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

Before I got to Valencia I found the place where wounded Brigaders were convalescing after the Battle of Jarama and that was where Lilian had been sent. It was wonderful to see her. We lost more than half of our battalion, killed and wounded, in that battle. It wasn’t just a convalescent home—it was also being used as a hospital. There were a number of wounded; several nurses had been in Jarama and they told me that it was very, very serious, very tense. One nurse from the north had had a nervous breakdown and said to me, ‘You mustn’t come out here, young man. You should go back home. We don’t stand a chance.’ Another nurse who had been with her tried to calm her and said to me, ‘It is tough, but you knew what you were coming to, anyway.’ Very soon, those who were well enough to travel went to a proper convalescent home which was run by British-speaking volunteers, at Benicasim. The others either went back to the front, or to one of the hospitals for further treatment. I was told to report to one of the British hospitals in a place called Valdeganga. We had two hospitals—one in Valdeganga and one in a place called Cuenca. I reported and I spent the rest of my time in Spain based in Valdeganga. I took Lilian with me on the bike.

Every day I was either on my motorcycle or driving an ambulance, picking up wounded from the base camps. Often I would go to different units of the battalion scattered around Spain with messages or parcels of medical equipment, where they were in short supply.

We knew the Fascists were killing and murdering all the trade unionists they could find, and I had an unhappy time out there for the first few months because I was on my own, going from hospital to hospital.

Everywhere I went, my memory of the warmth and friendship of the Spanish people is still very vivid. I didn’t speak any Spanish—well, very little. I could ask the way to a place, but I could never understand the answer. After a while I got into a habit that, if I came to a village, I would stop in the centre and people would look at me curiously from all around the square. After a while somebody would come and try and talk to me in Spanish, and I would explain that I was English, in the International Brigade. When they heard I was in the International Brigade, their hearts opened and I was taken in, often given food, though they had very little of it. There I first had a drink of anise—which nearly knocked my head off. This happened almost everywhere I went, in every village. From the hospital in Valdeganga I went to Madrid and several times to Barcelona, Valencia and Albacete, which was the base of the International Brigades. Generally, if I had to spend more than one night, I would stop and find the military controller of the area, and I was allowed to sleep there—but I never left my bike. I always made a point of bedding down beside the bike and resting my head on the wheel. They all thought it was very curious and very strange, but it was the only way I kept that bike. I lived on grapes growing by the roadside, for days on end.

I have one feeling of unease—whether I did the right thing or not I don’t know. On one occasion when I was at Albacete I met Wally Tapsall, who was the political commissar of the battalion, and Fred Copeman, who was a commander. When they saw me with the bike, they said, ‘Hey, we want you in the battalion—we could use you.’

I said, ‘OK—by all means. You just get in touch with the hospital.’

They said, ‘Oh no, it would take too long. You just come along and we will straighten it out later.’

I said I wasn’t prepared to do that, because I was attached to the hospital. I often wonder whether I did right. It is one of those things—you never know.

I remember when Harry Pollitt, who was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, came to speak to the battalion. He took a number of the wounded and members of the staff to hear him. It was a wonderful experience, because Harry was a well-known speaker. He had the art of speaking about what you felt in your own heart and on this occasion he spoke with such pride of the men who were there and pride in the fact that it was the Communist Party that inspired the formation of the Brigade.

I used to go to the village every day where the bakery woman had a young child of about ten or eleven, and she took to me. She would wait for my lorry to arrive, she would take me by the hand, lead me into the bakery and always insisted that I had something to eat or drink. Occasionally I would take her and her mother for a trip into the nearest town or to the hospital, and she loved it. Sometimes she would get all her friends to come for a trip on the lorry.

Occasionally in the hospital things were quiet, and then an ambulance would arrive with either wounded or people who had come from other hospitals for convalescence. Everybody would jump to action. The whole place was a hive of activity, getting their beds ready, looking after them, helping them to wash, finding new clothes for them, feeding them.

I don’t know how long I had been there before I had heard that Ben Glazer, my friend who went to Spain three or four weeks ahead of me, had been killed. Somehow I accepted it. Every time we heard of a friend or somebody in the Brigade who had been killed, somebody who we knew either by name or personally, there was never any—I won’t say sadness—but there wasn’t any great shock—almost as though we had always expected it. Looking back on my own feelings when I came to Spain, it was almost as though I was saying goodbye—almost as though I was expecting to be killed. After Jarama, and then later the Ebro [July-November 1938], when many of our people were killed, we almost began to accept it as inevitable. I don’t think we were callous—it was just part of life. We knew something of the murders and tortures, and the killings of the Republicans when the Franco forces overran a village or town, and we expected that to happen if the Fascists won.

When I had the lorry it was always a feature that, wherever you went, you would see somebody sitting on the roadside thumbing a lift. Of course we always did what we could, unless we happened to be in a hurry. The moment you stopped to pick up someone, within a matter of seconds ten or fifteen would appear with their goats, hens and chickens. This was a feature of any journey we made in an open lorry. On the ambulance, of course, it was different. Nobody ever tried to stop an ambulance, and with the motorbike it was altogether quite different because I was alone. I did have a pillion and there were occasions when I took passengers. On a long journey—I didn’t have a speedometer on the motorbike—to kill time I would either sing all the songs I knew, or try to count the telephone posts and guess how far I had gone, and work out the speed. I had a map then, but it wasn’t very clear.

It was always very exciting to go to Albacete, the base of the International Brigades. Brigaders were arriving from all over the world and in the canteen you would hear every language imaginable. Again, I was always in the position where, if I wanted to go to the canteen, I would never do so unless I got my bike looked after by one of the guards or policemen. I wasn’t a good mechanic but I knew how to service the bike. There was one occasion—the bike was a twin Douglas—when one of the gaskets blew and there were some flames coming from one part. I must have been twenty or thirty miles away from the nearest town and I drove along with one leg in the air so it didn’t get burnt. I managed to limp into this place, and of course they didn’t have a gasket head or whatever it was and we had to improvise. Improvising was a very important part of the whole transport problem. I knew little but managed to service the lorry, the ambulance and the bike, and we kept them on the road all the time I was there.

I had one accident on the bike going round a sharp bend. I came off. There was a fairly deep drop the other side and I went rolling down with the bike on top of me. I managed to clear the bike, but my arm was badly hurt. I didn’t know whether it was broken or not—I didn’t have any feeling in it. I must have stayed there for two or three hours before somebody came along to help me. In the event I was OK—they managed to get the bike onto a lorry and get me back to the hospital, and I think it was two or three weeks before I could use it fully, and was able to drive again.

There was one woman in the hospital named Winifred Bates, the wife of Ralph Bates, the famous author of The Olive Field, 1936, among others. She used to do some reporting, and occasionally I would take her to different parts of Spain, Barcelona particularly, where she had to link up with people she was working for. She wrote a pamphlet about the British Medical Unit. Things were quiet at the time, and they asked me if I would go back to England with the pamphlet to get it printed and also to take part in the campaign in Fleet Street for the sending of a further ambulance from Fleet Street.

What always struck me was that, when men came into the hospital wounded, I can’t ever remember anybody feeling despair or wishing they hadn’t come. There was a feeling of confidence. We never thought we would ever lose the war because there was such massive support among the people of Spain. We all did our best to keep in touch with whatever organisations we were from, and letters from Britain were very widely circulated. We also got copies of the Daily Worker.

The roads in Spain were full of holes and one night we took some wounded to the hospital. I remember the men lying there, very badly wounded, screaming that I was a Fascist and trying to kill them by going over the ruts in the road. On that particular occasion we didn’t have any nurse or staff to accompany the wounded. I had to do what I could myself—but there was very little I could do. Anyway, we got them back safely and they all not only survived, but, within a matter of months, and sometimes weeks, they were back in the line.

I wrote fairly regularly to the Party branch and to individual members. I remember once writing to NATSOPA [National Society of Operative Printers and Assistants] and saying that we had certain shortages, like chocolate, soap, toilet rolls and cigarettes. Cigarettes were the thing we wanted most. One day a great big tea chest arrived for me. It was customary when anybody received a parcel that everybody gathered around because, whatever it was, we shared it. We were all agog—what could be in this big tea chest? When I opened it up, it was toilet rolls and soap—but a week or two later we got parcels of cigarettes and chocolate. The food we had through the whole of the period was inadequate, but we expected that. We lived on beans, I think more than anything else. I didn’t mind—I have always liked beans. But they were usually cooked in garlic and olive oil and there were some from the British Battalion who just couldn’t stomach it. There was one bloke who went for days on bread only. There were others like him who couldn’t manage the food. Lots of them were very inadequately fed and you could see it in their faces at times, but it never depressed them—it didn’t affect our morale. As I said, we never thought we would ever lose the war.

I remember how some of the members of the Brigade, as soon as they were fit enough to walk and get about, were always eager to go back to the unit—to the battalion. I remember the feeling of pride among the staff in the hospital when patients were able to walk and be mobile. Lilian, who worked as a masseuse and nurse, was faced with the problem of trying to help the soldiers to walk again. She designed a gadget that had three sides to it: people could lean on it and it would help them to stagger along.

I remember how we coped with the cold. They say of the plain of Madrid that the wind is not strong enough to blow out a candle, yet strong enough to kill a man. Two or three times, when we went to Madrid or Albacete in the height of the winter period, it was so cold, unbelievably cold; I had never experienced anything like it. On one occasion we were on a lorry, going down a very steep hill. The wind was icy, and a whole number of lorries and ambulances had gone into a ditch. I had a spare driver with me, he drove in bottom gear and four of us tied a rope to the back of the lorry—walked down behind it, trying to keep the back of the lorry from sliding into the ditch, and we succeeded.

I remember the trip we had around Spain, trying to deliver the parcels which had been collected in England for Christmas of 1937, and the joy of people who were in isolated parts of the battlefront to get some goodies. Wherever we went, they were delighted to see us. The whole trip left a vague memory of various places, because, whenever we stopped, we had to see the mayor of the village or the town, and their kindness was always overwhelming. They were having a hard time themselves and yet they always tried to help us and feed us—although we avoided it as much as we could, knowing how short they were themselves.

It was September 1938 when I came back to raise funds for an ambulance—back to the East End. The Brigade had contacted the printers—they had an organisation, the Printers’ Anti-Fascist Movement, and raised money for an ambulance. To do that they went to all the Chapels—we even got some money from [press baron Lord] Beaverbrook. We had regular meetings with several wounded who had been returned.

We raised the money but by that time the war had changed and they wired us that they didn’t want an ambulance; they wanted a lorry, with as much medical equipment as we could get. So we gathered all the money we had and made another appeal to all the Chapels and got quite a lot more. Two other printers and I were going to take it over to Benicasim, to the headquarters of Medical Aid. But we were stuck at the border for a while, and that’s when we saw all these people flooding towards us. We arrived back at about the time the first refugees reached the Spanish border. They increased in numbers and, when they got to the French border, the French gendarmes made them lay down their arms, so they had great piles of arms—and they didn’t give them any help, any water or any food. They were near starving—there were hundreds and thousands of refugees with no food—so the reporters Bill Forrest and Tom Driberg telephoned London and reported about the way French authorities were treating refugees—which got front-page stories in the Daily Express and the News Chronicle.

They let them into France, but there were no facilities for them at all. The first wave were people who had been in hospital so we took them to nearby hospitals. We did two or three trips. We saw the wounded and children being carried. We saw photos used in the propaganda of women carrying babies that were already dead. We never saw that ourselves, but what we did see, and we stopped to photograph her, was a woman helping the Spanish women whose babies had died. By that time they were near starvation, and they’d been three or four days on the frontier without any food. The articles by Bill Forrest and Tom Driberg created quite a sensation. They reported that refugees needed food quickly, but the French sent the gendarmes to keep them down and wouldn’t allow any food to be brought in. We’d been given £50 each to live on while we were out there, and we went and bought loads of bread and chocolate—but they wouldn’t take any money. We started sharing out the chocolate—and we’d bought about five hundred loaves and we cut them in half and started giving them out. There was nearly a riot.

After the civil war there were all these Basque children who had been evacuated to the UK. I’d taken thirty to Hammersmith and the Committee arranged to put the children up in homes of the volunteers. After Barcelona and Madrid fell, the Fascists were cock-a-hoop—Franco got in touch with the United Nations demanding that the Basque children be returned. The Party said they’d send the first lot back and I was to take them. I took thirty of them back to the border, across the river. I was in charge with some Red Cross officials. I sent messages across the river to them about the children. They wanted to know when we’d be sending the children across. I took the decision that we weren’t going to unless we had a letter from each of their parents. All the children were talking and there was terrible sadness among them. These were the children who’d left when they were ten and eleven year olds and now were thirteen and fourteen and had come from peaceful England to a Fascist state. We absolutely refused to send them back unless we got a letter from their parents. They arrived back late in the day with the letters. Sometimes I cry when I think of it, the children hanging onto me, not wanting to go. It took all day. They all went back and we never saw any of them again.

When the last members of the battalion arrived at Victoria, there was such joy, the celebration, the tremendous enthusiasm of the crowd. Later on we went to a meeting somewhere in central London. It was after that that the depression set in for me, the realisation that we had lost the war—that Fascism had been victorious—and I thought of all the losses, the thousands of Brigaders and, of course, I thought of Spanish Republicans and what they were going through, the imprisonment, the torture and the killings.

After all these sacrifices, did we achieve anything? I think we did! I am proud of having gone and I would do it all again.

PENNY FEIWEL

Born 24 April 1909 in Tottenham, north London

My father was known in the neighbourhood as ‘Punch’ Phelps. He was an unskilled labourer, like most of the men in our street—a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. He was in and out of jobs, as a navvy on the roads, on buildings or in the railway yards. He was a chirpy, kindly man, always optimistic and full of backchat, never harbouring a grudge—but he had to work terribly hard, and in some jobs, I remember, he was driven so hard that after leaving the house at four in the morning he would come back in the afternoon drenched in sweat and dead tired, throw himself on his bed and fall asleep.

He was a rough diamond, but he wasn’t spiteful. He had a hard life, and he worked very, very hard, too—but he was always good to us children. He used to get up early in the morning before he went to his job as a navvy, and he’d clean all our shoes before we went to school. He never hit us—he used to say, ‘I’ll aim half a crown at you.’ We’d laugh at that—but his attitude would be threatening. My mother was very short-tempered. I had many a black eye from her—but she had a hard life. She was one girl among thirteen brothers, so she had to learn to look after herself. Her family were shopkeepers—they used to deliver coal on carts and they had a greengrocery shop as well. Right until I grew up, they kept that shop—amazing. My mother had stamina—but, my goodness, she had a temper. In my mind’s eye I carry a picture of her with jet-black hair covered by a man’s cloth cap, a white blouse and a long black ragged skirt, a piece of coarse sacking tied round her waist in place of an apron, and wearing boots done up with side buttons and with a broom in her hand.

There were a lot of us, but my mother adopted a boy; her friend who had a child died in the workhouse, and my mother took the baby and brought him up. He lived with us, but my eldest sister, Violet didn’t get on with him. In Edith Road—and it was usually the same in the other places we lived (because several times we had to leave after falling into arrears with the rent)—we had three rooms: a kitchen/living room with the grate and sink where the lot of us had our meals, washed and sat about, and two bedrooms. A gas meter was laid on, but such a thing as a bathroom was unheard of. Most of our neighbours lived in the same way.

I have a picture of women, wearing their husbands’ caps, talking across the road from their front doors, some of them leaning on their brooms, others scrubbing their front steps with buckets of water. The houses just could not be kept clean, because the children were always rushing in and out, and there were no street cleaners in those days—at least not in our area. The dust and dirt from the streets outside and smoke from the railway and the factories blew in so much that in summer our windows were often kept tightly closed. In winter there was the damp, against which one could do nothing. Whenever possible, us kids were sent into the street so that we swarmed around the pavements.

To us the pawnshop was important—on the Saturday our best clothes were taken out to wear on Sunday, then they were back in again on Monday. My mother even used to pawn her wedding ring and her Sunday clothes; thankfully those days have gone now, but we were always in the pawnshop. I hated it. To make a few pennies we sold bunches of mint in West Green Road by the kerb, at a penny a bunch. We had a garden and my father used to grow mint and carrots. When the carrots got so high, my brother and I would dig them up, take the tops off and wash them in the butt outside, and stick the stalks back again in the soil—and take the carrots to school. One day I got caught going underneath my desk to eat a piece of carrot. The teacher caught me and said, ‘Bring out what you’re eating.’ I emptied all these carrots onto the floor. She said, ‘I never knew we had a donkey in the class.’

Dad went into the army in 1914. I remember my mother hanging out the washing in the garden at the time, when my pa came to go, and I don’t know what he said, but I saw her wiping her eyes with her apron. From then on my mother had to carry the whole burden, so, soon after he was gone, she went to work in a munitions factory. In a brown overall and with a mob cap covering her jet-black hair, she’d go off early in the morning, coming home dead tired in the evening. It was a trying time for her because, before setting off for work, she had to get the five of us ready for school before the first factory whistle. Bill, the eldest, was in the top form, while I, at five or so, was sent along with the others, and a neighbour looked after Rosie, the baby. War at first seemed quite exciting to us children in Tottenham, with talk of heroes and our British navy, and the enemy Hun, but soon there were food cards and, before going to school, we had to queue up outside food shops, which I hated. There were free meals at school—usually pea soup or stew dumpling—but it wasn’t sufficient, and by evening we were hungry. Often my mother hadn’t enough food for us, and I can remember many nights when my brother and I stood outside the factories, especially the Harris Lebus furniture factory in Ferry Lane, waiting for the people to come out from various shifts, holding out our hands for any bits of their lunch they had left over. Often we were in luck, getting half a sandwich or a piece of bread and cheese.

I had to go into hospital, because I had a fall. It was a severe winter—one of the worst winters we’d ever known—and my mother was working in Leavis’s factory. For this she needed hairpins, as she had long hair. It was early in the morning, she was going to work and the factory hooter was going—and she hadn’t any hairpins—so she got my young brother and said, ‘You go and get me some hairpins. And mind how you go—it’s very slippery.’

He got as far as the iron gate and he fell and came back. So she got me and said, ‘You go now and see if you can keep your feet properly.’ So I went. I didn’t slip, but I knocked my elbow very badly. But I carried on, got her hairpins and came back, but the elbow was very bad. My mother went off to work, but when I was at school there was the teacher doing the PE exercises, and she pulled my arm up and I winced. She said, ‘What are you wincing for? What’s the matter with you?’

And I said, ‘I banged it on my way out.’

She looked at it and said, ‘I’d better write a letter to your mother to take you to the doctor.’

My mother took me to the Tottenham hospital, and they kept me in and operated on me. They discovered a diseased bone, which was operated on twice, and I was in hospital for quite a long time with osteomyelitis. I’ve still got the scars.

When I came out, my father, who had been ill with pneumonia, was invalided home from France and sent to a Redhill convalescent home. He was a very good cook in the army and they allowed me to go and help him during the daytime. He had a landlady who looked after him and me of a night and I had a wonderful time there in Redhill. We used to go blackberrying with his chums and the landlady. When I came home, the nurse used to come and dress my wound. My father stayed there, cooking for the Redhill barracks, until he was invalided out of the army, and my time there was an interval of freedom I never forgot.