Ernest Osbourne

Ernest Osbourne – Sussex Brigader

Born in 1901 in Walsall, Osbourne was a painter and decorator living at 31 Hazelwick Road, Three Bridges, Crawley when he volunteered for Spain. A member of the Transport & General Workers Union (now part of UNITE), and a member of the Communist Party, Osbourne attended the International Lenin School in Moscow before joining the International Brigade, arriving in Spain on 6th January 1937. Osbourne enlisted in No. 4 Company and was responsible for the kitchen and was reportedly “painstaking” in his work and that it was “mainly under his guidance that the kitchen developed into the sound organisation that was the envy and example to all battalions.” Osbourne achieved the rank of Platoon Sergeant and was wounded at Hijar in the retreat from Belchite in March 1938. He was repatriated with the rest of the British Battalion in December 1938.

Anton Miles (1911-1992) – Sussex Brigader

Born in London in 1911, Miles was a Brighton Communist Party member, and a laboratory assistant and insurance clerk who served with the International Brigade Medical Services.

Banner depicting Anton Miles on Brighton seafront in Sussex Peoples March of History, 1939

Bill Sill, Ernie Trory and Anton Miles at Brighton station on 12 December 1938 homecoming – see the film footage here

After the Second World War, in which he served as a soldier in Cairo, Egypt, he cut all links with the Communist Party and travelled to India to train as a sadhu (holy man), and then trekked penniless, around south-east Asia, before becoming initiated as a Buddhist monk in Bhutan. By 1961 Miles claimed to be Australia’s head warlock! At the time of his death in 1992, he was no longer known as Anton Miles, having become His Holiness Shri Paramahamsha Mahendranth (Dadaji) chief guru of the Adinathas.

Alan William Gilchrist (1913-1981) – Teacher and Sussex Brigader

Alan Gilchrist

Brighton born Alan Gilchrist was 25 when he arrived in Spain in May 1937. A schoolteacher and member of the National Union of Teachers (now part of the National Education Union), he was initially posted to the British Anti-Tank Battery, serving as their Political Commissar from January to April 1938 when the Unit was disbanded.

Gilchrist saw action in many of the major battles fought by the British Battalion – Jarama, Brunete, Teruel and the Ebro. He contracted malaria after Brunete but recovered to attend the Officer Training School. Commended for his bravery at Corbera on the Ebro front, Gilchrist was wounded in the chest in July 1938 and arrived back in England in December 1938.

Gilchrist was active in the International Brigade Association serving as its Vice President. He returned to teaching and in the early 50’s taught English at Hanley Castle Grammar School in Worcestershire. Alan Gilchrist died in 1981 and his ashes were scattered on Hill 481 by Christopher Smith, a close friend and fellow Anti-Tank Battery member. Hill 481 was a heavily fortified and strategic Fascist stronghold on the Ebro front overlooking Gandesa which the British Battalion had attempted to capture to great cost.

In 2012, Mike Slater of Malvern, a former pupil of Alan Gilchrist paid this tribute to his onetime English teacher.

“He (Alan) had a significant influence to the good on my life and many others. At school he was a tall imposing character, well respected by all. As pupils we were in awe of him-we knew he had been in the Spanish Civil War, but he never spoke about it and we were too fearful to ask.”

Thomas Elliott (1908-1937) – Trade Unionist and Sussex Brigader

Thomas Elliott was born in 1908 and was enrolled into the British Battalion of the International Brigades on 28^th December 1936. He was a shop assistant from Worthing, a member of the Shop Assistants’ Union and branch secretary of Worthing Labour Party. He was killed in June 1937 at Jarama aged 28. His death was reported in Worthing on 18 September 1937.

Albert Derkin (1918-2004) – Sussex Brigader

Albert Alexander Derkin was born in Brighton in 1918,  son of Albert Derkin and Lilian Mary Blake.  Known as ‘Bert’,  Derkin was a cinema projectionist.  He married Ann S Jones and died Jan 2004 in Southend-on-sea, Essex.

Frederick Cronshaw was born in 1902 and came from Sompting near Worthing. He was enrolled in the International Brigades on 24^th February 1937 and left Spain later that year. His Brigade number was 843 and as he was enrolled on the same day as Vincent Leo Deegan, whose number was 845, it is possible that they travelled together. Volunteers were often put into small groups of two or three so that they would not look as conspicuous as a large group travelling together, to evade the attention of the British or French police and secret services. Under the terms of the Non-Intervention Pact the French had closed the border between France and Spain and the UK had invoked a 19^th century law making it illegal for British subjects to fight for a foreign power.

Alexander Foote

Alexander Allen Foote (1905-1956) – Sussex Brigader

Born in Liverpool in 1905, Alexander Allen Foote left school in 1921, working in various professions until he joined the Royal Air Force in 1935. He deserted the following year, and sailed to Spain to join the International Brigade, where he served as a driver for British Battalion Commanders Jock Cunningham and Fred Copeman.

Foote also acted as a courier between London and Spain, officially transporting Red Cross supplies, in reality his mission was to carry documents between Communist Party Headquarters in King Street and the Battalion’s Party command.

Foote served nearly two years in the International Brigade and according to MI6 files he arrived back in the UK on 16th September 1936. Under Foote’s name is a handwritten annotation “? E.Grinstead”.

It’s likely that Foote was on his way to Woodcote Road, Forest Row, (four miles South of East Grinstead), where Margaret Powell, his sister, lived at the time.

While in Spain Foote was recruited by Red Army Intelligence and was sent to Geneva during WW2 as part of the Rote Drei cell gathering information from Nazi occupied Europe. Foote’s cell was infiltrated by German Intelligence who tipped off the Swiss authorities who arrested and gaoled him in 1943. Foote became disillusioned with Soviet Communism and after the War approached British Military Intelligence providing useful information, particularly on the Soviet use of false passports. He used his sister’s address as a poste restante and in October 1947 Foote applied for a British passport giving “Church Cottage, Forest Row, Sussex” as his home address.

Foote described his wartime experiences in Switzerland and his subsequent disillusionment with his Soviet employers in his 1949 book Handbook For Spies.

Handbook for Spies

Alexander Foote died in 1956.

Edmund Updale (centre)

Edmund Updale (1913-1976) – Sussex Brigader

It was only in 2012 that the family of Edmund (‘Ted’) Updale (born 29 July 1913, died 12 January 1976) found out he had been honoured as one of the ‘Worthing Five’. They had always known he had fought in Spain and that he had lost a leg at the Battle of the Ebro, but he had never mentioned Worthing at all.

It seems possible that his link with Worthing came through the refugee children who arrived there in 1937. Ted, who was born in 1913, never knew his parents and had been brought up in the Foundling Hospital in London. It seems likely that he would have responded to the call for volunteers when the British government refused to care for the new arrivals. Maybe this led onto his military involvement. Between January and July 1938 he fought at Salada, Segura del Banos, Belchite, Batea, and the Ebro, where he was attached to an American battalion, and lost a leg. His injuries were treated by the inspirational British doctor serving with the International Brigade, Alexander Tudor-Hart.

But in some ways, Ted was different from the other volunteers. The description of him on and off official forms rings true. A. Olenrenshaw wrote that Edmund Updale was ‘Not very well-developed politically, but a good type who was always appeared anxious to learn’. He was a passionate idealist – a ferocious opponent of injustice – but not an idealogue.

Ted’s reaction to fighting in Spain was similar to that of soldiers in the First World War. He was horrified by the carnage. He was also deeply critical of the authoritarianism of some of the commanders on his own side, and of the military shortcomings of some of the political leaders. He expressed this on an official form late in 1938. He was asked ‘What have you especially learnt in the political and military fields since you have been in Spain, and what can you take back to the anti-fascist organisations in your own country?’ His answer was:

‘In the political field, have learnt that a sound knowledge of the cause for which one is fighting enables one to suffer hardships and deprivations which would otherwise cause discontent. In the military field, that political leaders are not necessarily military leaders. While a military leader must be sound politically, the knowledge of what a man is fighting for is not sufficient justification for entrusting to him the lives of men and the conduct of an important military operation. Officers must be soldiers. Commissars politicians.’

He was putting his point rather politely. At that stage he was still dependent on the political machine to get him back to Britain.

Edmund Updale’s hatred of conflict lived with him into the Second World War, where his injuries kept him out of the forces, and landed him in a desk job allocating troops to the front. Years later, he spoke with guilt and horror about his part in sending young men to their deaths.

He went onto become a journalist on papers such as the Sunday Pictorial, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Sketch. He was proud of his stand against fascism, but although he maintained his opposition to Franco for the rest of his life, and refused to buy Spanish goods or travel to fascist Spain, a stronger emotion was his contempt for the political and diplomatic failures which had made the slaughter necessary at all. In later years, he came to despise people he judged as glorifying the war itself, or trading on their association with it. He stayed away from reunions and commemorations. Maybe he would have concealed the little he told his family about his time in Spain if he had not had to explain his false leg.

Edmund Updale’s experiences in Spain left him with a deep distrust of political organisations. For the rest of his life he was a passionate non-joiner. He felt personally oppressed by the practical necessity to belong to the NUJ [National Union of Journalists] in what was, in the sixties, the virtual closed shop of Fleet Street. He never joined a political party, and while he would sometimes cast a vote in the hope of getting someone out, he rarely showed personal enthusiasm for any individuals in politics. He outlived Franco by just six weeks, and died on the 12 January 1976.

For all his misgivings about fighting, he left his four children (who were the only blood relatives he ever knew) and the 14 grandchildren and great-grandchildren he never met, with an admiration for his courage and idealism in the 1930s.

[This biographical portrait was written by the family of Edmund Updale and is reproduced here with our thanks to them]

Start of the walk outside Hove station

Written by Pauline Fraser for the Morning Star 

A score of walkers arrived at Hove Station on Saturday [18 September 2021] from far and wide to take part in an eight-mile sponsored walk in the footsteps of some of the Sussex International Brigaders.

Assembling on a glorious autumn morning, the walkers visited nine addresses connected with volunteers from Brighton and Hove and the two houses that had welcomed in child refugees from the Basque country in 1937.

The walk was organised by Pauline Fraser, a Trustee of the International Brigade Memorial Trust and convenor of its affiliate, Sussex Brigaders Remembered, which is raising money towards a memorial to the Sussex Brigaders.

The walkers made an eye-catching spectacle as they wove their way through the city carrying the IBMT banner, Republican flags and others relating to Marea Granate. Members of the public asked walkers what it was all about, thus getting the message across more widely.

Information about each Brigader was read out when the walk assembled at the relevant address. At the two former children’s homes, Pauline read from the memoirs of two brothers who stayed there.

Banners outside the Pines

High point of the walk was a meeting between the walkers and members of the Guernica collective outside ‘The Pines’ Nursing Home, formerly Aylesbury House, one of the two homes for Basque refugee children in Hove. The collective brought their beautiful banner, made after the style of Picasso’s famous painting, which the artist had created following the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica. The bombing, which killed or injured some thousands, was carried out by Hitler’s Condor Legion, at Franco’s behest. In addition the banner draws attention to the present-day slaughter of innocent civilians, in particular women and children, in Palestine, Afghanistan and elsewhere.

In 1937 the Conservative government grudgingly permitted the nearly 4,000 child refugees, to enter the UK, so long as they were ‘not a burden on the public purse’. The widespread outpouring of sympathy for the young refugees ensured that they were at least fed and accommodated. Jakob, of Brighton Migrant Solidarity, which had come to support the walk, told us how the current right-wing Conservative government demonises and seeks to actively exclude migrants, including children seeking to be reunited with family members.

If you would like to support the efforts of the walkers and the project to get a memorial erected to the Sussex Brigaders, please donate, through the IBMT website: http://international-brigades.org.uk/, sending an email to admin@international-brigades.org.uk stating that your donation is for the Walk, or by bank transfer to: International Brigade Memorial, Sort code 40-52-40, Account number 00013716, giving the reference Walk’.

Reflecting at the end of the day

Farewell from the walkers

[This piece was originally published in Wickerwork, the newsletter of the Southwick Society, and is reproduced here with the permission of the society].

C.L.R. James and the writing of The Black Jacobins in Southwick

The Black Jacobins (1938 cover).

The black radical Trinidadian historian and writer Cyril Lionel Robert James (1901-1989) was one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable Caribbean thinkers.  He is perhaps best remembered as the author of two classic works – a semi-autobiographical cultural history of West Indian cricket, Beyond a Boundary (1963), and The Black Jacobins (1938) about Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution, which analysed the only successful mass slave revolt in human history, the transformation of colonized slave society of Saint-Domingue into the world’s first independent black republic outside of Africa from 1791-1804.  In his native Trinidad, C.L.R. James also analysed calypso and Carnival, and helped pioneer the West Indian novel with Minty Alley (1936), recently republished by Penguin with an introduction by The Booker Prize 2019 winner Bernadine Evaristo, as well as playing his part in the anti-colonial struggle as a campaigner for “West Indian self-government”.

The Black Jacobins, in the words of Sudhir Hazareesingh, author of the prize-winning biography Black Spartacus: The Epic Life of Toussaint Louverture (2020) remains ‘the classic modern work in the English language’ on the Haitian Revolution.  In 2016 the work was selected as the top work of ‘radical history’ ever written by the Guardian, and it also featured as no. 5 in a list of the top ten works on ‘black radicalism’ by the same publication in 2019.  The work (and a portrayal of James himself) have also featured in the Small Axe series of films produced by the award-winning director Steve McQueen (BBC, 2020).

It has long been known that one key period in which James wrote The Black Jacobins was spent writing while residing on the South coast during 1937.  In his 1938 Preface to the work, James describes how while the Spanish Civil War raged and he was writing the work, ‘it was in the stillness of a seaside suburb that could be heard most clearly and insistently the booming of Franco’s heavy artillery, the rattle of Stalin’s firing squads and the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence’ (C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, Penguin Classics edition, 2001, xx).   In later interviews James would recall spending time in Brighton in this period (see for example, David Widgery, ‘A Meeting with Comrade James’, New Society, 26 June 1980, online here).  James’s publisher Fredric Warburg (of Secker and Warburg, the same publisher of George Orwell in this period) also lived fairly close by in West Hoathly during the 1930s, and testifies to James sometimes visiting them at weekends and playing cricket for the local side.  ‘He was a demon bowler and a powerful if erratic batsman.  The village loved him, referring to him affectionately as “the black bastard”.  In Sussex politics were forgotten…’ (Fredric Warburg, An Occupation for Gentleman, London, 1959, 214-215).

Yet until the Special Branch files on C.L.R. James were released in 2005, it has been difficult to ascertain whereabouts exactly in or near Brighton James stayed and wrote (see the files in The National Archives, KV 2/1824, online here).  We now know from these files that one address CLR James stayed at on 19 July 1937 was on Old Shoreham Road in Southwick, due to an intercepted letter James wrote from this address.   I think he was here partly so he could be close to watch Sussex play cricket, and this property may have been a guesthouse in this period (‘Tintangel’).

Given one of the most important black writers of the twentieth century wrote The Black Jacobins, one of greatest works of ‘black history’ ever written in Southwick – and he may have also written other classic works like World Revolution also at the same address, is something that in our age of #BlackLivesMatter arguably is a piece of local history that deserves to be celebrated and commemorated.

Christian Høgsbjerg

[Dr Christian Høgsbjerg is a Lecturer in Critical History and Politics in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Brighton and the author of C.L.R. James in Imperial Britain (Duke University Press, 2014) and the co-editor of The Black Jacobins Reader (Duke University Press, 2017).  For more on James and the Spanish Civil War, see Christian Høgsbjerg, ‘The Fever and the Fret’: C.L.R. James, the Spanish Civil War and the Writing of The Black Jacobins, Critique, 44:1-2 (2016), 161-177, DOI: 10.1080/03017605.2016.1187858]

Edited to add: After a successful crowdfunder supported by the Southwick Society to raise £1000 for a blue plaque in Southwick for C.L.R. James, an unveiling will now take place at 290 Old Shoreham Road on Friday 17 March 2023 at 2pm – thanks.