Jack Jones vindicated
Our friend Manus O’Riordan writes:
On June 6, 2011, Athol Books of Belfast, Northern Ireland, published a new web booklet on its site entitled The Vindication of Brigadista and Union Man Jack James Larkin Jones: in refutation of the British intelligence campaign of character assassination. This booklet brings together a series of five articles written by myself, which were first published in the Irish Political Review between July 2010 and January 2011. The Spanish Ant-Fascist War veteran Jack Jones (1913-2009) had been the founding Chairperson/President of the International Brigade Memorial Trust. It goes without saying that the IBMT is a broad church of people united in their determination to honour the memory of the International Brigades, but whose members may hold widely divergent views on other issues of history and politics. Accordingly, the IBMT itself does not have a partisan position concerning the political and union controversies in which Jack Jones engaged both prior to and during his period of office as General President, from 1969 to 1978, of Britain’s Transport & General Workers’ Union. Still less is the IBMT responsible for any controversial political views on my own part during the period from 1971 to 2010, when I also served as Head of Research with the Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union / Services, Industrial, Professional & Technical Union [SIPTU].
See here on that same Athol Books website for my earlier, February 2010, dossier on this MI5 campaign against Jack Jones, which provides direct online links to most of the press coverage in question. A few links have been broken since the dossier was first posted, but for the 2008 commemoration of Brigadista George Brown, killed at Brunete, July 1937, and first husband of Jack’s wife Evelyn, see here on the “Ireland and the Spanish Civil War” website.
The Athol Books website also carries, along with my 1971 thesis Connolly America, a 2002 postscript in which I paid tribute to the memory of Mike Quill, founding President from 1934 to 1966 of the Transport Workers’ Union of America, for his solidarity with both the International Brigades and the Spanish workers’ struggles against Fascism.
