Across Britain, there are more than 100 memorials to the International Brigade volunteers from Britain and Ireland who took up arms in the Spanish Civil War.
Clifford Thurlow at the National Memorial to the International Brigade
Some 2,500 individuals made the journey to Spain to fight in what they saw as a common cause: the battle to stem the rising tide of fascism in the 1930s – a threat to social democracy in Europe and the United States crushed in World War II and rising again almost a century later.
Those who went to fight for the Spanish Republic were mainly working men and women, union officials, Red Cross nurses and pacifists who would not carry a gun but performed first aid and carried stretchers across the killing fields. There were intellectuals, artists and writers, most notably Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, who arrived in Barcelona on 26 December 1936 and enlisted with the POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista).
In his book Homage to Catalonia, Orwell describes the horrors and confusion of the battlefront, the near-fatal bullet wound that ended his time in Spain and the revolutionary euphoria of Barcelona where, ‘For the first time I had ever been in a town where the working-class was in the saddle.’
The Republic
Spain had briefly been a republic from 1873 to 1874. What became known as the Second Republic was proclaimed on 14 April 1931, when King Alfonso XIII went into exile. Two general elections, in 1933 and 1936, resulted in centrist governments made up of liberal and socialist deputies. The Falange Party on the extreme right received insufficient votes to win a single seat. The communists with a handful of deputies played a minor role in the two Popular Front coalitions.
The Republic set about modernising Spain with laws securing workers’ and women’s rights, a minimum wage, a programme of land reform and the creation of a national health system. The reforms were considered too slow by the urban workers and agricultural labourers who had supported the Popular Front, and too extreme by the Nationalist alliance of monarchists, landowners, the Church and the military led by General Francisco Franco. Three years of street protests and polarisation culminated in the military uprising on 17 July 1936 when the generals marched their soldiers out of their barracks to make war on their own people.
100 Memorials to the International Brigade
More than 50,000 volunteers across the world saw the dangers of fascism and risked their lives to stop its spread by volunteering in the International Brigades. Hitler and Mussolini backed Franco’s Nationalist uprising with trained troops and modern weaponry. The three great democracies, Britain, France and the United States, maintained a policy of non-intervention. Aside from starving the democratic Republic of aid and arms, it allowed Germany and Italy to test battle manoeuvres and bombing strategies. In what was the first aerial saturation bombing of a civilian population, the attack on Guernica by Germany’s Condor Legion on 26 April 1937 wiped the undefended Basque town of 7,000 people from the map.
The civil war ended on 1 April 1939 with a million Spaniards dead or in exile. The Nationalists established a dictatorship under General Franco that lasted for 36 years until his death on 20 November 1975.
The British Battalion fought against overwhelming odds on almost every front in the civil war; 526 men and women remained in Spain with the Spanish soil their shrouds. The National Memorial to honour the fallen was conceived as a sculpture by Ian Walters. It was unveiled on 5 October 1985 on the South Bank of the River Thames in Jubilee Gardens by Michael Foot MP.
The International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) keeps the blood flowing through the memory and spirit of the volunteers. The trust maintains the memorials and organises events across Spain and Britain. The most recent memorial – to the volunteers from Doncaster – was inaugurated on 13 February 2025, 86 years after the battle for Spain engraved its place on the very heart of British working class people.
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“The Spanish Civil War was a brutal rehearsal for the Second World War – and it was idealistic and wildly romantic. Thurlow captures it all in spades. Reminiscent of Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. But with a better love story. Had me alternately cheering, sobbing and shaking my fist at Franco and co,” Andy Martin review.