Not Just Orwell: The Independent Labour Party Volunteers and the Spanish Civil War by Christopher Hall
Warren & Pell, £14.99
The Spanish Civil War is big business. There seems to be no stopping the flood of books on the subject. The story as told is simple. Following a victory in the general election of February 1936 by the forces of the Popular Front there was in June a coup d’etat led by sections of the military, paramilitary police units and fascist and ultra-Catholic political parties. The coup was only a partial success. The plotters quickly took the south of Spain and much of the countryside, but the Republic held the cities and the north. It was civil war and lasted until March 1939 before Franco and his generals won and a murderous repression followed with executions continuing for almost a decade.
The civil war on the Republican side was initially fought by poorly equipped workers’ militias comprising activists from the left wing political parties and trade unions while on the side of the Nationalists were ranged the Spanish Army and Italian troops sent by Mussolini and a plentiful supply of arms and military supplies from Hitler’s Germany.
The left backed the Republic while conservative governments in Europe starved the legitimate government of arms. Thousands of communists and trade unionists went as volunteers to Spain to fight with the International Brigades – and fight they did in a series of heroic engagements, including the defence of Madrid, before the Soviet Union began supplying arms in exchange for Spain’s gold reserves and increased influence for the Communist Party. Yet, eventually, the Republic fell, losing an unbalanced fight.
Christopher Hall smudges the accepted wisdom on the left. It was just a little more complicated. Not all the volunteers went to save the Republic. The Independent Labour Party sent volunteers to fight with its sister party, the unorthodox Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista (POUM) to “save the revolution”. After the coup in Catalonia there had been a revolution as workers seized factories, farms and control. The problem was this rather got in the way of Soviet plans. Moscow wanted to use Spain to show the establishment in Europe the dangers of fascism, not the threat of revolution.
Thus there was a civil war within a civil war. Initially it was a cold war as the Communist Party manoeuvred for position but, by May 1937, it turned to bloodshed. While the POUM militia with its International Brigades volunteers, 9,000-10,000 strong, were still at the front fighting broke out in Barcelona with 500 killed and 1,000 wounded. It was the beginning of the end for the POUM; they were suppressed, outlawed and its leader Andrés Nin tortured and killed.
The result was that but for George Orwell, the POUM and the ILP volunteers would have been written out of history. For Orwell’s book Homage to Catalonia tells his side of the story as an ILP volunteer. What Not Just Orwell does is to expand this to encompass the scores of other British volunteers. The Aragon front where they were based was comparatively quiet yet, nevertheless, amongst the ILP volunteers who fought with the POUM and other units, Hall estimates, a third were killed or wounded – including Orwell who was shot in the throat.
In Not Just Orwell Hall just adds a little balance to the traditional version and, in doing so, introduces the reader to a range of characters that include Greville Texidor, the only British woman to fight with the POUM, and Stafford Cottman, a volunteer at 18.
Glyn Ford
