'This was war, not just an adventure'

The windows of David Marshall’s house in Stratford, east London, are curved and made of plastic. “I’ve always felt there was more to life than straight lines,” he tells me. That perhaps explains the way this articulate, poetry-loving 84-year-old has led his life and why, at 20, at the outbreak of the war in Spain, he became one of the first Britons to volunteer to defend the new government.

In 1936, Marshall, who was born in Middlesbrough, was a civil servant, deciding whether miners in the depressed coalfields of the north-east should get dole money. He hated the job and the system. The son of a railwayman, he had been a bookish youth and had stayed on at school until he was 18. The world beyond his beloved books came as a rude shock. “I couldn’t synchronise my life as a student with the fact that life wasn’t like that at all,” he says. “Life was nothing to do with poetry; it was just bloody wretchedness.”

Personal disaffection and the feeling that there had to be a better way of organising society put him on the road to Spain. “By chance one day I bought the Times,” he recalls, “and in it there was a one-inch paragraph that said there was no doubt that if the republican government won, there would be some sort of socialist state set up in Spain. Although I wasn’t political, I had enough reading to realise there was a chance of a different way of life.”

That was in July, at the dawn of the struggle. “At the end of that month, I got my pay and bought a second pair of specs,” he recalls. “By the end of the next month, I had enough money to get me there. I discovered that if you were under 21, you needed your parents’ permission, so I forged my father’s signature.”

At the beginning of September, Marshall had a two-week holiday from the civil service. He told his parents he was going to stay with his girlfriend in Whitley Bay, and told her he was staying at home. He took the night bus to London, bought a ticket at Victoria to the Spanish border and hopped on the boat train. Far from staying for a fortnight, he was going with the intention of staying for the entire war.

He travelled by train from Paris to Portbou, but was turned back at the frontier on suspicion of being a spy and allowed in only thanks to the intervention of a Spanish-speaking Italian called Giorgio Tioli. The latter convinced the guards that the bespectacled, shorts-clad, Keats-carrying Marshall’s lack of papers reflected his innocence, not his guilt. Marshall and Tioli crossed into Spain on September 4.

“We took the train to Barcelona, where I quickly met half a dozen other English people,” Marshall says. “We were in the Hotel Lloret and hung about enjoying it for about seven weeks. It was intoxicating. Our hotel was on the Ramblas and it was an exhilarating feeling to be in a beautiful city that was yours.”

He and a small group of other English volunteers formed the Tom Mann Centuria (named after a famous dockers’ leader). They drilled themselves and got hold of a batch of rifles dating from the 19th century. They had no money of their own, but received the odd pound from communist party sources in the UK. Marshall quickly became politicised. “I met a lot of party members and they had a terrific influence on me. I’ve been in the party ever since, though I’ve done bugger all.”

As more volunteers arrived from all over Europe, the International Brigades took shape and were stationed at Albacete. “We were addressed by the veteran communist André Marty, which was very moving,” Marshall recalls. “He said we were there to defend the republic, but if any man didn’t want to, now was the time to turn back. Well, you can’t say ‘I’m going back’ with a lot of other fellas watching.”

Marshall was in the Thaelmann brigade, which was predominantly French and German. The brigade left Albacete and travelled by train, lorry and on foot to Madrid, where the government forces were under assault. “We emerged at daybreak under some low hills to the immediate south of Madrid,” he says. “The air was very clear and there was no sound at all. You could see Madrid in the distance and while we were watching, we saw 12 columns of smoke rising. They were bombing Madrid. We realised then that it was war and not just an adventure.”

It was the first attack of the International Brigades. “We were due to capture Cerro de los Angeles – the Hill of the Angels – eight miles south of Madrid. It was a bollocks of a battle, but you don’t see that at the time. We had to attack across a flat plain, in the face of artillery fire and machine-gunning. A bloke got on to me, a sharpshooter, and he put four or five bullets around me. You could hear them hitting the soil nearby. Then I got hit in the foot. It went clean through.

“I was panicking by then. I was doubly frightened because they said that our flank was open and there were Moroccan troops on that side. I crawled back to some olive trees and sat down, and while I was sitting there a bloke came at me with a fixed bayonet. Luckily, it was one of the brigade, a Belgian bloke, who was as disorientated as I was. A lad helped me limp back until we met stretcher bearers and they put me on the floor of a lorry. We drove back for quite a long time until we got to a field hospital. I spent the night shivering.”

The battle had lasted all day and the Hill of the Angels remained in rebel hands, though it was captured 18 months later. For Marshall, the day’s fighting was the beginning and the end of his Spanish war. “I dropped out of history,” he says.

He was taken to a hospital in Tarragona and lost touch with his friends from the Tom Mann Centuria, who were in Madrid. The wound was deemed serious enough for a return to the UK and he headed for Marseille. A ship’s captain let him work his passage back to Newcastle. On the way, the ship picked up newspapers in Gibraltar; Marshall learned that all his comrades from the Tom Mann Centuria had been killed at the battle of Boadilla. “I feel guilty to this day,” he says. “To go back to Spain for the homage in 1996, I had a banner made in memory of those lads.”

Marshall was home by Christmas 1936. His parents never referred to his missing months; the girlfriend in Whitley Bay later became his wife; he even got his old job back. He continued to campaign for the republicans, but did not rejoin the war. “I was frightened,” he says now. “I’d lost my nerve. I hated myself for not going back. I suppose I wasn’t sufficiently politicised.”

In 1938 he went to a reunion of volunteers in Manchester, but was too embarrassed to enter the hall. “I was too ashamed to mix with these fellows who had been wounded a couple of times but gone back and stuck it for a couple of years.”

Marshall joined up in the second world war and got a transfer from doing clerical work in the pay corps to active duty with the Royal Engineers. He was in Normandy soon after D-Day and he and another soldier were sent out on reconnaissance to report on the effect of allied shelling. The other soldier, a Dunkirk veteran, became agitated as shells continued to fall. Marshall put his arm around the man’s shoulder to calm him – an act, he says, that gave them both renewed courage. At that moment, he knew he had got his nerve back.

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