‘But to me our real shame lies in our silence regarding Fascism. We must be anti Fascist or all our history is a lie.’ Thus wrote poet Ewart Milne to Muriel MacSwiney on May 19th, 1942, at a stage in World War Two when it was by no means certain that the forces of fascism would be defeated. Milne had acted as a medical courier during the Spanish Civil War, the prelude, or as some regarded it, the rehearsal for World War Two. He also wrote some of his best poetry as a result of this first-hand visceral experience, driving medical supply lorries across the conflict zone.
Milne and young poet Charles Donnelly were just two of the volunteers from across the globe drawn to the conflict, whether it was to the International Brigades, or as doctors or nurses, or to bear witness – as did journalists, photographers and documentary film-makers. Indeed it is now remembered, not entirely accurately, as a war, in its seeming stark struggle between fascism and communism that writers, poets, photographers and artists were galvanised by. Of course it was much more complex than that. But the fact that Irish writers – albeit only a handful – took their place in the ranks of an internationalist movement to save Spain from the threat of a Franco dictatorship, is still remarkable. Irish writers, both in physical and imaginative terms, engaged passionately with the cause of Republican Spain at a time when in conservative Catholic Ireland, vehemently in favour of Generalissimo Franco, it was deeply unpopular to do so. There were mass demonstrations in support of the church in Spain and Franco’s rebel forces. The largest of these gatherings, organised under the auspices of a right-wing organisation called the Irish Christian Front, was 60,000-strong. To be a supporter of the Spanish Republican cause could mean social ostracism and the possibility or threat of violence, even loss of job and income. Leslie Daiken, Irish Jewish writer and educator, and one of those contributing to the slim oeuvre of Spanish Civil war literature by Irish writers, had written a wisp of a short story, ‘Angela’, published in the New English Weekly, which vividly evoked the opprobrium, visited by laity and clergy on anyone remotely espousing socialist ideas or ideals. This threat became ever more pronounced during the years 1936 to 1939.
Overall, 35,000 foreign nationals, drawn from fifty-three countries, participated in the war, though Anthony Beevor asserts that ‘there were never more than 18,000 foreigners in the Brigades strength at any one time’. Accounts written by American volunteers emphasise positive aspects of solidarity and collegiality between the groups of Irish, particularly the letters of Ed Flaherty to Joseph Donnelly, now in the Gerald Dawe papers in Trinity College. (Poet and critic Gerald Dawe was an early champion of Charles Donnelly, with critical essays and a reader, Heroic Heart, edited by Kay Donnelly with Dawe, published in 2011.)
Donnelly’s poetry now has an established place within the cultural pantheon of Spanish Civil War literature but has been divorced from the broad panoply of his other political writing and his activism pre-1937. Gerald Dawe reflected that by the beginning of the twenty-first century Donnelly’s reputation as a poet risked being overshadowed by his politics and his courage in conflict. Still it is hard to go past the courage of men like Donnelly and those who lost their lives in Spain. (Of the 145 Irishmen in the International Brigades, sixty-one were killed.) Deeply affected by the death of his young friend at twenty-two, Leslie Daiken, an Irish Jewish writer and broadcaster, was just one of those who wrote in tribute to him. Whether the writer or poet bore witness on the battlefield or at a medical field station, wrote reportage or a travelogue on Spain on the brink of war, or composed elegies for the dead after the war’s catastrophic end, the varied circumstances of their experiences shaped the choice of literary response. The efforts which both Milne and Daiken made in relation to keeping alive the memory and promoting the literary reputation of Charles Donnelly is what in another context, as Stephen Zacks noted, could be called ‘redeeming the dea’.
I came across Daiken’s forgotten story as part of extensive archival research for my book Irish Writers and the Thirties. From the scraps of obscure memoirs, or neglected anthologies that you might stumble on in Oxfam Books or leafing through the pages of old newspapers and mosquito journals for the left-inclined, the lives of Irish writers and artists passionately engaged with world affairs came out of the shadows. What they left behind in material terms could sometimes unexpectedly move me to tears. These poignant archival traces, the faded posters with their chunky Deco lettering, spelling out urgent calls to action; the calls to ‘Save Dimitroff’, ‘Free Tom Mooney’, the torn circulars, creased pamphlets, the membership cards marked with tea or grease stains, the penny collections –‘-9/d – To help against Fascism’ scrawled in crayon on the back of an envelope, all those fervent calls to arms, hidden in Hanna Sheehy Skeffington’s archives. These archaeological remains exposed a hidden history of literary engagement, revealing Irish artists’ role in the greater cultural geography of internationalism.
Of all the causes of the Thirties, few seemed so urgent as the opposition to Franco’s rebellion. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in July 1936, it swiftly made headlines around the world. Franco’s revolt represented an escalation of the turbulent social unrest all over Spain in the Thirties, symbolised by such dramatic events as the violence against the Asturian miners in 1934 and the election of a Popular Front government early in 1936.
This informal international political engagement with the Spanish Republican cause could – and did – take many shapes and forms. For some Irish, it meant working in solidarity with international groups in London, being part of medical aid groups or participating in the Connolly Column fundraising ceilidhs; for others it was through expressing that artistic solidarity both in words and deeds. The Irish writers and artists who supported and/or wrote about the Spanish Republican cause include Charles Donnelly, Leslie Daiken, Ewart Milne, Louis MacNeice, Mairin Mitchell, Kate O’Brien, Tom O’Brien, Peadar O’Donnell, Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, Rosamond Jacob, Maude Gonne, May Keating, Katherine Gatty. The honorary Irish woman Stella Jackson first met the love of her life, Ewart Milne, in the offices of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee in New Oxford Street, and recalled the fateful meeting – and the tenor of the times – in an unpublished memoir written in the 1980s. This broad Aid Spain movement on the medical side was originally spurred to action, according to writer Valentine Ackland, in response to the news of an Irish contingent of volunteers led by General Eoin O’Duffy, headed to Spain to join with Franco’s forces. W Arthur Peacock, the trade unionist, in his memoir Yours Fraternally, writing of poet Charles Donnelly, recalled ‘his growing conviction that the time had come when intellectuals had to take their part in the physical battle against Fascism, for they were among its first victims if Fascism triumphed’. Peacock encountered Donnelly, Daiken and Milne in the SMAC offices. Daiken, in a posthumous tribute to Donnelly, quoted Milne recalling how both poets would swap their efforts for appraisal. ‘A cross current of poems passed between us from office to office at this time.’ A small phrase to characterise the fervour of activism and literature that Spain engendered for many of those on the left.
Donnelly’s precocious talent in many areas had been noted many times and not just among his Irish friends. Montagu Slater, later the librettist of Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes, who shared Daiken and Donnelly’s admiration for James Connolly, recalled his talent for strategic approaches to military strategy. American proletarian poet Edwin Rolfe, a fellow International Brigader, described Donnelly as ‘the most original talent in the entire Battalion’. Anthony Cronin, writing as Paul Gerard, surveying Irish poetry from 1930 to 1950, argued that Donnelly was ‘with one exception, the most promising of the younger poets who began to appear in the thirties’. Gerard/Cronin also contends that Donnelly’s short life had been over-defined by his death. That death was remembered by international as well as national observers. Josephine Herbst, one of the few women journalists allowed to observe action at the front, who has only within the last twenty-odd years been restored to the pantheon of women writers on Spain and the Thirties, was moved to write in her journal thus:
Charles Donnelly (poet) 26 years univ. grad. killed Feb 27. Body found very close to fascist lines. Body stinking after 10 days. Brought in. Face fresh and naïve looking.
The role of Irish women, as writers and activists, on the theme of the Spanish Civil War has been somewhat minimised. A poem by a woman often anthologised is Blanaid Salkeld’s ‘Casualties’, published in The Criterion magazine by TS Eliot in October 1937. Eliot and Salkeld appear to have had a brief but cordial literary correspondence. Salkeld would, in wartime, be put under surveillance by police and military intelligence, with disparaging comments about the ‘bohemian crowd’ she and her son Cecil formed part of. Salkeld’s elegy invoked not just the death of Donnelly but also the boxing clergyman Bob Hilliard.
Journalist Mairin Mitchell, born in England of Irish parentage, was on a trip to Spain in May just two months before the outbreak of war. She had intended to write a travelogue but the war brought about a reappraisal of her narrative. She bemoaned the lack of knowledge of either history or language by many of the eye witnesses. She spoke Spanish and read well in several other languages including Russian. Desmond Ryan worried that Mitchell’s non-partisan account of Spain on the eve of war would get lost amongst the multiplicity of books pouring out on the subject. George Orwell gave her book Storm Over Spain a short but sympathetic review. Mitchell wrote to Orwell to thank him for the review but was also obliged to correct him about her nationality – not British – but the review was nonetheless favourable and one of the few to give notice to her book outside Ireland. In a different category Kate O’Brien’s Farewell Spain can be viewed as part of a larger literature by women writers in the Thirties, bearing witness across Europe, sometimes to the destruction of countries they love.
Mairin Mitchell greatly admired the suffragist Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, her letters to her providing a lively and frank assessment of Irish political groups in Thirties London. Along with writing about Spain as Mitchell and Salkeld did, Irish women organised fundraising efforts for the brothers in battle. The Clarence Hotel in Dublin saw the inaugural meeting of the Irish Friends of the Spanish Republic Women’s Committee, with Sheehy Skeffington as chair. A news report at the time stated that the meeting was ‘well-attended by active women in the Republican and working class movement, as well as by women relatives – mothers and sisters – of the men at the front’. Sheehy Skeffington recalled that Mrs Esther McGregor, whose son Liam was killed, was an epic fundraiser.
Milne, in writing about the war in Drums Without End: Stories of the Spanish Civil War, as an older disillusioned socialist, insisted: ‘But it’s all like a picture to me now, not so much fading as completely static in a series of frames.’ In his letters to Gerald Dawe in the 1970s, referring to his ambivalence and doubts, and asserting that he had had these doubts from the beginning, he offered other reasons as to why he stayed on till the fall of Madrid, continuing the dangerous work of organising delivery of medical supplies. He did not feel he could give up the ghost ‘as we were being hailed as heroes back home’. He was one of many writers who became closely linked with the broad Medical Aid for Spain movement in Britain. Valentine Ackland and Sylvia Townsend Warner travelled to Spain on behalf of the Spanish Medical Aid Committee. WH Auden was briefly active in fundraising for the committee before he went Spain, offering his subsequently notorious poem ‘Spain’ for auction. Poet Cecil Day-Lewis appeared at public meetings to plead the Spanish Medical Aid Committee cause. Milne accompanied him on one of these in 1938.
After the Canadian Jewish volunteer Izzy Kupchik was killed, Milne marked his passing, memorialising him in the poem ‘Thinking of Artolas’ side by side with Charles Donnelly, comparing them as ‘Gael and Jew’ their outsider status cast aside in Spainas they united overall in their fight against fascism. They did not, as the poem has it, stand literally next to one another in a trench as Milne imagines it, but symbolically in solidarity. Less anthologised is the poem ‘Sierran Aftermath’, which stands as a direct elegy to the fallen dead at the Battle of Jarama. In common with other poet-witnesses at the time, Milne could mimic a telling caption or heading, like a news report. In ‘Sierran Aftermath’. by appending the stark information of the number of casualties at Jarama, one of the very worst battles of the war, Milne conjures it as both news headline and what one might read on a war memorial.
International solidarity across continents is nothing new. Both the Choctaw tribe and Baron Lionel de Rothschilds donated to Irish Famine relief in the nineteenth century. Today Ukraine and Gaza inspire international global solidarity movements. In 2026, it will be ninety years since outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Whilst in Spain, the contest over civil war memory continues to this day, the country has a democratic government. In other governments across Europe the threat of the resurgent far right continues to put democracy in peril.
1/2/2025
The essay is adapted from ‘I too have heard companion voices die’, a chapter on the Spanish Civil War in Irish Writers and the Thirties: Art Exile and War by Katrina Goldstone (Routledge paperback 2022).
