SPANISH CIVIL WAR: MUTINY ON THE LINARIA

The steamship Linaria lay moored in the winter fog drifting over Boston Harbor, her black hull streaked with salt, the boilers cooling after the long haul from Mariupol. Coal dust clung to her plates like soot on a miner’s skin. Seagulls wheeled above the masts, their cries lost against the rattle of chains and the muffled shouts of longshoremen stamping their boots against the cold.

The Linaria photo courtesy of Paul Johnson Collection.

It was February 1937. Six months earlier, on 17 July 1936, General Francisco Franco had marched his solders from their barracks to make war on their own people. The Spanish Republic – a fragile government elected on promises of land reform, a national health service and equal rights for women – had infuriated the Church, the grandees and the generals. They were certain Madrid would fall in days. It did not happen. Spanish workers had dragged their furniture into the streets to build barricades. Men with old hunting rifles stood shoulder to shoulder with girls in blue boiler suits and red neckerchiefs. The mantilla had gone. They were ready to die for the Republic they had voted for.

Germany and Italy rushed to Franco’s aid. Hitler and Mussolini sent planes and tanks, testing new tactics on Spanish soil. In April, the Condor Legion would reduce the Basque town of Guernica to rubble, killing 1,600 people in a three hour blitzkrieg – a rehearsal for the greater war to come. Britain, France, and the United States clung to ‘non-intervention,’ trading with both sides, business as usual.

And now the Linaria’s crew were being told to play their part in this cynical game.

The men gathered in their mean living quarters, the fo’c’sle heavy with tobacco smoke and the sour smell of damp wool. Mugs of tea cooled on the deck. They rolled cigarettes with calloused fingers. One man spat into his palms and rubbed them together as if bracing for a fight.

Alex ‘Spike’ Robson

Alex ‘Spike’ Robson, a broad, bullish fireman from Tyneside, stood and broke the silence. His face was drawn, coal-dusted, his voice steady.

‘They want us to load nitrates,’ he said. ‘Not for fertiliser, mind you. For bombs. For shells. For the killing of women and children.’

No one spoke. They had all seen the pictures in the papers: old men, women and children trudging dusty roads with their goats and dogs, columns of volunteers from the International Brigades holding back the fascist tide. To sail with that cargo was to become an accomplice to slaughter.

‘They can find other men for that job,’ muttered one of the stokers.

Blood Money

Captain James Robinson was summoned. A seasoned master with thirty years at sea, he ducked into the low-ceilinged fo’c’sle, cap under his arm. He listened as the men, through Robson, made their stand.

‘We’ll not carry explosives to Spain,’ Robson told him. ‘We’ll not take blood money.’

Robinson’s face was grim. Striking in a foreign port was mutiny, a crime under the Merchant Shipping Act of 1888. On their return to Liverpool the twenty men could be fined, imprisoned, or worse — blacklisted, their names circulated to every shipowner from London to Hong Kong.

‘Every British captain will know you as the Linaria crowd,’ he warned.

The crewmen did not budge. By morning the docks were buzzing with gossip. A British crew from Liverpool had refused orders. The Boston Daily Herald called it a ‘stay-in strike.’ American longshoremen backed them: if the Linaria crew would not load, neither would they. For ten days the ship lay idle, a black hulk in the harbour, cargo holds yawning empty, her engines cold.

The British consul came aboard, wagging his ebony cane and warning the men they would never sail again. Their own union – the National Union of Seamen – had betrayed them, denouncing the strike as ‘communist-inspired.’ The men were offered inducements: extra wages, indemnities in case of injury. Robson spat the words back at them: ‘Blood money.”

The fog thickened over the harbour. Food dwindled. They ran out of fags. The men endured, wrapped in blankets, listening to the ship bells and church bells echo across the frozen bay.

Word of the mutiny crossed the Atlantic. In Liverpool, a young docker named Jack Jones – soon to sail with the International Brigades, later to become one of Britain’s great trade union leaders – rallied to their cause. With Labour MP Sydney Silverman, he raised funds, found lawyers and kept the crew’s names alive in the press. ‘These men will not stand alone,’ he promised.

Linaria Crew in Court

The stalemate broke when the owners, Joseph Robinson & Sons of North Shields, paid the crew their wages and shipped them home to a welcome they were not expecting. The moment they stepped ashore in Liverpool, the mutineers were arrested and marched before the magistrate. They were charged with ‘neglect of duty and wilful disobedience.’

The courtroom was packed. Robson and his shipmates stood in the dock, backs straight, faces pale but defiant. The prosecution demanded punishment. The magistrate hesitated. Yes, the men had broken the law. But the evidence was clear: nitrates were the stuff of munitions. He fined them forty shillings apiece – three days’ pay.

It might have ended there. But the Liverpool sailors appealed.

In May 1937, before the Recorder of Liverpool, E.G. Hemmerde KC, the men presented testimony from chemists confirming what everyone knew: nitrates meant explosives. Hemmerde, a man of quiet socialist sympathies, studied the faces of the sailors in the dock. He ruled in their favour. The fines were quashed. The men walked free.

But Joseph Robinson & Sons would not let go. The case went to the High Court in 1938. The barrister D.N. Pritt KC spoke for the company. Robson spoke for himself, stern and unyielding. Again the verdict favoured the sailors. Costs were awarded against the owners.

It was a small victory that came with a price tag. Robson was blacklisted from the merchant fleet, his name struck from the lists. For years no British ship would take him on. Only when war broke out in 1939 did he find work again, serving aboard Royal Navy auxiliaries. After the war, he returned to the union he had once defied. In 1947, Alex ‘Spike’ Robson was elected to the executive council of the National Union of Seamen.

The Linaria strike ended not in triumph but compromise. The men won their case, but Robson and others carried the invisible scars of the blacklist, a slow suffocation of their working lives. What they gained was not wages or honour in the eyes of their own union, but a sort of moral authority, the rare courage of saying no when their masters demanded compliance.

In that frozen harbour they exposed a truth that governments and newspapers preferred to bury: Britain’s ‘neutrality’ was a mask, its ports and banks open to the fascist cause, its leaders content to let the Spanish Republic bleed out rather than risk upsetting Hitler or Mussolini. The betrayal ran deep – from Downing Street to the union halls – and for a decade after, the world would pay in rivers of blood for that silence.

The memory of the Linaria lives in a small dark corner of history, a reminder that resistance is not always measured in victories. Sometimes it is measured in the refusal to load a single ship, in the echo of a defiant voice on the dockside and in the courtroom, in the knowledge that when the moment comes you do not bend.

Read more on the Linaria Mutiny at the International Brigade Memorial Trust website. 

                                                                                           oOo

You may enjoy my novel We Shall Pass – 

‘Young idealistic British volunteers to the Spanish Civil War find themselves in a Guernica-like nightmare, an ever-rising body-count. Add a love triangle stretched across the extremes of the English 1930s class system and you have something very powerful.’ PETER YORK

WE SHALL PASS is available from indy publisher Luath Press – click HERE.

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And all good bookshops.

Alfredo Behrens reviews We Shall Pass