The Real Band of Brothers: First-hand accounts from the last British survivors of the Spanish Civil War. Max Arthur

       PREFACE

      The Real Band of Brothers stems from a chance meeting with the actor Alison Steadman in 2003 at the launch of my book Forgotten Voices of the Great War, where she read the moving words of Kitty Eckersley, whose husband had died on the Western Front. I met Alison again five years later and she introduced me to her friend, Marlene Sidaway, also an actor. Marlene lived for many years with David Marshall, one of the earliest British volunteers in the International Brigades, and was also the Secretary of the International Brigade Memorial Trust. In this role, she told me, she was in close touch with the last British survivors of the Brigade—and, from that meeting, the book began to take shape.

      To many people in the UK today, the Spanish Civil War remains something of a grey area—a conflict in which British troops were not engaged, and one that was eclipsed in the public perception by the Second World War. But the Spanish Civil War was a vicious and prolonged battle, the repercussions of which still reverberate through that country today. Many towns were destroyed and their populations massacred; the lives of half a million men, women and children were lost. Furthermore, while the British Government did not support the democratically elected Republican regime in Spain, individuals from the UK and other nations across Europe, incensed by the injustice of the Spanish struggle, volunteered their services to fight for democracy.

      In July 1936, the army generals including General Franco led a savage military coup to depose Spain’s elected government—a left-wing coalition of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), the Republican left, the Communists and various regional nationalist groups. This Fascist aggression was not isolated in Spain; in the early 1930s, extreme right-wing movements were also growing under Mussolini in Italy, Hitler in Germany and, to the alarm of left-wing parties there, under Oswald Mosley in Britain.

      Supported by his Blackshirts, Mosley tried to impose his authoritarian philosophies on the working-class population of London’s East End, and his political meetings often ended in violence. Eventually, in a well-orchestrated show of strength, groups of trade unionists, Communists and Jews joined forces to denounce Mosley’s racist ideology and prevent his jackbooted thugs from marching through their streets—it was a stand-off that became known as the infamous Battle of Cable Street.

      Some of the men and women who had seen off Mosley on that fateful day later volunteered to fight in Spain in what became known as the International Brigades. Much to the fury of these volunteers, the British Government of the day had adopted a policy of non-intervention. Not only would there be no British military support for the Spanish against Franco’s forces, there would be no official medical or material aid either. Although news from the Spanish war was sparse in any but the left-wing press, a growing number of people travelled to London to sign up with the Communist Party, and, in defiance of French laws against partisan military groups, made their way across the Channel, through France and over the Pyrenees to support the Spanish Republican army. Some were motivated by their political beliefs; others by their horror at the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Spain. The working people, already poor and living from hand to mouth, were facing starvation and disease, and many British doctors and nurses set out for Spain to offer their skills in order to alleviate the suffering their consciences could not ignore.

      In the three-year conflict—which has been dubbed the first battle of the Second World War—many of those volunteers lost their lives. To all who freely offered their services, for whom the cause was indeed just and one they were prepared to die for, the war was a life-changing experience—and one that none would regret, despite the consequences.

      As I started working on The Real Band of Brothers, just eight veterans of the International Brigades remained in Britain and, together with the award-winning documentary maker Matt Richards, I travelled across the country to interview and film these remarkable characters. The oldest, Lou Kenton, turned 100 in September 2008, and former nurse Penny Feiwel’s hundredth birthday is in

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