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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.
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