It all began on a cold grey street in Bellshill in 1925 when Ethel MacDonald, aged 16, pasted a leaflet on a lamppost. It read: Workers of the World, Unite!
Her breath was a faint cloud in the damp Scottish air. The ink had run slightly in the drizzle, but the words – and the commitment behind those words – were clear. Ethel MacDonald’s hands were raw from cold, her coat thin, but her eyes blazed with a defiance no weather could dull.
She kept up her activity for the next five years and was drawn into the world of pamphlets, small presses and meetings that sparked up spontaneously in community halls and around doorways in the poor tenements across Glasgow. She met Guy Aldred, the writer and activist, with his partner Jenny Patrick. They became more than friends. They became comrades. ‘She was quick with a brilliant turn of phrase, totally dedicated to decency and utterly unafraid,’ Aldred later remembered. ‘Ethel MacDonald was a woman whose courage shamed us all.’
Together they founded the United Socialist Movement (USM), breaking away from the Independent Labour Party for what they saw as Labour reform failures under Labour Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald; he was later expelled from the party after forming a National Government dominated by Conservatives.
When Spain erupted into civil war in July 1936, Ethel felt no hesitation. ‘We must go,’ she told Jenny Patrick. ‘If the workers there can make a new world, we cannot stand idle.’
Jenny Patrick
They hitchhiked across France, sleeping rough, waving down trucks and begging drivers for lifts, their journey sustained by a stubborn desire to do what they both considered was the right and only thing to do.
Ahead of them lay Barcelona, the city that seemed to be rewriting history, where George Orwell on Boxing Day that year would step from the train at Sants Station and sign on to fight with the militiamen of the POUM – Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista; the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification.
They Call Ethel MacDonald – the Scottish La Pasionaria
Their first sight of the city was unforgettable: tramlines sparking along the Ramblas, red and black flags fluttering from balconies, rifles slung across the shoulders of men in workers’ caps and young women in blue boiler suits and red kerchiefs. They were free from the chains of the Church and they were willing to die for their beliefs in trade unions, women’s rights, a health service for all. Fruit sellers piled oranges in crates beside anarchist newspapers; cafés served wine ‘gratis’ to militiamen just returned from the Aragón front. The air was alive with voices raised against fascism, graffiti freshly daubed on every wall.
Ethel MacDonald
Ethel MacDonald and Jenny Patrick were swept into the orbit of the Anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT). Ethel spoke with such skill and passion at meetings, she was invited to give her views on the radio. Sitting before the microphone in the studio, cigarette smoke curling above her head, she addressed the world in English, her words ringing out across Europe, unvarnished and persuasive.
A British journalist wrote home: ‘Miss MacDonald’s voice from Barcelona strikes with a clarity rare among political speakers. It is direct, impatient, the voice of one who has seen blood in the gutters. They are calling her the Scottish la Pasionaria.’
On 19 February 1937 she warned: ‘What are the actions of the parliamentary parties with regard to support of the Spanish struggle? They talk, they discuss, they speak with bated breath of the horrors that are taking place in Spain.’ She paused. ‘This is not the time for sympathy and charity. This is the time for action. Do you not understand that every week, every day and every hour counts?’
May Days
The Popular Front coalition had always been fragile with Marxists, Communists and anarchists disagreeing on what kind of world they wanted to create when the war was won, and lost sight of the fact that the Republic had been losing ground since the insurgent generals (Franco, Mola and Sanjurjo) marched their men out of their barracks and turned their guns on their own government.
On 3 May 1937, the uneasy coalition broke in Barcelona. It began when police units backed by the Communists attacked the telephone exchange controlled by the CNT, the anarchist group to which Ethel MacDonald and Jenny Patrick were affiliated. Within hours the Ramblas became a battleground. Gunfire rattled across the rooftops. Trams were abandoned, windows riddled with bullet holes. Shopkeepers lowered shutters as neighbours dragged furniture into the streets to build barricades. In five days of fighting, until 8 May, thousands of lives were lost.
Shortly after, the POUM (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) was banned and its leaders arrested. George Orwell, who fought with the Marxist militia, saw the May Days conflagration first hand, describing the internecine chaos in his book Homage to Catalonia. Like MacDonald and Patrick, he came to believe that the Communist Party was obsessed with power for its own sake and undermined the workers in their struggle for equal rights, fair play and, as he wrote, ‘common human decency.’ The experience shaped Orwell’s distaste of Communism and his growing allegiance to ‘democratic Socialism.’
Ethel MacDonald and Jenny Patrick watched the May Days battles from within the CNT headquarters. Their letters home were published in Guy Aldred’s ‘Barcelona Bulletin,’ and offer a more balanced account than the hostile, often inaccurate reports published in the British press, particularly the ‘Daily Mail,’ an outspoken supporter of the Nationalists in Spain as well as Hitler’s rise in Nazi Germany.
MacDonald wrote. ‘I can scarcely believe what I see: comrades killing comrades. Barcelona has become a civil war within the Civil War.’
Through deadly nights of curfews, blackouts and sniper fire, she moved between safe houses, carrying messages, delivering food and guiding hunted anarchists out of the city. ‘I have no weapon, only my wits, but I cannot abandon those who are being hunted like rats.’
One man she helped escape later recalled: ‘We would have been finished without her.’
The Scots Scarlet Pimpernel
The press in the UK made her a heroine. Some called her the ‘Scots Scarlet Pimpernel,’ others the Scottish La Pasionaria – nickname of the great Spanish poet, writer and Republican fighter Dolores Ibárruri. Whatever name they wanted to give her, Ethel MacDonald was totally demoralised and saw only betrayal. ‘We are being strangled,’ she confided in a private letter, ‘strangled by those who pretend to be our friends.’
Bob Smillie of the Independent Labour Party, a POUM volunteer, like Orwell, was arrested in Figueres by Communist police and taken to the Modelo Prison in Valencia, where he died in mysterious circumstances on 12 June 1937. Officials claimed peritonitis; whispers in the cafés said he had been beaten to death.
Ethel MacDonald took up the story on radio and in print. One night the Assault Guards came for her. ‘They ransacked every room, every cupboard,’ she told the Glasgow Evening Times. ‘What they found was enough to hang me – revolutionary literature, the words I had spoken in speeches on the radio when the enemy was Franco’s Nationalists and we were all fighting the same war.’
She was thrown in a dank cell with the names of prisoners scratched into the plaster walls. Against the odds, she managed to escape custody and travelled through France and Holland, giving speeches and denouncing the Communists. David Murray of the ILP insisted Smillie died of illness. For a time he was believed. Then George Orwell returned from Spain, Georges Kopp from the front, and both said aloud what many suspected: Smillie had been murdered.
Ethel MacDonald – Voice of Barcelona
Two months later, in Glasgow, 300 people gathered to greet Ethel MacDonald. She was thinner, her face sharpened. ‘I went to Spain full of hopes and dreams,’ she told the crowd. ‘It promised to be utopia realised. I return full of sadness, dulled by the tragedy I have seen. I have lived through scenes and events that belong to the French Revolution.’
The applause was thunderous, but those close to her noticed the sorrow. John Taylor Caldwell, the writer and anarchist, later wrote: ‘She returned to us not defeated, but marked. Her spirit remained unbroken, yet there was a shadow in her eyes that had not been there before Spain.’
Ethel threw herself once more into publishing, helping found the Strickland Press in Glasgow with Aldred, Patrick and Caldwell. Pamphlets continued to pour from its presses – against fascism, Stalinism, against war. But her health, damaged in a Spanish prison cell, slowly betrayed her. By the late 1950s, multiple sclerosis had stilled her tongue. The voice that had once carried across the airwaves of Barcelona was silenced. She died, aged 52, in 1961.
What remains are fragments: the words that reached across Europe, the pamphlets inked by hand, the memories of those she saved. A Scottish anarchist who walked the Ramblas in its brief moment of freedom, who smuggled fugitives out under the cover of darkness, who returned disillusioned but unbroken. The voice of Barcelona, the Scottish la Pasionaria. A woman who bore witness to both the flowering and the betrayal of a dream.
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 and 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.
All the Amazons – click HERE.
And all good bookshops.