The British grandchildren of the volunteers who went to fight in the (1936-1939) received yesterday in London the document that grants them Spanish nationality, following the Government’s decision to extend this privilege to the descendants of those brigade members.
At an event at the Spanish embassy in London, the names of the 24 Britons who have expressed their desire to receive a Spanish passport were read, part of the 171 who throughout the world will have this right without the obligation to first renounce their original passport (as is required for dual nationality).
A dozen grandchildren of those brigade members attended the embassy event this Monday, among them the Scot Ian Sutherland, who spoke on behalf of everyone to thank the gesture of the Spanish Government and recalled with a broken voice that his grandfather is one of those 526 who perished in the war and who never returned home. His remains were forgotten somewhere near Caspe (Aragón), where he fell in combat.
Although his grandfather was an engineer, Sutherland recalled that among the approximately 2,500 British and Irish who enlisted to defend it, there were mainly the working classes: workers, cooks or nurses, aware that a fight was being waged in Spain that was not only internal but global in scope against fascism.
In a subsequent conversation with EFE, Sutherland, who was overcome with emotion at times, recalled that his father barely spoke about that grandfather who died in Spain, but other uncles of his kept the memory alive and he himself has contacted Spanish historical memory organizations to give his DNA in case remains may one day appear that could be from his ancestor.
Three years ago, when he retired, Sutherland went to live in Orihuela, on the Spanish Mediterranean coast, partly for the good weather “and the cheap beer”, and partly to trace the memory of his grandfather.
A tattoo with two flags
He proudly shows a tattoo on his calf with two intertwined flags: that of the Spanish Republic and that of Scotland. He says that at a soccer match with Murcian retirees like him, one asked him, very surprised, why he had tattooed the republican flag as a foreigner.
“And when I told him that it was in memory of my grandfather who gave his life for the Republic, he lowered his voice and acknowledged that he had also ‘killed’ his grandfather.” Ian wonders out loud: “Why are so many Spaniards reluctant to talk about that?”
The historian Richard Baxell recalled for his part that the experience of war was very hard for the brigade volunteers, because beyond courage and conviction they came face to face with reality: they lacked weapons, ammunition and logistics, as well as organization, as George Orwell made clear in his memorable Tribute to Catalonialater made into a film by Ken Loach in the film .
Baxell highlighted that upon returning home in 1938, those 2,000 Britons, who were never the same, were received at Liverpool station by a crowd of nearly 20,000 people.
But the world was changing at full speed with the Cold War and bloc politics, and those men, who later formed a group of ex-combatants to continue advocating for the overthrow of Francoism, were left preaching to increasingly smaller audiences, while the idea that Franco was a valuable wall against communism advanced in the world, as he points out to EFE.
Among the British grandchildren of those brigade members there is a call, just like the leader of the Spanish Communist Party known as La Pasionaria, although in her case all that is just her first name. In his family, as in Sutherland’s, it is clear that the memory of anti-fascism was still alive for many years.
