How a few good men fought Franco and fascism

Yet the feeling of seeing live footage of him after he’d been taken prisoner by Franco’s forces is almost impossible to be framed in mere words. “It was a profoundly moving and humbling experience,” he says.

There was nothing complicated or dreamy about James Maley’s reasons for putting his life on hold (and in jeopardy) to fight in another country’s war: it was his war too.

“There was no good speaking of the menace of fascism and not going to fight it myself,” he would tell his family many years later. His son now reflects on this.

“When you grow up in a household where Britain and America are not the good guys of world history it does have a shaping influence on how you see things.”

James Maley died at the age of 99 in 2007 and now his Spanish Civil War experiences and those of his comrades will be commemorated in a book to be published next month. Our Fathers Fought Franco is the collected testimonies of four children and grandchildren – Maley, Lisa Croft, Jennie Renton and Tam Watters – of men who fought with the International Brigades in what Willy describes as one of the most important wars of the modern age.

“Lisa Croft emailed me out of the blue in September 2010 to say she’d been doing some research about her grandfather Archibald Campbell Williams and his role with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Her mother, Rosemary, had given her some old papers and when Lisa went through them she discovered a lot more about him. Lisa discovered he’d been captured at Jarama alongside my father.

“Her grandfather had kept a notebook in Franco’s jail which had the signatures of all his fellow prisoners. As well as the prison notebook there was another remarkable element to her grandfather’s story: he had become a father while in prison, presumed dead by his family, so his daughter – Lisa’s mother – was called Rosemary Nina for remembrance.

Read more: 'There are echoes everywhere': What we can learn about radicalism from the Scots of the Spanish Civil War

“The following year, I organised a one-day event to mark the unique Scottish contribution to the International Brigades to mark the 75th anniversary of its formation. It was the first time a group of family members whose fathers and grandfathers had fought Franco came together in this way.

“Then, around September 2017, I met Tam Watters for the first time at an International Brigades commemoration on Clydeside at the statue to La Pasionaria and we spoke about our fathers. It was probably around this time that the idea for a more focused book about a few men with shared experiences began to take shape.

“We discovered we had four very different stories about four different men who ended up in the same place at the same time for the same reason – to fight Franco and fascism. A few good men at a turning-point in history.”

Perhaps its proximity to the Second World War is the main reason why the Spanish Civil War has never really been accorded the attention and scrutiny its importance deserved. Maley suggests it may be a little more complicated.

“The Spanish Civil War was the prelude to World War Two,” he says, “a dress rehearsal for what was to follow. Anti-communism was a key component of fascism. Joseph Goebbels followed events in Spain closely and it was also a proving ground for propaganda. Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy were involved alongside Franco’s forces. It was an opportunity to take a stand, to draw a line, and to prepare for a wider conflict.”

James Maley, at the front of first row, after being captured in Spain in 1938 (Image: free)

There are other reasons why you won’t have heard much about the Spanish Civil War in school history lessons. Britain and France adopted a policy of non-intervention that left Spain to suffer and let Germany test its air power and weaponry and the tactics it would deploy across the rest of Europe: bombing civilians and cities.

Yet, Britain’s main priority was preserving its Empire.

“You could say that World War Two began on April 26, 1937, with the bombing of Guernica by the Luftwaffe. The attack on the Basque town established a pattern. This was Blitzkrieg,” says Maley.

“And so, as World War Two ended the Cold War kicked in and the anti-Communism that lay at the core of fascism became entangled with a more general and more virulent Western anti-communism.

"History started to be rewritten. George Orwell, who had fought in Spain, said that ‘the International Brigade is in some sense fighting for all of us – a thin line of suffering and often ill-armed human beings standing between barbarism and at least comparative decency’.

“The McCarthyite era of red-baiting took root and ensured that the rank-and-file Communists who had fought Franco would be tarred with the same brush.”

That the Spanish Civil War resonated so much with significant sections of Scotland's working class and trade union movements is one of the least well understood features of that struggle, certainly to later generations.

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We imagine Scotland’s most under-privileged communities in the 1930s to have been places where the daily challenges of maintaining dignity in the face of poverty, homelessness and mass unemployment must have been all-consuming, leaving no room for engaging in a war 1500 miles away.

Yet, these places were also cockpits of self-improvement where a thirst for knowledge and change through political engagement could never be dimmed by social inequality. “Scotland, like Ireland, had a tradition of trade union activism, socialist commitment and anti-imperialist struggle,” says Maley.

"In Scotland there was a vibrant, educated and well-informed working class with an internationalist outlook. Many of those who went to Spain as part of the International Brigades were first or second generation immigrants.

"They weren’t patriotic; they were political internationalists. In Scotland the reactionary nature of the British imperial monarchy made working-class activists look beyond Britain to make common cause with workers in other countries. This internationalism has always had a firm footing in Scotland.”

Then, as now, international struggles were portrayed according to fault-lines drawn by the political establishment and its nodding dogs in the press.

Was the propaganda of the day: that the International Brigades were all Communists and therefore best avoided, a factor in concealing what was really at stake in Spain?

Observe now how the geopolitical nuances of the war in Ukraine have been submerged in a frenzy of militarist and Western supremacist proclamations that ignore two decades of NATO’s catastrophic failures of diplomacy.

Maley observes other factors. “Like Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, the Western media and the capitalist class it served feared Communism, so there was a shiftiness and a shadiness about Britain’s dealings with Franco. But I don’t think this concealed what was happening in Spain,” he says.

“The rot kicked in after World War Two when the threat of fascism was seen to have receded and anti-Communism could be normalised without appearing to subscribe to a Goebbels-inspired anti-Semitic conspiracy theory about Bolsheviks. Mainstream anti-Communism obscured the connection between the pioneering anti-fascists of the International Brigades and the war against Nazi Germany and fascist Italy.”

Maley’s early research led to a 1991 play, From the Calton to Catalonia, written by him and his brother, John. He’s since learned much more about his father though, and the values that carried him to Spain. The son now feels he’s never been closer to the father.

“My father knew a lot about the past but he lived in the present,” says Maley. “The political struggles he spoke about most were those happening in the world at that very moment. He had no truck with nostalgia or romance or sentimentalism. His political beliefs were never hidden and because he spoke freely and frankly he was not popular with careerists or fellow travellers or opportunists.

“He was very much a product of the politicised working-class of the 1920s and 1930s. Personally, I feel closer to my father politically now than I ever did during his lifetime. He was much more clear-sighted than I was. The more I read about Spain and world politics the more clear-sighted he becomes.”

Our Fathers Fought Franco, Luath, £12.99