‘How far would you go to fight for what you believe in?’
IN THESE politically febrile times how far would you go to fight for what you believe in? However passionate our views and moral our values, most of us imagine we can do our bit for a better world without leaving the living room. We are merely social media warriors, posting a hashtag of protest or signing a digital petition.
In the 1930s it was a different story. Welsh men and women didn’t just leave their homes to uphold their beliefs, they left the country.
Almost 200 of them volunteered to join the International Brigade and travelled to Spain to fight fascism as the country was ripped apart by the Civil War between its democratically elected Republican Government and General Franco’s fascist army.
Politically, the Welsh volunteers were Communist or Labour; their activism shaped by the hungry years of the Depression and the industrial unrest of the General Strike. They were largely drawn from the mining valleys of the south east, but there were also volunteers from north Wales’ coal communities, coastal towns and rural areas.
Though predominantly working class – more than half were miners – there were poets, intellectuals and professionals too.
Eighty years ago this week they were given an emotional farewell parade in Barcelona and welcomed home to their Welsh communities, counting the cost of their idealism and courage. At least 35 Welshmen died on Spanish soil during the brutal conflict and a new book – You Are Legend – tells their remarkable story.
The author is Cardiff-born former educationalist Graham Davies.
“The writing of this book resulted from a confluence of emotive experiences,” he explains. “They began with a mesmerising assault on the senses by Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, and were nurtured by the discovery, in the Burry Port Institute in Carmarthenshire, of a plaque commemorating the men from south Wales who were killed fighting against fascism in Spain. The outcome is a book which examines the phenomenon of the Welsh who volunteer to fight against the fascist coup, in 1936, against Spain’s democratically elected Republican Government.
He adds: “When the Welsh volunteers returned home they were greeted in their communities as heroes, but many felt betrayed by the British government and were at first unwilling to share their experiences. However, as time went on plaques were erected, memoirs and biographies were written and historians began to carefully curate the individual pieces of this fascinating jigsaw, which I’ve assembled into one remarkable story of idealism and bravery.”
You Are Legend takes its title from a speech made at that Spanish sendoff by Dolores Ilbarruri Gomez, the communist politician and heroine of the Civil War, also known as La Pasionaria.
She thanked the soldiers of the International Brigade for their bravery and for defending democracy with the famous words: “Mothers! Women! When the years pass by and the wounds of war are staunched; when the memory of the sad and bloody days dissipates in a present of liberty, of peace and of wellbeing... speak to your children. Tell them of these men of the International Brigades... You are legend.”
Those legends included women. One of the most fascinating characters to emerge from the book’s detailed list of volunteers is Margaret Powell, a nurse and midwife who lent her medical skills to the cause.
Raised on a small hill farm in Llangenny, Monmouthshire, Margaret was accepted by the Spanish Aid Medical Committee and left for Spain in early 1937. She served as a frontline nurse in Aragon, Teruel and the Ebro and assisted in thousands of operations, often performed by the meagre glow provided by a cigarette lighter.
Margaret was described as “sincere, disciplined and hardworking”. Before her return to Wales she was interned in a French concentration camp.
Thora Silverthorne, from Abertillery, was another Welsh nurse on
When the wounds of war are staunched... speak to your children... of the International BrigadeLA PASIONARIA
the Civil War frontline. This daughter of a Bargoed miner joined the Young Communist League at the age of 16. She trained as a nurse at Oxford and gave medical back-up to the passing hunger marchers.
After volunteering for Spain she was one of the first nurses to be sent with the British Medical Unit. She recalled standing with a group of fellow nurses in their uniforms outside London’s Victoria station before being given a rousing send-off from supporters, complete with banners and bunches of flowers.
“We were done up in little round nurses’ hats, blue mackintoshes, black shoes and stockings,” she remembered.
Among her first tasks on arrival in Spain was helping to create the International Brigade’s first makeshift hospital in Granen – a huge, ratinfested farmhouse which they cleaned up before installing an operating theatre and wards. Thora also nursed in Huesca and other conflict hotspots, sometimes working up to 20 hours a day. Admired as a “firstclass theatre nurse”, she was praised for her “kindness and sense of humour”.
She is pictured in the book assisting Dr Alex Tudor-Hart, who initially worked as a GP for the Llanelli Miners’ Medical Aid Scheme before moving to London, where he married Edith Suschitsky, a Soviet spy, before volunteering for Spain. The methods he pioneered in treating fractures and wounds during the Spanish Civil War were to influence procedures in World War Two.
Graham Davies lists 149 mini biographies of the Welsh survivors of the Spanish Civil War, as well as details of the 35 who were killed. As I trawled through their stories I realised there was one man featured who I had actually met – Morien Morgan.
Born in Ynysybwl, Morien was studying languages at Cardiff University when he became politically galvanised. Appalled by the lack of response to Mussolini in Abyssinia and Hitler’s rearmament of Germany, he volunteered for Spain.
As the author describes: “A rifleman in No.2 Company, he was engaged in battle at Calaceite and escaped with a group of comrades. However, ill and hallucinating, he became separated from them and walked into a Nationalist camp by mistake. He was captured and spent the next six months in San Pedro concentration camp. On his repatriation, Morgan taught French in Pontypridd.”
He also married Elaine Floyd, who as Elaine Morgan we know as the late pioneering television writer, feminist icon and ground-breaking evolutionary theorist. Morien’s experience in the Spanish Civil War was one of the things that intrigued Elaine when they first met.
They married in 1945, settled in Mountain Ash, raising three sons, Dylan, Gareth and Huw. And it was in that same family home that I met Morien in the 1990s on a visit to interview Elaine. I remember him as a kind, gentle and obviously highly intelligent man. But at that point I had no idea he had endured such traumas in his youth, fighting the fascism that was sweeping Europe.
You are legend, said Dolores Ilbarruri Gomez to men like Morien. But it is a legend that is beginning to slip from living memory. Growing up in the Rhondda, tales of miners who journeyed to Spain to fight Franco were part of our cultural currency but the last Welshman to fight in the Spanish Civil War – Alun Menai Williams, from Gilfach Goch – died in 2006 aged 93.
On this 80th anniversary of the return of the volunteers to their homeland, the stories of Welsh men and women who fought quite literally for what they believed in deserve to be retold.