This is an article I’ve been wanting to write for some time now. It’s about the Spanish Civil War, and about the brave men of the Connolly Column who left the North of Ireland to fight side by side with comrades from all over the world in the International Brigades. These were organised battalions of volunteers from Communist and Socialist movements from across the world that came to Spain to fight for the Republic. Men from the UK, Ireland, Greece, the USA and Canada, and even Germany and Italy arrived in their thousands to bolster the ranks of the Second Spanish Republic and give Franco a bloody nose.
At a time when the two groups rarely mingled, Protestant, Catholic—creed didn’t matter to these men. Without pay, without the promise of repatriation, rescue or even victory these men were shipped, and some even walked, the hundreds of miles from their homeland which had already seen its fair share of bloodshed and civil war, to the battlefields of far-flung Spain. It was a foreign land that most had never laid eyes on. It’s where many of them are now buried.
In the period between the world wars, a great revolution had already taken place in Ireland during the Anglo-Irish War—or war of Irish Independence—that began in earnest with the Easter Rising in 1916 and culminated in the British withdrawal from all but six counties of Ireland, which went on to form Northern Ireland in 1921. Sectarian divisions had resulted in an explosion of violence in Belfast between 1920 and 1922, when Catholic families were burned out of their homes in their thousands and made refugees in their own city at the hands of Loyalist mobs. An estimated five hundred people died in the violence, and entire families were uprooted, some leaving Northern Ireland completely.
After the war for independence and the turbulent and bloody Irish Civil War had both ended— when the revolution in Ireland was all but over—and it was clear that the borders of both north and south would remain unchanged for the foreseeable future, there were those who sought further change. Some sought to export the cause of socialist solidarity beyond Ireland, to foment revolution and liberation where the call took them. The Spanish Civil War was exactly the solidarity project that they were looking for and gave many of the men, most of whom were unemployed, the chance to fight for what they believed in.
One of these men has a particular place in my heart. My ancestor, Liam Tumilson from Ballymacarrett in East Belfast, was the same age as me when he volunteered to join his compatriots and left for Spain in 1936. Born in 1904 to a Protestant family, Liam was a steadfast supporter of left-wing ideology and a believer in the struggle for the working classes from imperialism and capitalism.
He was active in the Outdoor Relief Riots in 1932, when 100,000 working-class men from both Protestant and Catholic communities protested in Belfast against the low-paid distress relief schemes which were set up to help unemployed men into outdoor labouring projects after the 1929 economic crash but had such a high threshold for entry that thousands of men were left unable to feed their families—a protest which escalated into violence and subsequently drew many young, working-class Protestants to the cause of socialism.
Tumilson joined the IRA in the working-class, mostly Catholic area of Short Strand in 1929, before leaving and joining the Republican Congress, which saw uprooting capitalism as key to achieving a united Irish Republic, in 1933. That same year he was wounded when he took part in the defence of Connolly House in Dublin against a contingent of right-wing paramilitary Blue Shirts that had besieged it.
In 1936, Liam left Belfast to join the International Brigades, boarding a boat to Liverpool and then hitch-hiked to London to join his comrades. He is so revered amongst Republican and Socialists in Ireland that he is name-checked in the Christy Moore song “Viva La Quinta Brigada,” which pays tribute to those killed in Spain fighting for the Republican government. Liam’s death motivated two of his former IRA comrades, Jim Straney and Willie O’Hanlon, both like him from Ballymacarrett—which includes Short Strand—to join the cause. Of the three childhood friends, only O’Hanlon returned to Belfast.
On the “opposite” side of the community divide was Richard ‘Dick’ O’Neill, a Catholic from the Falls Road in West Belfast. O’Neill was a devout Communist who joined the Belfast branch of the International Typographical Union in 1929. He is remembered by his sister, Peggy Mount, who recalled that despite the devout Catholicism of his mother and father—and the church’s support of Franco—they supported his decision to go to Spain because he was, above all else, their son. A letter by one of Dick’s friends in a copy of the Irish Democrat, dated September 4, 1937, remembers him as eager to enlist. O’Neill died in Spain that year.
Overall, the official figures count at least forty-eight men, young and old, who left Belfast between 1936 and ‘37 as volunteers in the fight against fascism.
Despite the sectarian divisions being drummed up in Belfast and beyond, these men were brothers in arms in a conflict now often reduced to a staging ground for the oncoming horrors of the Second World War. But its resonance was far-reaching. Franco’s forces were bolstered in their number, munitions and support by Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy. Diplomatic support for the junta came from the Vatican—a factor in the refusal of the IRA to officially enter the war on the side of the Second Spanish Republic. Indeed, such was the strength and power of the Catholic Church at the time that the Northern Ireland Labour Party lost much of its support from devout Catholics who wouldn’t dare risk the ire of their clergy.
Such things as religion and devotion to the church or state ideologies of Unionism and Irish Nationalism were irrelevant to the men of the Connolly Column, who believed only in the destruction of Fascism and the solidarity they could provide, even in their small numbers, to the beleaguered Spanish democracy. To them this was a struggle of good and evil, to remove themselves from the equation and face almost certain death in upholding their beliefs and that of socialism.
There exist very few photos of Liam—there aren’t any that I can find of his days in Spain. He died on February 14, 1937; killed fighting Franco’s forces at the Battle of Jarama Hill. Liam had been directing a machine-gun assault against the Francoist forces at the time of his death, having recently been promoted to the rank of Adjudant in the Machine Gun Corps. He was just thirty-three.
