Christopher Hamo Thornycroft (1915-2001)
Born in Hendon, London, in 1915, second of five children, the family later moved to West Sussex. Chris Thornycroft left his engineering degree course at Oxford University to volunteer for Spain. He was enrolled into the International Brigades on 12th September 1936, some months before the British Battalion was formed. He became armourer of the Thaelmann Battalion of German anti fascists in Spain.
A trained pilot, Chris Thornycroft had initially tried unsuccessfully to join the Republican Air Force, but Thornycroft’s ability to repair weapons and engineer new parts made him a priceless asset with the Brigades. He served at Teruel and rigged up the lighting in the cave hospital near Falset, where Dr Reg Saxton worked alongside nurse Penny Feiwel.
Chris Thorneycroft featured in the Daily Express on 12 March 1937
According to niece Anna Cordon, younger brother Bill Thornycroft said he caught pneumonia and was invalided back to England in 1938. Anna also understands that he may have been wounded and then hidden by local people somewhere inland from Tarragona.
Interviewed in 2000, a year before his passing in 2001, 85 year old Thornycroft said that he thought the pro-Republic Movement made a crucial psychological difference to the outcome of the confrontation with Nazism.
“It helped develop a spirit when the spirit of countries was being trampled underfoot. We could have had concentration camps all over this country quite easily. And it didn’t happen.”
See the Guardian obituary of him here
I am filled with admiration for this relative born 32 years before me who had the moral and physical courage to travel to Spain to help the Republicans resist Franco’s fascist forces.
Thanks for getting in touch Hamo. At a recent meeting we speculated that there might be descendants of the Thornycroft family who we could contact and now you have kindly got in touch with us. I see you have inherited the name from your famous sculptor ancestor. Might I ask what your relationship is with Chris Thornycroft and the rest of that mighty clan, who did so much in the Sussex area to help the Basque refugee children when they were evacuated to England. Last year our group staged a reading with archive film and photos of ‘Sussex and the Spanish Civil War’ at The Grove Theatre, Eastbourne. It was updated from the original script by Mike Anderson, a local historian of the SCW and the Brigaders. It was a sellout and we intend to put on another performance in Worthing later this year, with a greater focus on the Sussex Brigaders. Please let me know if this might be of interest to you.