As Timothy Neat documents in the first volume of his Hamish Henderson biography, The Making of the Poet (1939-1953), published in 2007, part of his war experience in Italy was to serve as an ‘informal liaison officer’ with the Partisans, and Allied interrogator of German prisoners-of-war, but he had not been a volunteer, either in the International Brigade or other military formations, in the earlier anti-Fascist conflict, the Spanish Civil War. However, Neat shows that the Spanish tragedy very much impinged on his mind and imagination, and documents prominent instances in Volume 2, Poetry Becomes People (1952-2002),published in 2009. First, there was the genesis of his anthem devoted to the struggle against apartheid, Rivonia. The immediate circumstances which led to Henderson composing the lyrics were described by the poet himself in unpublished lecture notes, quoted by Neat:
‘Rivonia’ is the name of the farm in South Africa where the South African National Congress leaders had taken refuge and where they were captured. Their trial was often referred to as the Rivonia trial. I made the song just after Nelson Mandela made that magnificent speech from the dock in November 1963. I was in London at the time and singing various Spanish Civil War songs, including ‘Viva la Quince Brigada’ which has this refrain ‘Rumbala, rumbala, rumba-la…’ and it struck me that that was rather like the sound of African drums and almost immediately I extemporised ‘They have sentenced the men of Rivonia.’ It was one of my songs that came together very quickly. (Neat, Vol. 2, p. 188)
In the passage above, Henderson refers to the British Battalion of the XVth International Brigade, consisting of approximately 600 men according to Judith Cook in Apprentices of Freedom(1979). The Battalion had a sizeable Scottish contingent and fought at the Battle of Jarama in January 1937, a costly victory which temporarily halted Franco’s troops. In Homage to Caledonia(2008), Daniel Gray points out that “Of the estimated 2,400 men and women who left Britain to serve in Spain, about 20 per cent were from Scotland”, and that “This is especially impressive when one considers that Scots then comprised only 10 per cent of the population of Great Britain” (p. 19).
Henderson’s song is particularly well known for its rousing political demand “Free Mandela Free Mandela”, a refrain which is repeated twice at the end of all five stanzas. Raymond Kunene from the African National Congress Headquarters in London linked the anti-apartheid struggle to the Spanish Civil War in a letter to Henderson, dated 13 Oct. 1964, as reproduced by Neat:
Dear Friend, we thank you most heartily for the song you have arranged. It is the spirit of this character that will indeed carry us through the immense task of liberation. Your contribution is greatly appreciated, indeed there are similarities between the Spanish struggle against fascism and ours. Anti-Apartheid has generally evoked the same idealism as the Spanish Civil War. We hope that ours will see the end of tyranny soon. (Neat, Vol. 2, p. 190)
The process of dismantling apartheid, and so ending the tyranny mentioned by Kunene, didn’t begin until the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990. The dismantling of Francoism in Spain had also been well established by 1990, so there too democracy finally triumphed.
Another Spanish connection was evident in Henderson’s contribution to the film Hallaig, made by Neat in Skye and Raasay, about the Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean. Neat reports that Henderson “initiated the film and set the general intellectual parameters”, and also “supplied his personal copy of an illustrated booklet of Spanish Civil War Songs for use in the film, and made new recordings of Glasgow veterans of the International Brigade singing The Battle of Jarama”(p. 260).
Henderson also paid the Spanish people the compliment of asserting that Robert Burns and Federico Garcia Lorca were kindred spirits. Neat reports that in a speech delivering the ‘Immortal Memory’, at the Langholm Burns Club supper in 1981, he had this to say:
Make no bones about it, Burns was a radical and a revolutionary. He was a paid-up member of The Friends of the People. Goethe greatly admired him… However, the poet he resembles most is Lorca – the great Spanish poet murdered at the very beginning of the Civil War in Spain. Both were men of passion. Both died young. Both embodied the folksong of their countries. Both ‘remade’ folksong, both were anti-authoritarian. (Neat, Vol. 2, p. 272)
At an event not mentioned by Neat, but which I know about because I witnessed it myself, and in which the poet participated, was a ceremony at the Memorial Stone to the Scottish contingent of the International Brigade in East Princes Street Gardens. The gathering was a small one. Henderson no doubt was intent on the International Brigade having pride of place at the brief ceremony. As recorded in Memorials of the Spanish Civil War(1996), the Official Publication of the International Brigade Association, “Steve Fullarton and John Dunlop, two of the surviving Scottish veterans of the British Battalion gathered at the Memorial Stone in Princes Street Gardens in March 1993 to pay their respects to their former comrades in a simple ceremony with Edinburgh district councillors” (p. 42).
The commemorative monument consists of a boulder, probably a granite one, with a bronze plaque. The inscription reads as follows:
TO HONOUR THE MEMORY OFTHOSE WHO WENT FROM
THE LOTHIANS AND FIFE TO SERVE
IN THE WAR IN SPAIN
1936-1939
NOT TO A FANFARE OF TRUMPETS,
NOR EVEN THE SKIRL OF THE PIPES.
NOT FOR THE OFF’R OF A SHILLING,
NOR TO SEE THEIR NAME UP IN LIGHTS.
THEIR CALL WAS A CRY OF ANGUISH,
FROM THE HEARTS OF THE PEOPLE OF SPAIN.
SOME PAID WITH THEIR LIVES IT IS TRUE;
THEIR SACRIFICE WAS NOT IN VAIN.
ERECTED BY
FRIENDS OF THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADE ASSOCIATION
That the poem is so straightforward in style, and anonymous, would no doubt have struck Henderson as highly appropriate, and a forceful expression of folk sentiment.
As recorded in the Memorials book, “There is in addition a plaque in the Edinburgh Labour Party rooms with the simple inscription: In memory of those who left this city to serve with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War – Edinburgh City Labour Party” (p. 39). In fact, most of the volunteers, like Fullarton and Dunlop, belonged to the CPGB, or Communist Party of Great Britain. Returning to Daniel Gray, he writes about the Scottish volunteers that “around 60 per cent were in the CPGB, while a fifth of volunteers spread their allegiances between the Labour Party and the ILP”, with a further fifth which had “no formal allegiance or membership” (p. 35). The Independent Labour Party, or ILP, mentioned by Gray, was a breakaway group dissenting from both the Labour Party, and the CPGB.
However, a good number of Labour volunteers joined the International Brigade. Many were killed, wounded and in some cases murdered when captured. One Labour Party volunteer, Donald Renton, who later became a long-serving Edinburgh Labour councillor, spoke for the great majority of volunteers in an interview with the historian Victor Kiernan, quoted by Gray, when he said that “We weren’t fighting for communism, we just wanted to beat the fascists. The Germans and Italians could have been stopped in their tracks in Spain if Britain and France had just let us get on with it” (p. 34). Renton’s observation is important, and should never be forgotten.
Hamish Henderson was no political dogmatist, and indeed mainly ecumenical in his support for the British Left. While he had strong sympathies with the CPGB, even if objecting to its anti- nationalist stance, he undoubtedly appreciated the CND elements opposed to nuclear weapons in the Labour Party, and possibly he also felt some admiration for the ILP. After all, their leader James Maxton, MP, had been a Red Clydesider, and is described by Gray as “one of the ILP’s most staunch supporters of the Spanish Republican side” (p. 149).
