Dunbar seems to have felt
uncomfortable in other people’s company”. There have been suggestions that
he was homosexual, which would have been something to hide. And his
aloofness and privileged background set him apart from the largely
working-class rank-and-file in the British Battalion. But, as already noted,
he was admired for his competence as an officer and for his bravery. He was
wounded more than once. Bill Alexander, the leading British Communist
commissar, described him refusing to be evacuated even when he received
“about fifteen fragments in his face, chest and legs.... he keeps calmly
puffing on his cigarette while his wounds are dressed”.
When the International Brigades were withdrawn from Spain, Dunbar worked for
the Daily Worker and in 1940 he
was drafted into the Royal Artillery as a private. He never rose above the
rank of sergeant in the British Army, despite his record in Spain and the
fact that he was awarded the Military Medal for his “cool calculating
courage in the face of the enemy” during the Normandy campaign. When he was
discharged in January 1946 he worked for the Labour Research Department, but
by 1949 he was moving away from the Communist Party. Baxell says he had
“apparently become a drinker and a hypochondriac and was unhappy to the
point of depression”. In 1963 a body was washed up on a beach at
Milford-on-Sea, near Bournemouth. It was identified as that of Malcolm
Dunbar. The formal verdict was suicide, but a friend of Dunbar wasn’t
convinced that it was and asked someone she knew who worked in military
intelligence to make some enquiries. He did, and advised her to “drop it”
and refused to discuss the matter any further. It was known that Dunbar had
talked to Kim Philby just prior to the latter’s defection to Russia.
Peter Kerrigan the tough, working-class Glaswegian that Baxell referred to,
was born in 1899 into a family with strong trade union links, and was
conscripted for military service towards the end of the First World War. He
was posted to Egypt but did not experience any fighting, other than in the
boxing ring where he became the regimental champion. When he returned to
Glasgow he continued to box locally as “Kid Kerrigan” and worked as an
apprentice turner. He joined the Socialist Labour Party (SLP) and, after
losing his job in an economic downturn, he became a member of the National
Unemployed Workers’ Movement. In 1922 he joined the Communist Party.
Kerrigan made what Baxell says was “the first of many trips to Russia” in
1924. He married Rose Klasko, an equally devoted communist, in 1926. He rose
quickly in both the Communist Party and the Amalgamated Engineering Union.
And in 1929 he was sent by the Party for “a special course of
Marxist-Leninist training” in Moscow. It was there that he met Stalin and he
was to remain a Stalinist all his life.
Kerrigan arrived in Spain in December, 1936, and his standing in the British
Communist Party ensured that he was quickly promoted to Political Commissar
for all the British-speaking volunteers at the International Brigades base
in Albacete. Kerrigan later claimed that commissars were welcomed by most
Brigaders but Baxell isn’t sure and adds that they were often referred to as
“comic stars” and full of “pious rhetoric”. When Kerrigan returned to Spain
after a short visit to Britain, it was as the correspondent for the
Daily Worker, a role which took
him to the front lines, enabling him to see what the situation was really
like and “the
pitiful condition of the British
volunteers”, many of them without proper footwear and with their clothing in
shreds.
Kerrigan was denied the opportunity to join the British Army in 1940 due to
his activities as a leading light in the Communist Party. And he was
precluded from certain jobs as a security risk. There may have been
substance to suspicions about his activities. Baxell points out that in 1943
Kerrigan met with a member of a Soviet Trade Delegation and passed on
“secret information and photographs relating to British shipbuilding”.
Another veteran of Spain named Kerrigan as a Soviet agent. No action was
taken against him and he continued in his role as Industrial Organiser for
the Party. The 1950s and 1960s saw trade unions as particularly powerful and
influential, so Kerrigan was in a good position to influence events.
However, he was in the spotlight for the wrong reason when, in 1959, there
were allegations of vote-rigging by communists during an election for
leadership of the Electrical Trade Union (ETU). Kerrigan died in 1977.
According to Baxell, some people thought that he was “sectarian, inflexible
and ruthless, a typical Communist Party apparatchik.....a hardcore
Stalinist”. Baxell says that “he
never made any secret of his loyalty to the USSR and his great admiration
of Stalin, despite the purges and regime of murderous terror”.
In devoting space to just four of Baxell’s chosen subjects I’ve not wanted
to play down the interest aroused by others in his book. Alexander Foote
after Spain really did work for the Russians, though mainly against the
Germans, operating a radio transmitter from Switzerland. Clive Branson was a
talented painter and poet. He survived his time in Spain, though some of it
was in a Nationalist prison, but was killed in
action in 1944 while with the British Army in Burma. Alex Tudor-Hart
was a surgeon, performing miracles under difficult circumstances. He often
operated by torch-light. Leah Manning looked after Basque children evacuated
to England following the attack on Guernica. Sam Lesser was in Spain early,
before the British Battalion was formed, and along with some others like
Ralph Fox and John Cornford was “placed in the French Commune de Paris
Battalion of the Eleventh International Brigade”. Wounded, he went back to
London, but returned to Spain to report for the
Daily Worker. Finally, there were
the Haldanes, who, in Baxell’s words, were “the one case of an entire family
volunteering to go to Spain: they were the journalist, writer and feminist
Charlotte Haldane, her teenage son Ronnie, and her (second) husband, the
distinguished geneticist and scientist, Professor JBS Haldane”. Ronnie, as a
member of the International Brigades, came through the war in Spain, and in
1940 was commissioned into the British Army. He was a Second Lieutenant in
the Wiltshire Regiment and was wounded during the battle for Caen in 1944.
Richard Baxell clearly devoted a lot of care to researching the lives of the
people covered by his book. There are over sixty pages of notes. It’s not a
reflection on the value of Forged in
Spain to say that it obviously deals with those who, for one reason or
another, left some kind of record of their activities, not only of their
experiences in Spain but also of what they did before and after the war. I
would guess that it might be difficult to track down details
of many of the 2,500 or so British volunteers who supported the
Republican side. Most were working-class and, if they survived (500 or so
didn’t), never got around to writing accounts of who they were, why they
went to Spain, and what happened there. From that point of view they were
like the rank-and-file in any army, and in any war, whose voices are rarely
heard. But the point to remember is that they believed in something and
thought they could make a difference by opposing fascism in Spain. We can
easily debate about whether or not they were misguided in putting their
faith in communism, and perhaps even duped by Stalinist knavery, but we need
to see them in the context of the 1930s to understand their actions at the
time. Forged in Spain helps us do
that.