Our Fathers Fought Franco: The anti-fascist fight in Spain and London

Today he brings us the story of Jennie Renton’s father Donald...

JENNIE, an Edinburgh-based secondhand bookseller, typesetter and publishing freelancer, introduces her father like this: “Don was a man who, when called upon to fill in an official form, would enter ‘political agitator’ under occupation and ‘militant atheist’ under religion. At the bookies, when placing a bet, his moniker was ‘Don Red Renton’.”

He was a “lifelong Marxist and revolutionary” and “a utopian democrat”. Jennie adds: “As a political commissar in the International Brigade, he was lucky his captors did not realise this when he was taken prisoner during the Battle of Jarama, only a few months after setting foot on Spanish soil in December 1936. His loyalty to the Communist Party of Great Britain was unswerving until the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.”

Her appraisal is succinct: “The impulse to build a fairer world was what drew my dad to join the Communist Party as a teenager. His essential humanity took him, in the years beyond the CP, into the Labour Party, where he devoted his energies as an Edinburgh councillor to causes such as better social housing”.

Knowing such things helps “to contextualise his experience as an International Brigader; to show what he was fighting for, not just what he was fighting against”.

And that’s crucial. So the story unfolds: “Born on March 30, 1912, Don grew up in a tiny flat in Bridge Street, Portobello, with six brothers and two sisters. His mother, Julia, had been a land worker in East Lothian.

"His father died when he was 14 and he left school to go out to work and contribute to the meagre family income. An apprenticeship as a painter and decorator (his father’s trade) came to an abrupt end when he was fired for using company paint for daubing pavements with political slogans. He was blacklisted for militancy.”

He became “well-known in the Portobello area as a political activist, involved in campaigns relating to the local environment, housing and (un)employment”.

Jennie tells us: “Some years ago, an elderly man came into my bookshop [Main Point Books] on a mission to tell me that he had been brought up opposite my granny’s flat in Mount Lodge Place.

"He remembers being woken up one evening by the sound of someone singing The Internationale in the street. His mother, less than pleased at her little boy arising prematurely from his slumbers, told him it was just Donald Renton giving it laldy, and to get back to sleep.”

Such anecdotes and illustrations personalise and humanise a life, making it more than a statistic or a shadowy image in the grand, heroic political movement. There is always pathos in the epic effort and the social, familial, generational contexts and a sense of the company of others prevails in Jennie’s account and gives a warmth and sharpness to her portrait of her father.

In the early 1930s, he founded the Portobello Branch of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, “taking up the cudgels on behalf of people attempting to appeal against the heartless rulings of the means test introduced by the ‘national’ government of Ramsay MacDonald in 1931, a time of mass unemployment”.

Jennie comments: “The means test might have been dreamt up by Torquemada.” It was a torment to those who had hit rock bottom: “Possession of a radio was deemed sufficient reason to cut off benefit and throw families into deeper crisis and despair. Don’s eloquence and ability to mount a cogent argument was sometimes enough to win the day at an appeal tribunal.”

This commitment to helping people in the face of government impositions so often practised by malevolent individuals whose cruelties would be encouraged and valorised by self-legitimised authority is the mark of the man. How much need there is of that today! The enemy has not ceased to be victorious and the opposition to the Nazification of any contemporary establishment is always more than required. A book like this, an account like this, helps.

Don stood in local elections in Portobello, a Tory stronghold, in 1935, and was election agent for Willie Gallacher, who became the Communist Party MP for West Fife. He helped organise the hunger marches from Scotland to London in 1934 and 1936, after which he volunteered to serve in Spain.

THESE are Don’s words: “It was a matter of solidarity with the people of Spain in their struggle against reaction in their own country aided by arms and men from the fascist powers. But there was more to it than just that – we regarded the defence of democracy in Spain as being inseparable from the defence of our own homeland against Hitler’s drive to subjugate all the peoples of Europe.”

With 63 others, Don travelled from Dover to Dunkirk on December 20, 1936. In Paris, the group boarded a train for Perpignan. At the Spanish border, there was no interference from the French police or railway authorities and he was exhilarated by the huge welcome they received in Madrid, recollecting “an atmosphere I will never forget … the sense of freedom in the air, of workers’ power”.

But it didn’t last. On February 13, 1937, he was captured along with his compatriots and his group of prisoners was compelled to witness several executions.

“The method of execution was for the firing party to present its rifles very close to the prisoners’ heads, blowing their skulls to pieces. To my dying day I will recall how the blood shot up from their heads – but even more I will think of how Ted Dickenson lifted his clenched fist in the anti-fascist salute and called out in his last words ‘Salud comrades’.

“We were marched down the valley under fire from our own lines, which killed more of our boys. Our wrists were tied with wire. The Moroccans kept us moving with whips and rifle butts. Then we were bundled into lorries and driven under heavy guard to a filthy prison.”

Jennie takes up the story again: “Lice started eating into his wounds. There was no medical attention and they were all on starvation rations. The only reading matter available in English was the bible. He read it twice from beginning to end, which only served to consolidate his view that religion was the opium of the people.”

After his release from prison and repatriation, Don didn’t go back to Spain. In London he became a leading propagandist for the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, committed to anti-fascist work in the East End, where Oswald Mosley was introducing his own brand of fascism.

Don planned numerous direct actions, using tactics Jennie describes as “more recently associated with Trident Ploughshares, Pollok Free State and Extinction Rebellion”. He spoke at hundreds of meetings in support of the Republic and against the British Union of Fascists.

These demonstrations and public actions continued. Perhaps the fact that stories such as Donald Renton’s are so rarely commemorated in current 21st-century media is that they set such a strong example.

What does civic demonstration actually mean? What do you do? What are you prepared to do? What’s the cost? And what is at stake? These are the questions Don asked and answered and Jennie’s account of her father’s life in this book presents them to us, fresh and vivid. Self-sacrifice and a sense of human worth beyond his own life possessed him and propelled him.

After the disastrous sinking of a submarine in Liverpool Bay, he took part with comrades from the International Brigade in a dangerous experiment under the direction of the scientist Professor JBS Haldane, in the hope of increasing the safety of submarine crews.

That story, and the domestic story of how he met his wife Queenie, who loved and recited Shakespeare and could play by ear and from memory Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Chopin – it was love at first sight! – are further episodes in the account.

Jennie takes us through to her own reflections and retrospective summary of her father’s life: “At the end of the Second World War, in which he served in the Royal Artillery and took part in the anti-aircraft defence of London and other targets of the Blitz, Don returned to Scotland and a post as full-time secretary of the Communist Party for the Lothians area.

‘AS far as I know, Queenie, a shorthand typist, brought in the only wage. In the front room there was a dark brown settee, two armchairs, a piano and a piano stool. Our neighbours used to come out on to the landings to listen to my mum playing the piano. On the odd occasion we had visitors, my dad would glow with pride and ask her to play Greensleeves.”

But this is a tough account of reality, unsentimental and unsweetened and all the stronger for it. “After a few years out of the CP, his application to join the Labour Party was accepted and he became councillor for Craigmillar in 1962, holding the seat until 1968, when it was won by the SNP.”

But: “Our home life in the 1960s was turbulent. My parents argued, mainly over Don’s drinking. Queenie would make an evening meal. Sometimes he arrived at teatime, more often after the pubs closed at 10. She’d be up to high doh and her eyes would bulge with anxiety as his key turned in the lock – I became quite an expert in interpreting the degree of inebriation the sound expressed. On Sundays, when the pubs were all shut, there were reconciliations … ”

Such openness connects us readers to the vulnerabilities of a family, life in all its complexity and difficulty. This is a virtue of all four accounts in Our Fathers Fought Franco.

Don died in 1977. His daughter reflects: “There was an honesty and idealism about him which remain inspiring to me. He was a convinced revolutionary and an inveterate Marxist-Leninist propagandist who would have concurred with the view of Jacobin Nicolas Chamfort, that revolutions are not made with rosewater. Don was never one to flinch from fighting – literally – for what he believed in.”

Donald Renton was surely one of those men of whom Hugh MacDiarmid was thinking when he wrote, with reference to Spain and the Civil War:

Men of work! We want our poetry from you,

From men who will dare to live

A brave and true life.

But indeed Poetry and the cause of the people are one

And in Spain the menace to the people

Menaced the entire national culture too,

For, from the Cantos of El Cid,

From the archpriest of Hita to Cervantes, Lope, Quevedo, Góngora, Calderón,

All the classical literature of Spain

Is of the people’s workmanship.

So also is their painting – Murillo, Velázquez, Goya, El Greco, Zurbarán – as well as their music

And their theatre, synthesis of all these arts.

No wonder all the true creative artists of Spain

Were aware that not only Spain’s present culture,

But also its future culture, depended

On the issue of this struggle

In which a savage attack,

Fiendish in its barbaric cruelty,

Was launched against the people.

It is no way incidental

That an utter and absolute want of culture

Is typical of all the elements

Whose common denominator is fascism,

That is, of the insurgent militarists

Supported by foreign states and marching hand in hand

With the catholic church and the capitalists

Who always and everywhere defend

Their selfish and predatory interests.

What comes through persistently in Our Fathers Fought Franco is a sense of how much we have to learn from the past. As government cuts target education and the arts, such truths the stories in this book present to us are in themselves a defence against the tyranny of malevolent control.

The American poet Ed Dorn once wrote: “The courting of anxiety comes from a preoccupation with the future. There’s no anxiety in the past – there are only lessons there. Knowledge of the past is the only thing that can reduce anxiety about the future. In fact, that’s the nature of tragedy, that it’s there to teach you about now. The future means nothing to me.

The past is everything. The future flows into the past, and cultivates the past, and renews the topsoil – if that’s possible.”

Donald Renton’s story shows us how that’s possible, and where we are today tells us how badly needed is its telling.