Scots in Spain
The Edinburgh Anarchists have been kind enough to post a review essay on Scots volunteers in Spain, published last year by Stuart Christie (of Christie Books, which this blog has featured before) in the Scottish Review of Books:
A new and fascinating contribution to Scotland’s role in the Spanish Civil War, Daniel Gray’sHomage To Caledonia brings together for the first time riveting accounts of the plots and sub-plots of the 1930s Scot tish-Spanish connection, together with the personal stories and testimonies of some of the 549 Scottish volunteers who made Spain’s struggle their own. Most of this Scot tish contingent (around twenty-three per cent of the British Battalion) came from the urban and industrial areas of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, specifi cally Maryhill, Springburn and Bridgeton and, of course, the mining communities of Lanarkshire and Fife. Of the ninety-two Scottish IB volunteers killed in Spain, sixty-five were from Glasgow; another nine came from the Lanarkshire mining communities around Blantyre. Sixty-seven per cent of them were members of the Communist Party.
Read the whole essay here.
