Spanish Civil War veteran dies

[Ed_Haynes]

James Maley

Spanish Civil War veteran

The Independent

Published: 18 April 2007

James Maley, labourer and political activist: born Glasgow 19 February 1908; married 1949 Anne Watt (four sons, five daughters); died Glasgow 9 April 2007.

James Maley was captured during the Battle of Jarama in February 1937 when the Spanish Republic rebuffed a ferocious attempt to encircle Madrid which had been launched by General Francisco Franco's rebel army.

As a volunteer in the International Brigades, Maley expected to be executed immediately. Indeed, Franco issued a proclamation soon afterwards saying that any foreigners captured under arms would be shot. The edict was not carried out in the case of the captured Britons thanks to a stiff note sent by HM Government which, despite its distaste for the International Brigaders, reminded Franco of his obligations under the Geneva Convention. In addition, Benito Mussolini put pressure on Franco to use the prisoners to negotiate exchanges for Italian soldiers being held by the Republicans.

Maley and the other prisoners were later paraded before newsreel cameras. Franco also decided to stage a show trial. A military court in Salamanca in May 1937 found the men guilty of "aiding a military rebellion" - they had, of course, been fighting on the side of a democratically elected government and against a Fascist-backed military uprising - and Maley was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment.

News of the capture had not reached Maley's mother in Scotland, who feared the worst for her son's fate. However, footage of the captive Britons was screened in cinemas around the country as part of a British Movietone News broadcast. By chance, she was among those who watched it and was so relieved to see that, contrary to expectations, her son was alive that she asked the projectionist in a cinema in Paisley to cut out two frames of the newsreel.

She kept the pictures as a memento until his return home soon after the trial as part of a prisoner exchange involving the British prisoners and a similar number of the Italian troops sent by Mussolini to assist Franco's rebellion.

Maley, from the Calton district of Glasgow, was one of 500 volunteers from Scotland (out of a total of 2,300 from the British Isles) who enlisted with the International Brigades to defend the Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War. He arrived in Spain in December 1936, five months after the start of the war, and joined the newly formed British Battalion. The Battle of Jarama saw the battalion in action for the first time. It suffered horrendous losses as it resisted Franco's attempt to cut the main road from Madrid to Valencia. Out of the 500 who advanced towards enemy positions on 12 February 1937 near Morata de Taju?a, 125 were killed and a similar number injured. Maley was one of the 30 members of the machine-gun company who were captured.

The British volunteers, who had received only basic training beforehand, faced Franco's crack troops: the foreign legionnaires and Moors of the Army of Africa which Nazi German transport planes had ferried from Spanish Morocco to the mainland. Maley, who had served in the British Territorial Army in the early 1930s, later recalled the confusion of the battalion's advance while Spanish Republican units were in retreat:

After 200 yards going forward, the retreat was coming back and going down past us and we were going through. There were soldiers running past us and we were going up. And there were soldiers of the British Battalion dropping as we were going up. Without firing a shot they were getting killed.

In fact Maley nearly avoided capture after his machine-gun company found themselves stranded in no-man's land on what was named by the surviving volunteers as "Suicide Hill". They hid among the olive groves for two days before finally being taken prisoner by the Fascists. They were initially mistaken for Russians. "Somebody shouted, 'Ingl?s?' " Maley recalled. "If it hadn't been for that we would have been shot one at a time."

The story of Maley's capture and the strange way that the family found out that he was still alive inspired a play written by two of his sons, John and Willy, entitled From the Calton to Catalonia. It was first performed in December 1990 in the Lithgow Theatre, Glasgow.

One of a family of six, Maley left school to help his mother, Anne Sherlock, a hawker, wheel her barrow around Glasgow. In 1929, following the death of his father, he emigrated to Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked briefly in a car factory, but returned to Scotland the next year, homesick and disillusioned by American attitudes to immigrants. In 1932, aged 24, he joined the Communist Party and became a familiar public speaker at Glasgow Green and Govan denouncing the rise of Fascism in Europe and the inequalities and social injustice which the economic slump had exacerbated in Britain.

After his repatriation from Spain, Maley gave in to his mother's pleading for him not to return to the International Brigades and face certain death if he were recaptured. He continued to speak on public platforms, campaigning for an end to the British government's non-intervention and its refusal to sell arms to the Spanish Republic until its eventual defeat in 1939.

In 1941 he enlisted with the King's Own Scottish Borderers, then the Highland Light Infantry, serving in Burma and India. After the Second World War, he worked in Maryhill Barracks as a telephone operator until demob in 1947. He was then employed for the next 12 years laying tracks for British Railways and afterwards as a building labourer for Glasgow Corporation. Astonishingly for a father of nine, he remained politically active as a lifelong Communist, trade unionist and tenants' association campaigner.

Maley was an avid fan of Glasgow Celtic and two 30ft-long banners were unfurled in his honour at Hampden Park on Saturday during the cup-tie against St Johnstone. Quoting the slogan used by the defenders of Madrid during the Spanish Civil War, "They shall not pass," the banners said: "James Maley RIP. No pasar?n".

Jim Jump

http://news.independent.co.uk/people/obitu...icle2456879.ece

[Kev in Deva]

Hallo Ed,

thanks for posting, seems this chap lead a very exciting life may he Rest In Peace.

Soldiering on: James Maley, 97, with son Willy.

The International Brigades veteran fought against fascism and remains a committed socialist.

Photograph: Robert Perry.

See also: http://living.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=1364902004

General Franco: his part in my downfall by MARK FISHER

SO YOU?RE here to talk about the war," says James Maley as I settle into the armchair opposite him in his Maryhill living room. I hesitate to reply. Maley will be 97 in February and by "the war" he could legitimately mean Iraq, the first Gulf War, Vietnam, Korea, the Second World War or the First World War. We are indeed here to talk about the war, but it?s the Spanish Civil War I have in mind.

That?s because in 1936, the 29-year-old Maley set off from his home in the East End of Glasgow to help the people of Spain in their struggle against General Franco. Maley is one of just three surviving Scottish members of the International Brigades.

His story is the basis of From the Calton to Catalonia, a funny, vibrantly written play by two of his sons, John and Willy Maley, which is being revived by Kayos Theatre Company, a youth group from Inverclyde, in Glasgow this week.

"On a Friday night at the end of 1936, I left George Square," he says. "Three double-decker buses had been hired. Some were even standing on them. We were away to London and then we?d make our way to Spain."

In an effort to appease Hitler and Mussolini, the governments of Europe had agreed not to respond to the pleas for help from Spain?s newly elected Popular Front government. A rebellion was under way and General Francisco Franco was marching on Madrid from his base in Spanish Morocco. His Army of Africa was an elite fighting force backed by the fascist powers in Germany and Italy.

Those, like Maley, who volunteered to fight did so without state support. He was among the 2,300 British men who joined the International Brigades, most from working-class areas of London, Liverpool, Manchester and Glasgow. More than 500 of them would not return.

They were equipped with uniforms - Maley thinks they came from Belgium - but their Russian-supplied ammunition was out-dated and highly unreliable. They had right on their side, but organisation was poor and the odds were stacked against them.

For Maley, the war was to last just three days - three days in which more British soldiers were to die than died in the rest of the three-year war. "It was pandemonium," he says. "They could have been better organised. You need to have somebody leading you and there wasn?t. And the other side had more planes."

He was part of a 500-strong British battalion that faced Franco?s Moorish Regulares in defence of a key road between Madrid and Valencia in the Jarama Valley to the south of the capital in February 1937. Squaring up to a highly trained army while facing a shortage of usable ammunition for its machine-guns, the battalion lost half its men by the end of the first day. It was much the same story on day two, so that by day three there were just 140 men left. Remarkably, they held their positions for the rest of the war.

"We opened the box of ammunition," says Maley, making the sound of two or three rounds going off. "And that was it. Then there was silence. Total silence. We were left with guns and no ammunition."

Maley?s war was short-lived. He was one of the 30 members of the Machine Gun Company who were captured in Jarama. It was only because they were English speakers that he and his comrades survived at all. "They thought we were Russians with the uniforms at first," he recalled in an interview for the Imperial War Museum. "Somebody shouted, ?Ingles?? If it hadn?t been for that we would have been shot one at a time."

Three of his captured comrades were shot in cold blood, five were sentenced to death and the rest were given 20 years? imprisonment. It sounds horrific, but Maley tells his stories with an impish delight, frequently breaking out into giggles.

Despite his age, he?s sharp and lucid, firm on his feet, with a healthy head of grey hair and only his lack of lower teeth slurring his speech. He lived through those days - and saw further action in the Second World War - and now it all seems like one big adventure.

AMONG THE FAMILY photographs on the wall is his red, orange and purple brigadier medal and a certificate awarded to him in 1996 by "El Director General" in Madrid to commemorate his efforts. He?s proud of his contribution and sees it as just one part of his lifetime commitment to socialism.

Age has not mellowed him nor lessened his political interest. His conversation frequently diverges to talk about the war in Iraq or the unrest in the Ukraine or, appropriately enough, that night?s Celtic versus Barcelona match in Catalonia.

Like many of his generation growing up in 1930s Glasgow, this son of an Irish Catholic was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party and had been following the situation in Spain for two years before the Civil War. "I don?t know how people don?t know what?s right and what?s wrong," he says, giving no suggestion that he thought twice about going to war.

Unlike many of his fellow volunteers, he knew how to handle a gun having enlisted in the Territorial Army with the intention of learning military skills. Operating amid such carnage in Spain, they were skills that must have kept him alive. "The experience was handy," he says.

His imprisonment sounds no less ghastly, but still he reminisces with an easy laugh. "We were marched all through the night and put in prison, nine to a cell," says Maley, who was released after five months as part of an exchange with fascist prisoners held by the Republican forces.

"There were only 27 of us left. The others had been shot. We were in there and all of a sudden the door opened. Two soldiers burst in with guns and they gave us a big pan of soup. They went out the door and that was it. There was nothing else we could do but eat it with our hands. After three or four days we had a visit from a British man and after that we got his spoons."

He bursts into laughter as he recalls the time a soldier from Liverpool accidentally dropped his bread ration into the soup. The man rolled up his sleeve and fished it out with his bare hand. In a prison without toilet paper, it was an extremely unhygienic thing to do and his fellow inmates refused to eat until more soup arrived the next day.

"The lice were murder," he says, adding to the sense of discomfort. "But I couldnae grumble."

The prisoners did seem to be treated reasonably well, the guards allowing them to trade their boots for extra supplies. Some asked for cigarettes, but Maley, who is teetotal and a non-smoker, got eggs and goat?s milk. He still relishes the memory.

The fact that Franco was victorious does not weigh heavily on him. He?s content to know he played his part. "My father would say that the Spanish Civil War was a preliminary skirmish and that war goes on as part of a larger political struggle," says youngest son Willy Maley, 44, who is professor of renaissance studies in the department of English literature at Glasgow University.

Maley senior plans to be there for the opening night of From the Calton to Catalonia, which was first performed in 1990 and enjoyed successful revivals in 1991 and 1992. Committed to the last, his only concern is that he?ll be letting the side down if he doesn?t turn up on the Thursday, Friday and Saturday as well.

From the Calton to Catalonia, Tramway, Glasgow (0141-422 2023), Wednesday until Saturday, 8pm

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James Maley was one of two surviving Scots veterans

Kevin in Deva.

Edited April 23, 2007 by Kev in Deva