The Volunteers

Of the many ways that Scots responded to the war in Spain, those who joined the International Brigades have always been at the centre of historical and popular memory. This chapter seeks to establish exactly who these volunteers were and what connections they shared before coming to Spain, offering detailed new evidence and analysis regarding their collective identities. Instead of viewing them as a relatively small, disparate collection of individuals, it is shown that the Scottish volunteers were heavily clustered along the lines of geography, class and political affiliations. Rather than understanding these volunteers as the representatives of Scotland, or even the Scottish left, it is argued that they are best understood as a more concentrated mobilisation of quite narrow socio-political sphere, defined by formal and informal links to the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Scotland in the 1930s

Scotland suffered acutely from the economic and political crises of the interwar period, with industrial decline, mass unemployment and cultural uncertainty in evidence by the early 1920s. This chapter explores the consequences of this economic and social dislocation for Scottish politics in the lead up the late 1930s. Particular emphasis is given to left-wing politics and anti-unemployment activism, suggesting that the roots of a distinctively Scottish response to the Spanish Civil War lay in older radical political cultures that had survived and evolved into the interwar era.

Thinking and Acting

The motives of foreigners who fought in the Spanish Civil War has long fascinated historians. While recent work has been able to explore the complexities of individual motivation, efforts to explain the scale of mobilisation still hinge on the anti-fascist beliefs of the volunteers. As well as exploring new ways of understanding the nature of volunteers’ anti-fascist beliefs, this chapter seeks to adapt and expand these frameworks, arguing that the best explanation for the scale of these mobilisations lies at the intersection of local and transnational communist political cultures. Not only did the belief systems of interwar communism lend themselves to these kinds of mobilisations, the nature of the recruitment process led to social as well as political impetus towards enlisting, leading to the dense recruitment among certain social-political networks observed in the previous chapter. This, it is suggested, offers a model for understanding the key pre-requisites for large-scale foreign fighter mobilisations.

Epilogue: Beyond

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Scots in Spain: Continuity, Change and Politics

This chapter follows the Scottish volunteers to Spain itself, asking how far it is possible to establish a distinctively Scottish experience of serving in the Spanish Civil War in the absence of a particular Scottish unit in the International Brigades. Despite the lack of a formal collective identity, it is shown that the social and political networks that underpinned recruitment continued to matter in Spain, serving important functions in shaping volunteers’ experiences of everyday life, service and even battle. In particular, such informal connections could be vital in order to successfully understand and navigate the highly-politicised atmosphere of the International Brigades, and to mitigate the consequences of personal failings.

Coalitions of the Willing: Spanish Aid Committees in Scotland

A distinctive feature of pro-Republican solidarity movements in Britain was the formation of local, regional and national ‘Spanish Aid Committees’, which brought together diverse groups in order to campaign and raise funds on behalf of Republican Spain. Their widespread success across Britain has been taken both as evidence of either the success of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s efforts to build progressive political coalitions in line with their aspirations for a ‘Popular Front’, or as representing their failure to do so, with such committees taking on a chiefly humanitarian rather than political outlook. By exploring regional case studies across Scotland, this chapter argues that while this communist strategy was more successful in Scotland than elsewhere, this success exposed the limitations of this model of activism, with the committee-based approach proving considerably less successful than previously assumed in key contexts such as Glasgow.

Taking the Lead? The Scottish Labour Movement and Spain

The labour movement represented the single most important constituency for pro-Republican activism in Scotland, representing a considerable concentration of financial resources and political influence. Yet it was far from clear how far the structures of Scottish trade unionism were suited for waging a long and sustained solidarity campaign for Spain. Despite the willingness of key local and regional institutions such as Trades Councils to take the lead in organising a Scottish response to the conflict, the increasingly centralised structures of the British labour movement often acted to limit the effectiveness of more local efforts. While innovative and increasingly effective approaches emerged over the course of the Spanish Civil War, culminating in a series of successful foodship campaigns in 1938 and 1939, the Scottish labour movement also faced considerable resistance from anti-communist elements, even in traditionally radical sectors such as mining unions.

Introduction: ‘Unforgotten’

Despite the death of the last Scottish participant in the Spanish Civil War in 2012, and the absence of sustained scholarly interest, Scottish involvement in the Spanish Civil War has never been forgotten. This memory has been preserved through ongoing grassroots efforts to write about, commemorate and celebratethe activists and volunteers who gave their time, money and lives in defence of the Spanish Republic. Rather than recovering an otherwise ‘forgotten’ history, this book instead aims to offer new explanations and analysis of this passion for Spain that so clearly lives on today. As well as offering a new assessment of how far a particularly ‘Scottish’ response to the conflict existed, it contextualises this story within much wider narratives: the wider ideological struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, the transnational nature of interwar communist politics and culture as well as the modern phenomenon of foreign war volunteering.

Between Fronts

For foreign fighters, connections with the ‘home front’ could pose particular problems. Not only was separation from loved ones and home a source of anxiety, communication and movement between Scotland and Spain made particularly difficult by the circumstances of civil war. Managing these connections proved to be an unexpectedly complex and challenging for the communist leaders of the British contingent in Spain, who were forced to balance their domestic political position at home with the necessity of contributing effectively to the Republican war effort in Spain. In particular, casualties suffered in battle raised the crucial question of how the families of dead and wounded volunteers were to be supported. Not only did this lead to a distinctive fundraising campaign in Britain, it is argued that the contours of this highly-politicised campaign can shed light on the different ways in which pro-Republican activism was shaped across Scotland and Britain.