Jolly (rt) performing abdominal operation, Ebro field hospital, Aug. 1938.

New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.

The book was launched in July 2024 in Jolly’s small and remote hometown of Cromwell, Central Otago, and the following evening at Otago University in Dunedin, where he studied medicine in the 1920s. Among the attendees were Jolly’s relatives, who offered their own memories and family records about him.

Bidda Jones was a baby when her English grandmother married Jolly in 1964. Bidda, who lives in Australia, describe her childhood with an adoring, eccentric grandfather. It was not until his death 19 years later that she discovered his large collection of personal papers, including hundreds of letters, photographs and mementoes of his service in Spain. That collection eventually formed the basis of the research for Frontline Surgeon. It has since been donated to Otago University’s Hocken Library, where it will be made available to further generations of researchers.

Card granting Jolly permission to use camera, Madrid.

Two of the most influential figures in Jolly’s life were the socialist activists Donald Grant and his wife Irene. Jolly first befriended them as a young medical student at Otago University. They met again in 1932 in London, where Jolly was studying for fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons. Two of the Grants’ three children eventually became doctors, likely influenced by the active and impressive young New Zealander who became a surrogate member of their household.

One early New Zealand reader of Frontline Surgeon recognized many names familiar from her own family’s history. In 1938 her intrepid New Zealand aunt, Chris Bell, had undertaken a cycling tour through much of southern Europe, including countries such as Austria and Germany that were then under Nazi control. On her return to London in November 1938, Miss Bell visited the Grants and recorded her impressions in letters home to her own family. “Irene has just come back from a lecture tour in USA, and she says there is a great danger of Canada going Fascist, the Ottawa government particularly. They have passed anti-communist laws and won’t define what they mean by communism, so that they are free to sit on anything they don’t like the look of…” Irene’s husband Donald, wrote Miss Bell, “is not as pacifist as he used to be and feels that Britain should be standing for collective security and the League [of Nations].”

Jolly (left) and his aristocratic anaesthetist, Peter de Sarigny.

Irene Grant was evidently heartbroken by the latest news she received of events in Austria, where she and Donald had lived from 1929 to 1933, until forced to leave by the rise of a pro-Nazi government. Chris Bell herself found Vienna “just too sad for words. While we were there, there were thousands in prison – Jews and political offenders, Jewish lawyers and doctors particularly, for no given reason at all…. They said they would do anything to get out of Vienna, such was their life there.”

The Grant household in north London offered short-term refuge to an endless stream of refugees from Austria, and after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, to foreign volunteers on leave. Chris Bell met, but regrettably failed to name, “an Ambulance driver from Spain who had come to England to see if he could get some more supplies to take back to Spain. (He works with Dr Douglas Jolly, a New Zealand doctor.)”

She then met this renowned New Zealand surgeon himself, “who has just been back from Spain a week or so, having been evacuated with the International Brigade. He thinks that as it is not at all likely that Franco will correspondingly withdraw his foreign helpers, and as France is being forced to seal her frontiers (so that no supplies can get through to the government forces), and as the Franco ports are remaining open to what likes to come in, it is pretty certain that they will be starved into defeat, no amount of spirit, of which they have plenty, being able to stand up against starvation.)

Loading wounded onto ambulance, Bisbal de Falset, Ebro, 1938.

“The 200 doctors and about 200 nurses who are being disbanded from the International Brigade are without money, jobs or country, as the majority of them came from European countries from which they are now excluded because of their anti-fascist activities. The communists among them could go to Russia, but they don’t want to as they think that would be too easy for them, and a retreat from the fight which they think needs their support elsewhere. Most of them are not communists.”

Jolly, she found, was, “a mass of nerves and is terribly disappointed over having to give up, as he feels that Franco is going to have it all his own way from now.” Since his fellow foreign medical volunteers were now stateless, stranded and impoverished, he was “writing to all his rich acquaintances for assistance. He himself now wants to go to China but may go to New Zealand to visit his mother in Dunedin first.”

As Frontline Surgeon explains, Jolly did indeed visit his homeland after returning from Spain, and afterwards abandoned plans to serve with Mao’s Red Army and enlisted instead in Britain’s Royal Army Medical Corps, where he headed frontline medical units in North Africa and Italy throughout WW2.

Mark Derby’s biography of Doug Jolly, a New Zealand surgeon who served with distinction in the Spanish Civil War, came out in 2024 with the University of Nebraska and Massey University.