Spain and the World: Aspects of the Spanish Revolution and Civil War (5)

British Imperialism and non-intervention

The revolt of the sections of the Spanish army led by Franco in July 1936 left the British ruling class with a series of immediate dilemmas, the most important of which was to stay out of a war that had a potential to conflagrate and not to support the Republic a state that had shown itself incapable of stable government. The British ruling class hoped that Franco’s forces would be quickly successful and stable government that represented no threat to British interests would resume.

Leon Blum : Socialist Prime Minister of France's Popular Front Government

The establishment of the Non-Intervention Committee
Since the First World War Britain and France were in alliance and tended to follow the same diplomatic path. In 1936 a Popular Front government was elected in France consisting of Socialists, Radicals and Communists. This government had strong links with the Spanish Popular Front government in Spain and indeed contracts in place were for the provision of French arms and munitions for Spain. Immediately after Franco's revolt some aeroplanes and other munitions were dispatched to Spain on the order of the French premier Leon Blum. Blum had strong sympathies for Spain but found himself constricted in his actions by the attitude of the British, the possibility of a split in the French government with the Radicals clearly indicating their aversion to any support to Spain; and lastly the possibility of igniting mass protests against the PF government by the very large French fascist

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Workers’ control in the Spanish Revolution 1936


The Army mutiny in Spain in July 1936, and the resulting 3-year civil war, had a few positive effects. Well away from the fighting, in the cities, towns and countryside, thousands of anti-fascist committees were set up; thousands more workplaces were occupied and work kept going. The collectivised workplaces were run by workers’ committees, or Comités, and we give two examples below - a major transport system and a health service.

Barcelona Tramways
Perhaps one of the best examples of socialisation was that of the Barcelona Tramways, described extensively by the major book on the collectives. It covered trams, buses, underground, taxis and two funicular railways, and 7,000 workers of whom 6,500 were members of the CNT*. After the military coup there were 600 operating trams and many of them had been used in the street barricades, ther was also extensive road damage and the main company's offices were guarded by Civil Guards. Armed workers saw off these troops and found the building deserted except for a lawyer left behind to parley. This man was well known as he had led the prosecution two years previously of workers’ leader Comrade Sanches, which resulted in a 17 year sentence. He had demanded 105 years for the crime of heading a 28 week strike! The workers wanted to shoot the man on the spot but Sanches opposed

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The tragic consequences of anarchist participation in the Popular Front government

At the time of the conflict there were two governments in Spain, the central government in Madrid and the Generalitat, the government of the autonomous region of Catalonia. The CNT-FAI entered the latter on September 27th 1936 referring to it as a Regional Defence Council; on November 4th 1936 four members of the CNT entered the central government [Richards 1995 p63 and 68].

 Juan Garcia Oliver : leading anarchist became Minister of Justice

Collaboration and its prelude.
Was the entry of the CNT-FAI into the Popular Front (PF) government an abandonment of principle [Richards p42] or a strategic mistake that led to an abandonment of principle and a dismantling of its autonomous and revolutionary structures [Schmidt and Van der Walt 2009 p200]? From the start of the military uprising anarchists were placed in a very difficult, or maybe an impossible situation that according to Peirats they had no clear plan to deal with [ibid p202]. Lacking, as they saw it, the necessary support to carry through a revolution, they put all their efforts into the fight to defeat Franco. To many putting the war before revolution was a false dilemma [Guerin 1970 p129] and by this thinking they failed to recognise that the real enemy was the capitalist system of which fascism was but one form of expression [Richards p51]. The basis of the CNT, its independence from political parties, opposition to the state, its decentralised structure and opposition to permanent and paid officials should have prevented any temptation to participate in government [ibid p82]. There were tight rules preventing anyone representing a political party from becoming a militant of

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Writing about medicine and health care in the Spanish Civil War


Angela Jackson, Beyond the Battlefield: Testimony, memory and remembrance of a cave hospital in the Spanish Civil War. Pontypool, Warren & Pell Publishing, 2005.

Nicholas Coni, Medicine and Warfare: Spain, 1936-1939. London, Routledge, 2008.


Jim Fyrth, The Signal Was Spain: The Aid Spain Movement In Britain, 1936-39. London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1986.

Jim Fyrth, Sally Alexander, eds. Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War. London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1991.

Paul Preston. Doves of War: Four Women of Spain. London, HarperCollins, 2002.

These books deal with the civil war rather than the revolutionary aspects of events in late 1930s Spain. Some information on healthcare in relation to the latter can be found in the ‘Libertarian Medicine’ posting on this blog, May 2010.

The focus of Angela Jackson’s analysis in Beyond the Battlefield is memory and remembrance – an angle that has special significance in Spain after the decades-long suppression and willed forgetting of those times, institutionalised until quite recently in the post-Franco ‘pacto de olvido’ (‘Don’t mention the civil war’). She looks at the hospital set up in a cave to treat casualties from the battle of the Ebro, summer 1938. By this stage the People's Army medical services were bringing their most seriously wounded to improvised hospitals as near to the front line as possible. Many patients were International Brigade volunteers, interspersed with injured prisoners-of-war and civilian victims of bombing raids. (Caves were also used as bomb shelters.)

Many foreigners were sent to help set up and run the hospital; others came later. Memoirs, letters and interviews are used extensively in the book, along with photographs. Conditions were, inevitably, incredibly difficult – up to a hundred beds, ‘all higgledy-piggledy’ – but somehow the work proceeded. At least one nurse ‘even began to doubt that anything could be worth the suffering that she saw around her … this misery and this horror’. Still the staff managed some improvements: in wound treatment, a new system of triage, blood transfusion (sometimes direct arm-to-arm), and training Spanish nurses. There were of course numerous patients who did not survive, buried in a grave outside the village. Eventually the cave, which had featured in pro-Republican reportage, had to be evacuated, at the end of 1938.

Parts of the broader medical history of the Spanish Civil War were being written up in professional journals as they happened, but the comprehensive treatment of the subject provided by Nicholas Coni’s book was long overdue.

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Spain 1936: the view from the East End

Extracted and adapted from: Joe Jacobs, Out of the Ghetto – My Youth in the East End: Communism and Fascism 1913-1939. London, Janet Simon, 1978, 319pp. (Later reprinted by Phoenix Press)

Joe Jacobs, in his well-regarded memoir of early 20th-century left-wing political activism, had quite a lot to say about the Spanish Civil War, showing how important it was in the political life of the time, in London’s east end as elsewhere. He refers extensively to his files of the Daily Worker (DW, the Communist Party newspaper which eventually became the Morning Star), highlighting the inadequacy and inaccuracies of its coverage and using it to show how the official ‘line’ lagged behind events.


Chapter 10 of his autobiography is entitled ‘Three Tailors from Stepney in Spain’ (pp.213-21 in first edition). He tells the story of how Nat Cohen, Sam Masters, and Alec Sheller set off by bike for the Barcelona Olympiad (the alternative to the ‘Nazi’ Olympics in Berlin), due to start on 19th July 1936; Joe and his wife Pearl were expecting to see Nat and Sam in Antwerp in about a fortnight. But by 20th July headlines were appearing, if not yet as front-page news, about the attempted right-wing military coup, already termed ‘Fascist’, and resistance to it: ‘Masses defend the Republic’; ‘General strike begins’...


Within a week reports had started coming from a DW special correspondent, the headlines were big, and the word was out to rally supporters to the cause of the Spanish Republic: ‘All into action now’. Joe noted that no more than two days’ notice was required to fill any hall when events in Spain were being