Crucially, the anti-fascists erected barricades in the streets, blocking the London police from intervening in favor of Mosley. Longstaff’s League of Youth had lifted the strategy from the civilian resistance to the Francoists in Madrid, images of which the newspapers of the Labour and Communist Parties had published in England. In “The Advance, the Labour League of Youth paper, in the Challenge, which was the organ of the Young Communist League, in the Daily Worker… there was [sic] photographs in, of the Spanish people defending Madrid” with barricades that were able to block tanks, Longstaff later recalled.11 The interplay between Spanish and British anti-fascist movements, even before the establishment of the International Brigades, illustrates the deep connection British leftists felt with the struggle in Spain.  

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One of the central ways the volunteers picked up the anti-fascism that would lead them to fight in Spain was through lived experience in London’s largely Jewish East End. Longstaff remarked upon how Mosley’s British Union of Fascists would routinely attack Jews on the street.12 Louis Kenton, an ambulance driver in the International Brigades, lived in East London and described how “the fascists used to attack the Jews whenever they had the opportunity.”13 Harold Collins, who served in the Brigades’ No. 4 Company, recalled similar incidents. Collins was in the East End one day when he saw fascists attack children on the street: “I saw these fascists chasing these young Jewish kids, these young, very young kids at 11 or 12, and hitting them… just because they were Jewish, nothing else.” This experience strengthened his pre-existing views; already a member of the Communist Party, Collins pledged to a “fast, stronger attitude against the fascists.” Soon after, he decided to join the International Brigades as a rifleman.14  

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Charles Curry was a Manchester electrician and a member of the Communist Party. His first experience of what Spain would be like came through anti-fascist action on Hackney Street in East London. In 1935, a British Union of Fascists demonstration in Manchester resulted in Curry’s eye being cut open. Soon afterwards, he traveled with his local branch of the Party to London and rallied against the fascists alongside a “quarter million people out on the streets.” Curry recalled that the incident was “the introduction to Spain, because Spain really was a continuation of the fight against fascism.” He thought that in Spain, he could commit to the same struggle he was fighting in Britain; but because Spanish fascism was “out in the open,” it would be possible to do so “with guns instead of fists.”15 

Still more burgeoning volunteers came to anti-fascism not from personal experience, but from their pre-existing political views. Bob Doyle, a British Battalion machine gunner, was born in Dublin in 1916 and was a committed member of the Youth Irish Republican Army. He decided to volunteer for Spain because he feared that, under the leadership of General Eoin O’Duffy, Irish fascists might “follow the footsteps of the Nazis” and seize power.16 Striking a blow against fascists abroad was, for Doyle, a way of fighting the fascists at home.  

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Hitler and the specter of the Nazis pushed many Britons to volunteer. John Londragan recalled that his decision to join the International Brigades’ Anti-Tank Battery was motivated by “recognition” that “Hitler was a threat, that war was a possibility.” As a member of the Independent Labor Party and later the Communist Party, he was “involved with anti fascist work” “based purely on the fact that what had happened in Germany, what’d happened in this country, and what I seen [sic] was happening in Spain.”17  

Another volunteer whose motivation was primarily anti-Hitler was Martin Herford, a doctor who aided Spanish Republicans as part of the Society of Friends contingent in Spain. Herford remembered that he did not have “any strong political views, but I was very much against Hitler.” With the “vile beyond words” actions of the Nazis in mind, the events in Spain made Herford “more and more angry” and made him want to take action.18 Even for someone who had never taken political action before, wasn’t a member of a party, and was admittedly not interested in politics, the currents of anti-fascism and the need to oppose Hitler were enough to leave Britain behind for in a far-away war zone.  

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More specific than general anti-Nazi sentiment was the theory that fascist defeat in the Spanish Civil War would halt Hitler’s expansionist policies. Max Cohen was denied a place in the International Brigades because of his lack of military experience, but he managed to reach the conflict anyways as an ambulance driver with the British Medical Unit. Cohen strongly believed that stopping Franco in Spain would have an effect on both Hitler and Mussolini. Cohen remembered thinking in the mid-30s that the fascists “were getting everywhere without a struggle” and longed for “the opportunity to do something concrete.”19 That opportunity came when the first International Brigades were formed in October 1936.20 Cohen, along with comrades in his ambulance crew, theorized that “there was [sic] sufficient anti Hitler elements left in Germany that if his list of successes was broken, then there may be a change within Germany itself.” If Franco could be stopped in Spain, the whole fascist system might collapse. Cohen emphasized that, though he was a member of the Young Communist League in London, the theory was not one of world revolution: “here was a country that was trying to make strides on behalf of the people and the working class and… Franco had brought in foreign troops, and if he can bring in foreign troops, who’s supporting the Republic?” This version of anti-fascism was also focused on the unfairness of the situation in Spain — a liberal government had been elected democratically, and the military was robbing the people of their chosen leaders.21  

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The political reasoning of many volunteers led them to believe that Spanish fascism was a threat to Europe more generally — and sometimes, they believed that a Francoist victory in the civil war would directly lead to a fascist attack on Britain. “If they bombed Barcelona, they bombed Coventry” was a common saying in leftist circles, as was the slogan “Spain today, Great Britain tomorrow.”22, 23 Robert Edwards was a former pacifist and labor activist who became an ambulance driver in Spain and an exponent of the idea that Franco’s coup in 1936 was a threat to all of Europe. With the rise of fascism, Edwards “began to realize that it just wasn't enough to accept pacifist views, that fascism was… sweeping across Europe, and somewhere, it had to be halted.” “Resolutions” and dialogue would not be enough to stop fascist regimes. So by the time the Spanish Civil War began with “the destruction of a democratically elected government by the revolt of an army based on fascism,” Edwards had turned his back on pacifism and decided that what was needed was “fighting men.” 24 

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There were others who were primarily concerned with the fascist threat to Spain itself. Whatever they thought of the possibility of fascism reigning in Europe, they volunteered because they felt a special affinity for the struggle of the Spanish people. Jim Brown, who fought both in the Marseillaise Battalion and the British Battalion at various times during the war, acknowledged the “democracies and dictators” aspect of the war, but emphasized the conflict’s meaning to Spain and its people. He recalled “this lonely Spanish war, fighting for a decent life, education, a bit of food, to leave the feudalist conception of life. Irrigate the soil, education… medicine, push for all the things that really matter.”25 Communism, or fomenting global revolution, was certainly not among Brown’s motivations; it was the plight of the Spanish people and even the abolition of feudal serfdom that mattered to him. 

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The decision of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy to support the Nationalists, while the democratic powers in Europe actively banned their citizens from intervening, was another crucial factor for many volunteers. The scale of this intervention was massive; Baxell writes that the number of International Brigade volunteers from all nations was “dwarfed by the numbers intervening on the Nationalist side.”26 In response, some volunteers saw themselves as stopping the fascists from testing new methods of war. Morien Morgan, a student at the University of Cardiff who became a machine gunner in the British Battalion, recalled that he believed that Hitler had developed a “new form of fighting,” and was looking to test it in Spain. Unlike the “static” trench warfare of the First World War, this new style relied upon dynamic tank units and advanced aircraft — namely bombers, which could now hit targets more effectively and were capable of destroying population centers. Morgan felt that “once Hitler had perfected his technique, that there’d be no chance whatsoever of us ever living a normal life again.”27 The situation required that he help stop Hitler’s experiment in Spain. 

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 Others still saw themselves as making up for the unfair intervention of major powers against Spanish democracy. John Londragan, the anti-tank gunner, believed that it was only his war to fight once the fascist powers intervened. He refused to be involved in a civil war, “but the moment, in September, when… the German Condor Legion, followed by the Italian Blue Division, come [sic] over to Spain, it ceased to be a civil war, and now became a war of intervention.”28 He was motivated by anti-fascism, but also by a genuine respect for the sovereignty of foreign nations over their own conflicts. Joseph Garber, an International Brigades machine gunner from East London, held a similar view. The Spanish people had elected a liberal government, and it was their job to defend it: “It’s their affair, actually. The majority of the people… voted for a democratic government, and they’ll defend.” Once reports of German soldiers landing in Portugal arrived in London, though, the situation changed: “I thought to myself ‘No, it is my job… we've got to go.’”29 Someone had to assist the Spanish people against aggressive foreign powers, and Joseph Garber thought it was his responsibility.  

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A number of volunteers cast the anti-fascist struggle as key to defending the interests of the working class. Almost all volunteers were socialists of some kind, although Communist Party members may not have even made up half of the Brigades. Necessarily, their left-wing economic politics informed their anti-fascism to some degree. For some, however, the connection was more explicit than for others. James Brewer was a miner in Rhymney, South Wales, an area famous for its coal mines, before leaving on scholarship for Oxford. Later, he would be an anti-tank operator and machine gunner in the British Battalion. He recalled his opposition to the Nationalist cause being influenced by Franco’s treatment of miners in Spain. Miners in Asturia had collectively risen against their deplorable conditions and the Spanish state, declaring a revolutionary commune across several towns that lasted for two weeks before the military put the revolt down.30 Brewer said that the central reason for his attitude towards Spain was his shared experience with those downtrodden miners: what “made a tremendous impression on us as miners was Franco's putting down of the Asturian miners… I think it influenced us, because once you've been a miner, you've got a different attitude to life from other people who’ve never been in the mines.”31 It was the attitude of Spanish fascists towards workers — towards a specific subset of the most heavily exploited workers — that drove Brewer’s emotional connection to the conflict. 

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Anti-fascism, then, was the central ideological commitment that drove members of the International Brigades to volunteer. Yet fascism had by then existed for more than a decade. What drove British leftists to respond differently to Franco’s coup than they had to Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922? The answer is that there was a specific mid-1930s feeling that history was happening and the world was being remade. The men and women that volunteered in Spain were driven by a desire to have a hand in world-historical events. 

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Morien Morgan, the Welsh university student who became a machine gunner in Spain, felt that the world situation was simply too urgent to not do something drastic. He recalled his thinking at the time: “I felt I could no longer study philology when the whole world was coming to pieces.”32 The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 had begun a process that continued with Hitler’s remilitarization of the Ruhr in 1936 — the fascists had continually taken and taken and the democracies of the West had done nothing about it. Their passivity prompted in Morgan a need to take action. “I don't make any claim to be a prophet, but I was overwhelmed by the urgency of this matter, and felt I could no longer devote myself to pure academic matters when the whole world was going up in flames.”33 Morgan’s gesture to prophets is telling. While mostly secular, the 30s were a prophetic time, full of turmoil and frenzied zeal, when competing political projects truly did believe the world could go up in flames and that they had to seize the present in order to remake the future. 

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Christopher Thornycroft was a student at Oxford around the same time Morgan was at the University of Cardiff. They shared the feeling that they could not remain and study while the world was burning around them. Thornycroft was a member of the Oxford University Labour Club, which at the time advocated for a much more militant position on continental fascism than the national Labour Party. He remembers that the Club — and Oxford more generally — was frustrated by Britain’s inaction during the Nazis’ rise. “Germany under Hitler is riding high, our people are mucking about and doing nothing about it. This was the whole spirit of the time.”34 Thornycroft himself stopped “mucking about” and cut his Oxford education short to join the International Brigades as a rifleman and engineer in October 1936, the first month he could have possibly done so. He explained his motivation for leaving so soon: “I went off to Spain half baked in that sense. I didn't get my degree before going. The feeling that we had was one of enormous urgency and we felt that, you know, the world couldn't wait for us.”35 In other words, the “whole spirit of the time” was so frenzied and everything was of such importance that students were willing to throw an incredibly valuable Oxford degree out the window to risk their lives for what they believed in. The 1930s was an era of enormity — “enormous urgency,” as Thornycroft put it, colossal beliefs, immense theories, prodigious impact, vast death. This was the environment in which the International Brigades swelled. 

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Volunteers to the British Battalion did not only feel the sweep of history working upon themselves. Many believed that the majority of the British population did too. Stafford Cottman was a member of the Youth Communist League who volunteered in Spain as a rifleman with the Independent Labour Party (ILP). He believed, in retrospect, that the Spanish Civil War was the last war that people believed they could personally have an impact in.