Pictured here with the two speakers at the IBMT's 2019 Len Crome conference in Oxford: to my right, the researcher and author Daniel Gray, to my left historian and The Guardian's football correspondent, Sid Lowe. There are more images on the IBMT's Flickr account.
Full report in the May 2019 issue of ¡No Pasarán!
In the Sky News studio talking about the former International Brigader, Geoffrey Servante, who died on 22 April 2019, aged 99. He was almost certainly the last surviving British veteran of the Spanish Civil War.
I was very happy to take part in a short six minute film produced by the Gill Parker Consultancy. The film was commissioned by the LSE to showcase the expertise of the university's academics; in this instance Professor of Contemporary Spanish History, Paul Preston. In addition to myself, the film included interviews with former Basque child, Herminio Martínez; Professor of Spanish History, Helen Graham; and Spanish writer and journalist, Lala Isla.
On 9 August 2017, I introduced a number of readings relating to the International Brigades, movingly delivered by actors Christopher Ecclestone and Yolanda Vazquez and by Margot Heinemann’s daughter, Jane Bernal.
On 31 May 2018 I joined the biographer and filmmaker, Jane Rogoyska, for a presentation at L.S.E.'s Cañada Blanch Centre, chaired by Professor Paul Preston. We were outlining our thoughts on the image that had recently appeared on social media: did it really show the celebrated photojournalist, Gerda Taro, on her death bed?
In July 2014 I joined presenter Jonathan Freedland, Shiraz Maher and Usama Hasan for Radio Four's 'The Long View', which discussed attitudes towards British people volunteering to fight in foreign wars.
2026
28 November 2026, Marx House, London. Len Crome annual event, with Profs Helen Graham and Paul Preston.
History, as the aphorism frequently attributed to Churchill would have it, is written by the victors. This certainly holds true for the Bayeux Tapestry, as anyone fortunate enough to have seen it recently in London will have seen. However, there are of course exceptions, one of the most glaring examples being the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. If British audiences know anything about the conflict at all, they will have likely come to it via supporters of the defeated Republicans such as George Orwell or Ernest Hemingway or having seen Ken Loach’s ‘story from the Spanish revolution’, Land and Freedom. As the German historian Reinhart Koelleck points out: ‘while the victors impose their view of the past in the short term, it is the defeated who advance historical knowledge because they are forced to ask why they lost.’ Or, as the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno dismissively informed General Millán-Astray, the brutal commander of the Spanish Legion during the civil war, ‘venceréis, pero no convenceréis’ (you will win, but you won’t convince) …
My review of Jo Labanyi’s cultural history of the Spanish Civil War appears in The Spectator.
On 10 June 2017 a memorial to volunteers for the Spanish Civil War from Oxfordshire was unveiled in St. Clement’s, Oxford. The road to this event had been incredibly long and tortuous, not least because many locals had opposed the erection of a monument to ‘a bunch of reds’. That the project had ever managed to be realised was down to the hard work, determination and bloody-mindedness of the members of the Oxford Memorial Organising Committee, not least the historian and journalist Chris Farman. Sadly, Chris died last week, one of all too many victims of the pandemic.
With Valery Rose and Liz Woolley, Chris was the author of No Other Way, Oxfordshire and the Spanish Civil War. Sales of the book did much to help fund the erection of the Oxford memorial. It’s a great piece of local history, well written and extremely thoroughly researched, with a great introduction written by Chris. He was the perfect choice for the introduction, for he had previously written for The Guardian and the Illustrated London News and worked as an editor on a book on the British Empire, published by Time-Life Books. He also has written his own monograph: The General Strike, published in 1972.
I first met Chris in at a fundraising for the Oxford memorial. Like his fellow organisers, Colin Carritt and John Heywood, Chris put a huge amount of time and effort into this and subsequent events. His natural charm and enthusiasm did much to help make them a success and (as I know) he was adept at persuading other people to get involved. A regular and popular presence at IBMT events, Chris will be very sadly missed.
There are full obituaries for Chris Farman on the IBMT’s website and in the Banbury Guardian.
