britains popular front

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ESCRIBE A TUSA M IGO S l !f D E T O D O E L M U N D O I i

B ritain's P opular Fro nt?: A id Spain and

the B ritish L abour M ovement

by Tom Buchanan

The Spanish Civil War was a crucial episode in the tw entieth-century historyof the B ritish w orking class, and it was perhaps one of the disappo intmen tsof the recent fiftieth anniversary that the mood of reassessment noticeableamongst historians of the conflict itself was not matched in accounts ofBritish involvement. Indeed, if anything there has been a consolidation ofthe view, prevalent at the time, that a weak-kneed and enfeebled labour

movement was the accomplice to an unsympathetic British government inthe betrayal of Spanish democracy. Clearly this argument is not withoutsome foundation; the Labour Party's decision to acquiesce in the Britishgovernm ent's policy of 'N on-Interv ention ' looks even w orse after some 50years than it did at the time, and the failure of the labour movement toorganize a mass campaign of solidarity with Spain certainly drove manyactivists to despair, or to co-operation with forces outside the movement.Even so, the lack of a genuine debate on the nature of British labour'sresponse to the Civil W ar has made the subject appear peculiarly static. For

instance, the most recent study, Jim Fyrth 's The Signal was Spain, is in manyrespects the lineal descendant of contemporary critics of labour's perform-ance and restates rather than develops their analysis.

1

Such a damning assessment of labour's response has not always goneunchallenged. There is an alternative historical tradition that is broadlysupportive of the labour leaders in this period, and identifies the Spanish

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Britain's Popular Front 61

Civil War as the crucial episode in the conversion of the labour movementfrom the pacifism of the 1920s and early 1930s to support for rearmamentagainst the growing danger of fascism. According to this interpretationleaders such as Hugh Dalton and Ernest Bevin had a clear (and correct)grasp of the realities of world politics, and successfully marshalled awell-meaning but woolly-minded membership into accepting rearmament.In particular, while they profoundly sympathized with the agony of theSpanish people, they avoided the trap of succumbing to the 'emotion'generated by the Civil War and kept their eyes fixed on Britain's owndefence priorities. D alton , for instance, was unenthusiastic about the slogan'A rms for S pain' if it meant that B ritain w ould denude itself of the w eaponsthat it desperately needed for protection against a resurgent Germany.

2

However, this interpretation is inadequate as a full explanation of labour's

response precisely because it mimics the attitudes of contemporary labourleaders w ho saw ordinary mem bers as simply an obstacle to the adoption of'rational' policies, rather than having alternative policies of their ow n. It ismisleading, moreover, to argue that the response to the Civil War displayedthe statesmanlike qualities of D alton, Bevin and the rest w hen, in fact, theirattitude towards Non-intervention and other crucial issues was primarilyconditioned by a desire to preserve the unity of the B ritish labour movementand by a chauvinist hostility towards its Spanish counterpart.

3

However, in recent years this interpretation has been eclipsed, in sheerpublished volume at least, by the approach that I shall term 'PopularFrontist'. In many respects this approach offers a refreshing change: thepreoccupations of ordinary members are taken seriously, and the m otives ofleaders treated with scepticism. Broadly, it argues that Popular Frontactivity - a coalition of progressive forces stretching far beyond the confinesof the labour movement - was the only viable way of delivering aid to theSpanish Republic. H ence, the Civil W ar gave rise to a mass movement ofsolidarity in Britain within which the Communist Party, if not actually

playing a leading role, was first amongst equals, and which displaced thelabour movement as the main vehicle for solidarity with Spain.4 Thecorollary of this argument is to see the labour leaders as ineffective inhelping Spain and a positive obstacle through their anti-communism. Thepublication of The Signal was Spain marks the completion of a series ofbooks from Law rence and W ishart w hich present a thorough overview of the1930s from such a perspective, including Noreen Branson's History of the

Communist Party of Great Britain, 1927-41 , and Fyrth's own edited volumeon Britain, Fascism and the Popular Front. In particular it complements Bill

Alexander's Volunteers forLiberty

which studies British participation in theInternational B rigades.

This article is intended as a critique of the 'Popular Frontist' interpre-tation and is motivated by two considerations. Firstly, the lack of rigorousdebate on the subject has allow ed many tendentious lines of argument to goalmost unchallenged. Jim F yrth's book, for instance, has been dismissed by



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62 History Workshop Journal

academic reviewers with little systematic discussion of the issues raised: itcertainly deserves closer inspection. In methodological terms I will arguethat there are severe problems w ith an approach that presents an episode ofprimarily working-class history without making any real attempt to under-stand how it relates to the main political institutions of the w orking class: alabour history without the labour movement. Secondly, the 'PopularFrontist' style allows for overt but insidious connections between theputative success of the P opular F ront of the 1930s and the need for a similarkind of politics to confront Tha tch er ism '. Y et if any such comparisons are tobe taken seriously they have to be based on a firm historical foundation.

Jim Fyrth's contribution is the most ambitious of these books, portrayingw hat the author perceives as a mass movement of solidarity w ith S pain, and

in this lies its main weakness. However, it is fair to say that the book hasmuch to recommend it. The greater pa rt of the text is taken up w ith a highlydetailed, but still very readable, account of the activities in Spain of Britishmedical volunteers - primarily those funded by the S panish M edical A idCommittee, but also including chapters on the Quakers, the somewhatdiscredited S cottish M edical Unit, and on B ritish medical aid for the rebels.There is also a fascinating chapter on medical advances w hich shows how inthis, as in so many other areas , the B ritish establishment w as slow to take onboard the lessons of the Civil War. B ecause much of this account is based on

diaries, letters and interviews it contains a great deal of new material and willsurely be a standard reference point on this aspect of B ritish involvement inthe Civil W ar.

Where I would dissent from Fyrth is in his failure to set the Britishresponse convincingly in the framew ork of national, and in particular labourmovement, politics. Although he rightly asserts the role of the Britishw orking class within the solidarity movement and delivers some m ore kicksat the tottering edifice of Spain as 'the intellectuals' w ar', the result is arather partisan and ungenerous account of the relationships within the

B ritish 'left'. M oreover, although his attempt to show that the 'A id S pain'activists and volunteers w ere not 'communist stooges' is fully v indicated, theconsequence is that the book carries a very defensive air.

The crux of the m atter is his representation of the ' "A id S pain"mo vement' ('. . . the nearest thing to a Peo ple's Front that came about inBritain' (p. 22)) as the central fact of British support for Republican Spain,w hich somehow subsumed all othe r campaigns. Yet he fails utterly to offer aclear definition of what he means by the 'Aid Spain' movement.

6Indeed,

'A id S pain' did not exist as a national political entity and had no institutional

basis. Instead, there was a range of organizations on a national and locallevel which united activists from many backgrounds in solidarity w ork. M ostnotably, the Spanish M edical Aid Com mittee (SM A ) was formed w ithindays of the m ilitary rebellion in Spain and gave an opportunity for left-w inglabour and communist activists to work together. From November 1936 theNational Joint Committee for Spanish Relief (NJC) served as an umbrella



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Britain's Popular From 63

for a bewildering array of interested organizations ranging from youth toreligious m ovem ents. Yet, as Fyrth admits (p . 203), even the N JC could notspeak for more than a fraction of the local bodies supporting Republican

Spain. In practice, the book takes as a focus the organizations that I havelisted above, clustered around the cross-party leadership of the D uchess ofAtholl MP (Conservative), Wilfred Roberts MP (Liberal) and the commu-nist Isabel B row n; my article follows this practice in using the term 'A idSpain'.

In the absence of a clearly denned 'movement', 'Aid Spain' serves in thisbook as a catch-all for all support for Republican Spain. The effect has beento depoliticize the question of aid for Spain, and in particular to marginalizethe activities of the Labour Party and trade union movement, which

consistently rejected the 'Aid Spain' embrace and preferred to mount theirown well-defined solidarity campaign. TUC and Labour Party aid flowedinto an 'International Solidarity Fund' which was aimed specifically ataffiliates of the trade-union and socialist internationals in Spain. H ence, thelabour movement's 'Spanish Workers' Fund' was aimed not, as the titlemight suggest, at all Spanish w orkers, but only at those in the UG Ttrade-union centre and the PSOE (Socialist Workers' Party). In this itdiffered from the mass of 'A id S pain' campaigns w hich w ere 'humanitarian'in the sense that they aimed to help all casualties of the war on the

Republican side.A nother important distinction w as tha t, unlike Spanish M edical A id,

labour staunchly resisted attempts by the Spanish government to takecontrol of its relief work. This question of independence also troubled manymedical volun teers, and Jim Fyrth is perhaps too cavalier w hen he dismissesthe views of those w ho objected to the S M A 's British M edical Unitbecoming part of the Spanish A rmy: 'O ne can only w onder that in themiddle of a fierce war there should be those who thought that the armymedical services should be independent of the army they served' (p. 87). Yet

Spanish M edical A id was certainly not m arketed as an auxiliary medicalservice for the S panish Republican army in B ritain. Thu s, Fyrth ignores thefact that there were genuine political questions concerning who wouldcontrol the use of relief funds in Spain and their collection in G reat B ritain,and merely makes the labour movement's abstention from 'Aid Spain'appear ludicrous.

Accordingly, 'official' trade-union solidarity is written off as inadequate(p . 265) or, where possible, is claimed for the 'Aid Spain' cause. A goodexample comes when Fyrth lists the estimated totals raised by 'Aid Spain',

casually inserting the £86,000 produced by a miners ' federation levy alongw ith that raised by other organizations (p. 216). In practice, this money,barring that given to dependants of the International Brigaders, waschannelled through the International Solidarity Fund and administered byits officers. H ence it is quite w rong to see it as an extension of 'A id S pain'.Similarly, while Fyrth mentions that the TUC was represented on the

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Basque Children's Committee, set up in May 1937 to receive 4,000 Basquerefugee children, no other reference is made to the central role that theBritish labour movement played in this whole operation.

7While it could be

argued that all that mattered was for money to be raised and either sent toSpain or used to finance good w orks in B ritain, I believe that it is importantto emphasize that there were genuine political divisions in the campaign forsolidarity w ith S pain, and certainly that 'A id S pain ', in the sense used he re,enjoyed no hegemony within Britain.

8

The book's main failure, however, is to offer any real interpretation ofwhy the labour movement took the stance which it did on Spain. This iscrucial because, w hile the labour movem ent held aloof, 'Aid Spain', nascentPopular Front or not, had little chance of offering substantial political help

to the S panish Republic. There are three broad areas of disagreement h ere;firstly, in assessing the attitude of the working class to Spain; secondly, inassessing the attitudes of the leaders of the labour m ovem ent; thirdly, in thehistorical relationship of communism and the labour m ovement and the roleof anti-communism as a determ inant in that relationship. In the first case Iwould argue that the whole 'Popular Frontist' argument founders on a rockof its own creation. It is so keen to establish that the mass of B ritish peoplebroadly sympathized with Spain in these years that it is quite incapable ofhandling any discordant experiences.

9Jim Fyrth, for example, rejects the

judgements of George Orwell and the Foundry Workers' union, that themass of British people were apathetic towards Spain, as an 'irrelevanttruism' (p. 272): w hat is significant to him is the unprecedented natu re ofinternationalist activity among w orking-class activists. Yet, in the context ofany debate over labour's response to Spain I would contend that thiscomment too approaches irrelevance, primarily because its premiss is thatw orking class activity over S pain could only be in support of the R epub lic.O n balance, O rw ell's perception w as closer to , or at least no further from,the truth than F yrth 's. What neither view gives sufficient attention to is the

fact that shock waves generated by the Civil War could also spark activismagainst the S panish R epub lic. In any case, the im portant point here is surelythe real difficulties in generalizing about w orking class attitudes tow ards theCivil War. In practice, apathy towards, support for, and opposition to theSpanish Republic w ere all visible betw een 1936-9.

This false premiss prevents Jim Fyrth from properly developing what herightly offers as an explanation for labour's 'failure' over S pain; the L abourP arty's fear of alienating its 'Catho lic vote '. A t no point does he make clearthat the w orries of w orking-class Catholics w ere not without substance - the

massacres of priests and nuns at the outbreak of the Civil War were not,unfortunately, the lurid fantasies of the 'yellow press', however much theymay have been embellished by it. The Civil War presented many Catholicworkers with a genuine conflict between their faith and their politicalmovement, and labour's support for an apparently 'atheistic' Republic inSpain led some Catholics to doubt w hether labour could any longer be seen



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as an acceptable political haven. Indeed, it was probably only the lack of anyreal political alternative that prevented much greater damage to labour thanactually occurred.l0 Th us, the contours of w orking-class Catholic discontentover Spain have to be made central to any account of labour's hamstrungresponse, not because there was great sympathy for their position amongstthe leaders (although it would be wrong to underestimate th is), but becausediscontented Catholics could seriously damage the cohesion of the LabourP arty and trade unions.

The Catholic reaction to Spain is significant precisely because itchallenges the idea of generalized support for the Spanish Republic in thelabour movement. Not surprisingly it has been consistently represented asab errant ," the implication being that all w orkers should have supported theRepublic and where they did not this can be explained as due to a falseconsciousness.

Yet the Catholics w ere not the only ones for whom the w ar, and the issuesw hich it generated, raised genuine dou bts. A good example is the manner inwhich the formation of the International Brigades clashed with the pacifistconvictions that were still deeply rooted in the labour movement in theinter-war years. A frequent point of conflict was whether trade unionsshould 'keep clear' the cards of volunteers until their return, and a vigorousdebate arose over this issue in the National Society of Painters, aconstruction union w hich decided at its G eneral Council in 1937 to opposesuch action by an overw helming 14—1 margin. This followed overtly pacifistinterventions from a number of Council mem bers. A ccording to one:

Here we are in a country which is supporting the Non-interventionpolicy, and we are subsidising somebody to go to w ar. The w hole attitudeis w rong in another w ay. W e, as L abour people, are out for 'N o M oreWar' and yet you are giving a man 50s to go. It is practically acting as arecruiting agent for w ar service.12

It later became apparent that this speaker saw Spain through the lens of hisown w ar experience - 'The conditions in Spain are awful - even those of usw ho saw service in the G reat W ar in France can imagine nothing w orse'.'

3

Another speaker had felt that 'personally he objected to fighting and w ouldrather [the volunteers] had joined some peace movement'.

14At the 1938

General Council, however, this decision was overturned by 10-5.15

Thus, it is important to stress that labour movement leaders did not

respond to Spain in a political vacuum, still less were they perverselyresisting, initially at least, a tide of mass popular support for the Rep ublic.Instead, they were faced with an unpredictable and continually shiftingrange of responses within their working-class constituency. This context isvitally lacking from the whole 'Popular Frontist' approach, which deliber-ately seeks to cast the leaders off from the institutional and political

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constraints under which they operated. Thus, personal criticisms replaceany coherent account of their motivations, and the w orst possible construc-tions are placed on their words and actions. A good example is Jim Fyrth'streatment of Ernest Bevin, always an easy target for this kind of operation.In one paragraph we are told that Bevin played no 'significant part' in the'Aid Spain' movement and never addressed 'Aid Spain' meetings, that hisunion turned down a proposal to grant £2,500 to the TU C fund in M arch

1937, and that it closed its fund for Spain in 1938 (p. 265). This is a highlyselective version of events. The Transport and General Workers Unioncontinued to give financial support throughout the Civil War. In August1938, for instance, it gave £1,000 to the miners' Spanish appeal (on behalf of

its own mem bers in the P ow er Workers' G roup ), and as late as M arch 1939 itdonated £280 to support Loyalist Spanish seamen stranded in Britain afterFranco's victory. Bevin himself regularly spoke on Spain at meetings of hisown union and of the international labour movement. Thus, Bevin's refusalto co-operate with 'Aid Spain' should not mask the fact that he expended agreat deal of energy in support of his chosen mode of solidarity w ith Spanishworkers, the sum total of which was, however, channelled through the'official' labour movement.

Another example of this approach is Jim Fyrth's incomplete quotationfrom Walter Citrine's speech at the 1937 TUC ('whatever we subscribe for

S pain. . . cannot affect the situation in Spain materially . . .') w hich is usedas evidence that TUC leaders displayed 'little conviction' (p. 266) in fundraising. In fact, the complete passage suggests that Citrine was simplyoffering a fair assessment of w hat the international labour m ovement couldhope to achieve through its established procedures: 'But this congress cannever put itself in a position of being able to sustain a major war out ofvoluntary contributions, or even to cope with the distress consequent on amajor war'.

16

Thus, no real attempt is made to prove that B evin and his colleagues w ere

actually hostile to the Spanish Republic. R ather, this point is suggested andassumed. In practice, however, support for Spain existed throughout the'official' trade union m ovement and the L abour P arty, but w as expressed ina very different way from that of 'Aid Spain'. One might well beunimpressed with what they achieved and disagree with the methods theyemployed, but B evin, Citrine, Dalton and their colleagues acted on the basisof a legitimate political position which deserves serious consideration ratherthan caricature. This fact is much less palatable than the picture of anuncaring labour leadership, but has, I believe, to be confronted.

Jim Fyrth is on much firm er ground w hen he asserts that the response ofthe labour movement was moulded by anti-communism. Certainly theseleaders were anti-comm unist and failed to recognize that 'A id S pain' was nota mere communist tool. However, one cannot ignore the history ofcommunist/labour suspicion which so conditioned their attitude. Nor am I


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convinced that the connection between anti-communism and the responseto Spain is as direct as many authors have concluded. In fact, anti-communism in the 1930s had tw o distinct com ponents. Firstly the re w as anorganizational anti-communism that shared many characteristics with

M cCarthyism - communism w as seen as a subversive force, seeking toinfiltrate and corrupt the labour movement through its 'solar system' of frontorganizations.

17The need to exclude the communists largely defined the

form of lab our's solidarity w ith S pain, clearly dem arcated as it was from any'front' organizations. However, underlying this was a second form ofanti-communism which was essentially the product of tensions within thelabour movement betw een political activists and a leadership which soughtto control and channel their energies. Thus, while leaders feared thatcommunism of the Popular Front era might be genuinely attractive to the

labour rank and file, the communist bogey was also a convenient way ofexternalizing tensions that would have existed without the existence of thecommunist party, and also had the effect of smearing dissent with thecommunist taint, which still carried negative connotations from thesectarian 'third period'. All too often the communist stick was used to beatan essentially loyal opposition w ithin the labour movement.

Thus, the importance of 'anti-communism' does not necessarily meanthat one should give the communists the leading historical role that theyclearly play in the 'Popular Frontist' accounts. This subject has to beexplained primarily with reference to the labour movement itself for,although its leaders may have abrogated their position of leadership, thelabour movement was still the dominant force in British working classpolitics. H ence, the main factor was not the Communist P arty or the PopularFront, but the radical disjuncture within the labour movement between the'New M odel' organization of Citrine, B evin and D alton and the desire ofactivists to give practical assistance to Spain. It is essential to begin byrecreating the organizational structure on which the labour movement'sresponse w as built, and the impact of S pain on that structure.

Ever since the General Strike Citrine and Bevine, aided in the 1930s byL abour P arty leaders like H ugh D alton, had been engaged in constructing ahierarchical movement in which clear lines of command would extenddownwards from (after 1931) the National Council of Labour (NCL). Amore tightly controlled movement was seen as a vital concomitant forlabour's new responsible image and emergent social democratic policies.This w as initially most apparent in internal labour po litic s-f or exam ple, theassertion of central authority over the trades councils, or the resistance to

'rank and file movements' within the unions. This proved remarkablysuccessful in containing mobilization around one of the main political issuesof the inter-war years - unemployment. Yet increasingly the 1930s weredominated by international questions, stemming from the rise of fascism,and these posed a clear challenge to the Citrine/Bevin concept of political


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action precisely because they invited independent political initiative by thelabour rank and file. Citrine and Bevin opposed fascism, but wanted tocontain internationalism within controlled forms of activity: telegrams ofsympathy; centrally administered solidarity funds; high-level delegations toministers. In other w ords, their vision w as of an internationalism defined byand expressed through a small number of leaders; and certainly not aninternationalism that could be used to mobilize and politicize the rank andfile.

Every new fascist aggression jolted the B ritish labour m ovem ent, yet thecrises prior to July 1936 had little real impact precisely because they hadbeen short-lived and w orking-class resistance to fascism in G erm any,Austria (February 1934) and Spanish Asturias (October 1934) had beenrapidly crushed. Thereafter, any relief work could be confined to fundraising for victims within formal structures. The Spanish Civil War wasdifferent, because the Spanish w orkers w ere not primarily victims of fascism(although all the solidarity movements in Britain consistently focussed onthis angle) but w ere actively engaged in a war against it. (This, incidentally,posed questions which both the 'official' labour movement and the P opularFront alternatives never adequately addressed.)

Thus, for Citrine and B evin, D alton and A ttlee, Spain represented manyth ing s-n on e of them congenial. It w as an annoyance, because they could beforced to challenge the British government over its policy of Non-intervention instead of accommodating themselves to it; it was a threat totheir own position because it alienated some of their most naturalsupporters, the Catholic workers; and it challenged the cohesion of thelabour movement that had been established to deter the mass membershipfrom engaging in independent political activity. The great rejection ofN on-intervention at the Labour P arty's 1936 conference was significant notas 'the apogee of Labour emotionalism','

8but because it was a clear

rejection of a form of labourist internationalism that, while accepting thatindividual members of the labour movement could hold views on inter-

national affairs, believed that action had to be mediated through the NCL.Thus, the labour leaders spent most of the Civil War fighting (and sometimeslosing) the battle for control over solidarity with Spain. The two main goalswere, firstly, hat political activity should follow 'constitutional' lines and beexpressed through the Labour Party in parliament. As Citrine told thebuilding workers conference in 1938; 'W e can all use every scrap of influencewe have in stimulating inside our movem ent, and outside our movem ent, theuse of all the electoral pressure we can on the government [to abandonN on-in tervention]. We have a great political party . . ."'S eco nd ly, the aim

was to construct a single fund over which the National Council of Labourcould preside and which would be administered under the auspices of theInternational Solidarity Fund in Spain. Communists and others would bew elcome to contribute to this fund (and initially did so) but could expect to


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Britain's P opular From 69

exert no control over its uses. This would draw a clear distinction between

labour's own 'official ' fund and the growing number of other 'unofficial '

funds which w ere not to be su ppo rted.

For three years the main goal was to consolidate this structure andpitifully little attention was paid to increasing the levels of subscriptions.

W her e the movem ent did adop t more imaginat ive technique s this tended to

be when it had been bounced into accepting new responsibilit ies, as in the

case of the Basque refugee children.2 0

H en ce, the prime source of funds w as

always intended to be grants from trade unions, or individually collected

funds paid into a central orga nizatio n. B ut until the formation of the 'official '

Spain Campaign C om mittee af ter the L abo ur Pa rty 's 1937 conference there

was no systematic attempt to channel the energies of activists in the

movement: and even this was a half-hearted affair.21

This at t i tude even

struck leading figures within the labour movement who were broadly allied

to Citrine as dangerously short-sighted and politically inexpedient. How-

ever, their fears that the official movement would lose prestige if it yielded

the initiative in solidarity work for Spain to the Communists were given

short shrift by Citrine.2 2

Such a dismissive atti tu de ten ds to suggest that the

leadership's real enemies were not the communists at all but the labour

movement 's own members, who were denied the r ight to creat ive poli t ical

activity within their own organization. The great irony here was that the

communists , the bogeymen of the sectarian 1920s, were in their Popular

Front incarnation much more frightening to the labour leaders. Yet there is

no evidence to suggest that Citrine and Bevin would have acted any

differently had the communists not existed: indeed, had the communists not

existed then they would surely have invented them.

T h u s , if the labour movement was 'successful ' in its own narrow goals,

success was purchased at a terrible cost to its credibility in the eyes of

activists. Citrine had built, if not a folly, a house of crystal - beautiful in its

ideologically pure structures but lacking in humanity and vitality, meaning

litt le to ordinary members. Indeed, the fine distinctions between 'official 'and 'unofficial ' funds was often quite lost on rank and file members.

Regularly, for instance, the TUC received donations from union branches

for appe als over w hich it had n o j urisdiction - it w ould send these sheepishly

to their proper destination or return to sender. On other occasions it is clear

that branches w ould make tw o separate donation s - o ne to the 'of f icial' T U C

fund w hich they felt comp elled to m ak e, ano the r to an 'unofficial ' fund such

as S panish M edical A id which prob ably had som e real mean ing to them in a

local context.

This in turn necessi tates new quest ions concerning the 'Aid Spain '

movement. What exactly was it and what was its political dynamic? How far

did it succeed in challenging the labour movement at rank and file level?


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H ence, why did a movement w hich apparently motivated and mobilized theworking class in Britain so effectively fail so completely to influence thecentral institutions of the working class? Until these questions are tackledthe glaring discrepancy betw een the humanitarian achievements of the 'A idSpain' movement and its massive political failure remains largely inexpli-cable.

The simple, if he retical, answer is that the 'A id S pain' movement did notexist, at least not in any concrete form and certainly not in a way that ishelpful to historians analyzing this period. This is not, of cou rse, to deny thatmany 'Aid Spain' committees existed on a local level, or that thousands ofindividuals contributed time, money and energy to something which theycould identify as 'Aid for Spain' or 'Spanish Aid'. But it would be quite

wrong to go beyond that and argue that this represented any form ofcoheren t, national 'mass movement'. In this the 'A id S pain' movement wasvery much less than the sum of its parts; and not surprisingly wasspectacularly unsuccessful in affecting the politics of either the labourmovement or the government.

If pressed to define w hat 'A id S pain' was, I w ould have to argue that it w asessentially a product of the vitality and humanity of activists in the lowerreaches of the labour movement. Ignored by the 'official' campaigns anddenied national leadership, confronted by much apathy in the local labour

movements, certain activists sought to give vent to their solidarity by settingup their ow n campaigns alongside any other group w hich w ould co-operate.O ften this involved the communists, but could also involve a w ide range ofcultural, religious and social organizations. Seemingly rejected by theofficial labour movement these activists were driven to seek support from awider and wealthier group of donors than would normally have been thecase. The results were gratifying. In July 1939 the Secretary of theSouthampton Joint Council of labour and co-operative organizations,looking back on the considerable achievements for Spain in Hampshire,

remarked that they had decided to act alone because since 1937 he hadreceived no 'plan of campaign for raising money for Food, etc. for Spain,from the National Council of Labour'. He felt that a great deal had beenachieved by acting on a broad political basis:

It is doubtful w hether w e should have raised anything like the total sum ,by an effort for the International Solidarity Fund, organised solely by theLabour Party, Trade Union and Co-operative organizations, particularlyin view of the apathy, indifference, and sad to say, even veiled hostility,from some leaders and sections of these movements . . . In fact the truthis that consistent support has been forthcoming for our S panish comradesonly from a small number of Labour w orkers.23

Since June 1937 a broad coalition had funded and run a Southampton H omefor Basque Children. This had united organizations as diverse as 'BoysBrigades, Cycling Clubs, Co-operative employees, Commercial staffs,


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Teachers, one small Labour Party Ward, one Trade Union, CommunistPar ty , e tc '

'Aid Spain' thus only comes close to a real identity on the local level, interms of broad coalitions of individuals and institutions both within and, asoften, w ithout the labour movement. B ut it w ould be w rong to see this as inany sense a political project. Such coalitions lacked the capability tochallenge the labour leadersh ip, who in turn w ere not greatly discomfortedat their activities. Certainly C itrine and A ttlee w ould have preferredactivists to be out collecting for 'the ir' Spanish fund, but they would not losemuch sleep so long as the big institutional grants from trade-unionexecutives and branches continued to roll in. M oreover, the actual level ofpoliticization within these coalitions was very limited, not least due to thesheer, exhausting amount of practical work required. Dissatisfaction withthe 'official' response of the labour movement only rarely turned into openrebellion. Indeed, given the extent of genuine disgust with labour'sshortcomings over Spain,

24the actual political damage was surprisingly

limited, and this reinforces the argument that, while many members werewilling to work with other groups in the local context, there was no largescale desertion from labour. The integrity of the labour movementnationally and the vitality of its local political culture were dented but by nomeans destroyed by the events of this period .

Thus, the real hall mark of 'A id Spain' was its very diversity: M edicalAid; International Brigades Dependants' Aid; Voluntary Industrial Aid;local foodships and flag days. Yet this very diversity denies the character of a

'mass movem ent'. W hat, indeed, united these diverse phenomena beyond abroad internationalist sympathy w ith the people and workers of Spain and ahatred of fascism? To impose on them the character of a 'mass movement',let alone a successful Popular Front, is to place an impossible historicalstraitjacket on the period .

N O T E S

1 See for ins tance, A llen H utt , The Post-War History of the British Working Class, LeftB ook Clu b, 1937, pp. 288-97.

2 B en P imlott , Hugh Dalton, 1985, pp. 233-4; see also Alan Bullock, The Life and Timesof Ernest Bevin, Volume 1, Trade Union Leader, 1881-1940, 1960, pp. 586 and 588. The mostdetailed exposition of this case is found in John F. N aylor, Labour's International Policy - The

Labour Party in the 1930s, 1969, especially chapter 6.

3 This case is mad e in my book, The Spanish Civil W ar and the British Labour Move me nt,Cambridge University Press, 1990.

4 Noreen Branson , History of the Comm unist Party of Great Britain, 19 27-41, 1985,

p p . 224-9 .5 See Jim Fyrth's essay, 'Introduction: In the Thirties ', pp. 24-9, in his edited volume

Britain, Fascism and the Popular Front, 1985.6 T his confusion is reflected in the boo k's title, w ith the 'Ai d Spain M ove m ent' of the

cover becoming the 'Spanish Aid M ovem ent ' on the inside cover .

7 This argum ent is develo ped m ore fully in my article 'The Role of the British L abo urM ovem ent in the Origins and Work of the B asque Children 's Com mittee , 1937-39', European

History Quarterly, April 1988.

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8 In this conte xt, see also H ywel Franc is ' com me nt that the T U C and the L abou r P artyw ere among the organisations 'co-ordinated ' by the N ational Joint Comm ittee , Miners AgainstFascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War, 1984, 111-2.

9 J i m F y r t h , Britain, Fascism and the Popular Front, 1985, p. 19.10 A point made by Tom Gallagher in the context of Scotland, 'Scottish Catholics and the

British Left, 1918-39', The Innes Review, 34: 1, spring 1983, pp. 35-7. The question of theimpact of the Spanish Civil War on L abour/C atholic rela tions is explored in my book (see note 3above) , chapter 5 .

11 Victor Kiernan, 'Labour and the War in Spain', Journal of the Scottish Labour HistorySociety 11, M ay 1977, p. 10.

12 Warwick Univers ity M odern R ecords Centre (M RC ) , Mss 78/NA SO H SP D /4 /2 /18,G ene ral Council m inutes, 1937, p. 103.

13 M RC , Mss 78 /NA SO H SP D /4 /2 /19, G enera l Counc i l minutes 1938, p . 99 .14 M RC , M ss 78/N A SO H SP D /4/2/18, G eneral Council minutes 1937, p . 150.15 M RC , M ss 78/NA SO H SP D /4/2/19, G eneral Council minutes 1938, p . 99. O n this

occasion opponents tried a different tack:

Som e m ay say [the volunteer] has gone out to fight against Fascism. Y es: he may have do ne;but w hat I am conce rned w ith is w ould he have gone out to fight for democracy? T here areother 'isms' that are just as dangerous to the Trade Union movement as Fascism.

16 TUC Congress Report, 1937, p. 27 5.17 In 1933 the L abou r Party produ ced a pam phlet called The Comm unist Solar System ,

which claimed to expose communist infiltration tactics.18 Naylor , Labour's International Policy, p. 164. A ccording to D alton 's m emoirs the

deleg ates w ere 'w allowing in sheer emot ion, in vicarious valou r ': The Fateful Years, 1957, p. 94.

19 Citr ine 's speech to the A UB TW N ational D elegate Conf erence, 19/7/1938, pp. 62-4;Warw ick Univers ity M RC , Mss 78/AU /1/2/13. (My em phasis .)

20 See my article cited in note 7 abo ve, pp . 166-7.21 See C. Fleay and M . L. S anders , 'The L abour Spain Com mittee: L abour P ar ty Policy

and the Spanish Civil War', Historical Journal 28: 1, 1985, pp. 191-3.

22 See for instance the correspondence between the London Trades Council and the TUCdiscussed in my book, chapter 6.

23 TU C File 946/529 - 'Spain R efugees, 1939', letter from L eslie W itt, Secretary ofSouthampton Joint Council of Southampton Trades Council , Labour Par ty and Co-operativesocieties to the Joint S ecretary, N ational C ouncil of La bou r, 11 July 1939. Th e letter was anappeal for publicity in the Daily Herald for the plight of Spanish refugees.

24 See the letter from J . R. Ch ancey to William G illies, 26 Ja n. 1939:

. . . the few thou sand p ounds collected by the P arty will have little or no effect on the resultof the Spanish revolt. The main complaint is that the National Executive had not given thisquestion the attention that it deserved. I write in the past tense, because it seems that theSpanish Republic is now beyond hope of saving. I am personally so disgusted that I amresigning from th e secretaryship of the Faversham D ivis ion al L abou r Party] at the nextA nnua l M ee t ing .

Labour Par ty archive, William Gill ies papers , WG/SPA 564.

See also the sw ingeing attack on Lab our Party policy conta ined in a private letter to the G eneralSe cretary, James M iddleton: 'Your poltroonery m ay yet force the Loyalis t governmen t intorepressive m easures against some of its num bers . . . You sacrificed the wo rkers of Spain to theexpediency of your own bureaucracy ' . Ruskin College, O xford, M iddleton pap ers , M ID 59, 18A ugust 1937, W. B enetton ( in N ew York) to M iddleton.


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