Our Fathers Fought Franco: The tale of AC Williams

IN Our Fathers Fought Franco, Lisa Croft, a former library assistant, writes on behalf of her mother, Rosemary Nina Williams, who was born when her father was imprisoned in Spain, and for her aunt, Jennifer Talavera Williams, who is named after that Spanish jail’s location.

She begins her grandfather’s story with the mysterious sense of growing wonder at the discovery of lost documents, and then the rediscovery of a life: “My grandfather never talked to his daughters and grandchildren about his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. After he died my grandmother, Jane Orme, mentioned it in passing and I regret not discussing it further. It was only when I started to research my family history that I found out aspects of his life through documents and newspaper articles.

"My mum Rosemary and her sister Jennifer knew very little. Amazingly about 15 years ago some of his papers were discovered in a suitcase in Jen’s Los Angeles garden summer house, including a small notebook, sketches and notes from his time in Spain.”

READ MORE: Our Fathers Fought Franco: Lothian coalminer joins anti-fascist fight

Other papers became available, and Lisa and her mother became fascinated with the Spanish Civil War, attending lectures and exhibitions, visiting Madrid and Jarama. The tale of AC Williams was beginning to unfold.

What follows here is mainly quoted or paraphrased from Lisa’s account, but it is only an introduction to the full story. In the book, with the accompanying biographies of AC’s contemporaries, we have what amounts to a document of rare value: it renews our sense of human worth, and what commitment is really for. We need that more than ever these days.

Archibald Campbell McAskill Williams, or simply AC, was a self-educated, well-informed working man, his voice carrying traces of his travels: southern Hampshire English with a Highland Scots lilt, and a North American drawl. He was born to Scottish parents in Portsmouth in 1904, the first of six sons. Their father, John, had migrated to work in the shipyards on the south coast in the 1890s after his apprenticeship in Greenock. His mother, Julia McAskill was from a family of tenant crofters from the hamlet of Greep on the Isle of Skye.

When AC was about 10, the family moved for his father to work in another Royal Navy dockyard at Invergordon on the Cromarty Firth, north of Inverness. After Invergordon Academy, the Williams family moved again, to Leith dockyards, near Edinburgh. AC’s first job was as an insurance clerk, but opportunities were scarce and when the chance came to travel across the Atlantic and take up secure employment and training as a bank clerk in Canada, he took it. In 1923, aged 19, AC set sail from Glasgow. He never saw his parents again.

Canada was a liberation. He sent home money every month, helping to support the family. But after three years, a faulty cable started a fire in the bank, AC rescued the senior teller, about to succumb to fumes, and saved as much of the paper money he could, scattered on the floor, surrounded by the blaze. But he gave in to temptation and kept $500, equivalent of a year’s salary. The police arrested him and though his counsel pled for leniency, noting his selfless courage during the fire, and letters in the local newspaper indicating that bank tellers got a pittance compared with the millions of profits to the banks, he was sentenced to two years imprisonment.

READ MORE: Our Fathers Fought Franco: The anti-fascist fight in Spain and London

AC now had a criminal record, lost his job and his home, and when his family in Scotland heard the news, his mother broke off all contact. After AC had served his time, he was set to be deported but he escaped and made a run for it.

Aged 23, he took whatever work he could get on the road: he was a corn-cutter in Kansas, a cowboy in Virginia, a fur trapper in Saskatchewan. He was face to face with a grizzly bear before his companion shot it straight between the eyes. He drove husky-dog-teams in Alaska, transporting fur and meat across the ice. He was a lumberjack, a gold-prospector, a gambler.

But almost all work dried up in the Depression and official estimates in the late 1920s figured that around 70,000 “single homeless unemployed males” were travelling about the country looking for work. AC walked for miles and “rode the rods” (in, under or on top of a box car freight train). He was arrested on a few occasions for vagrancy and gave the alias of William Johnson. (He was John’s son and a Williams!) Official government practice victimised people like AC with prejudice. The Canadian Department of Immigration moved to a new phase of deportation work. Demonstrations increased. Many of the homeless unemployed were deported, some to home countries governed by military regimes. They would have been executed on arrival.

At the 1933 May Day Parade at Saskatoon, violence erupted. Twenty-six rioters were taken into custody. AC went on the run again. But not for long. Arrested and put on trial after 87 days, he represented himself, but he was given a sentence of two years. He was released from jail in December 1935, aged 31, and deported.

He travelled back across the Atlantic in chains. He’d left as an optimistic teenager more than a decade earlier. He arrived at Liverpool docks in December 1935 and headed for London, demoralised, exhausted. On Christmas Eve he made his way to a recommended café, and suddenly, fortune smiled. Helping there was the secretary of the local National Unemployed Workers Movement, Jane Orme Fetherstonhaugh, a clever, capable, articulate woman with an English accent and a friendly manner. The attraction was mutual. They discussed their dreams for a fairer society. They were both members of the Communist Party. Jane’s mother lent them money and they rented a house in Trebarwith near Tintagel, Cornwall. When they married, on 23 March 1936, AC gave his occupation as “fur trapper”. They honeymooned at the old fishing village of Polperro.

On his travels, AC had seen Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists at rallies, trying to whip up support among the unemployed men gathered around the docks, looking for work. AC wrote: “I had an episode on Sunday night; I went up to hear the Blackshirts, damn them! But at least I found a Daily Worker from the opposition there! News reports announced that a civil war had broken out in Spain.” But the British Government decided not to get involved in the Spanish Civil War, declaring a non-intervention policy.

By December 1936, after months of searching, AC was still without work, income or security. Jane Orme was five months pregnant, but they agreed there was only one thing to do. Jane Orme, who had been to Spain in 1932 and was still passionate about the Spanish Republican cause, would stay with friends in Portsmouth. AC would go to fight in Spain.

With other volunteers, he set off to Dover on 23 December 1936. They travelled to Paris and then by train to the Spanish border. They crossed the border on Christmas Day, travelling on to International Brigade headquarters at Albacete. On 6 February 1937, the newly formed 15th International Brigade Battalions, including AC’s No. 2 Machine Gun Company, set off for the front to counter a new fascist offensive aimed at trying to cut off the road through the Jarama Valley that led to the Spanish capital, Madrid, which was held at that point by the Republican troops. Thousands of fascist troops were reported to be part of this operation, including the Army of Africa, known as the “Moors”, notorious for brutality. AC’s Company was to cover the Brigade from sudden attack.

By the end of the Battle of Jarama, the Republicans had at least 10,000 dead or wounded and the Nationalists 6,000. Thirty members of the Machine Gun Company were captured. Nervous guards singled out a few comrades and they were shot in full view of the others. Twenty-seven of the Company’s prisoners remained, including AC. They were lined up before a firing squad but were reprieved. They were taken by lorry to Talavera de la Reina, an old pottery factory south of Madrid that was being used as a makeshift prison. A photograph taken when they were on the lorry was published in the British right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail, with an article that cast the International Brigaders as naïve fools.

Prisoners of the Spanish civil war (Image: Alan Riach)

Their work was to repair roads and dig graves for the bodies of executed Republican prisoners. The conditions were cruel. Their heads were shaved. They were covered in lice. They were beaten by guards, fearful that they might be shot at any time. Despite these conditions and the guards’ brutality, the International Brigaders were lucky: 30 other prisoners were shot every day, and the Spanish Republican prisoners were treated worst of all.

After Talavera, AC and his comrades were transferred to a prison in Salamanca. On arrival, they were each interrogated separately by Don Pablo Merry del Val, a Spanish fascist who told them he was a lawyer. After the interviews, Don Pablo Merry del Val said that they had one chance to save themselves: to fight on the fascist side. Each comrade remained silent. They were put on trial and found guilty of “aiding a military rebellion”.

Released and crossing the border through a gauntlet of fascist salutes (Image: Alan Riach)

In May 1937 they were informed that Franco had pardoned them, to be exchanged for a similar number of Italian prisoners captured by the Republicans. Most of the volunteers reached England by the end of May 1937. Jane Orme was at Victoria Station in London to meet her husband. She hardly recognised him, he was so thin, and his hair was cropped to the scalp, which was covered in sores.

Emaciated and traumatised but reunited with his wife of only a year and his baby daughter, AC had come home. But the war raged on. Franco’s fascists continued their destruction of all who opposed him. And as fascism escalated and the Second World War rolled across Europe, AC and his family remained under the scrutiny of MI5. Their flat above the Left Bookshop in Portsmouth was raided, their personal papers stolen. “Then, during the Second Word War, Whitehall maintained their ‘tabs’ on AC in a surprisingly direct way: they employed him. He was interviewed and offered the job of Labour Manager at one of the Royal Ordnance factories making ammunition in Euxton in Lancashire.”

The Daily Herald of May 1937 – showing Jane Orme and AC reunited after his return from Spain (Image: Alan Riach)

Later he discovered that other comrades who had fought in Spain were similarly employed. AC was a popular figure during his employment in the Royal Ordnance factory, introducing an apprentice scheme that included training and education as well as implementing much needed Health and Safety standards.

In the early 1960s AC’s job took him and Jane Orme to another Royal Ordnance factory, this time to Bishopton, in Renfrewshire, Scotland. This was to be their “final home … a cottage in lovely countryside at the bottom of a quiet country lane, in a small hamlet called Glenshinnoch, only two miles from Bishopton, bordering an unused area of the munitions factory land. AC managed to rent the cottage for the both of them for many happy years.”

Lisa recollects her grandparents fondly: “AC and Jane Orme were wonderful grandparents to my brothers and myself. Much warmth and fun was bestowed on us grandchildren on countless happy holidays at their Scottish country cottage home. They inspired us with their knowledge and showered companionable love upon us – four noisy, scruffy, questioning children with an insatiable appetite to learn.

"They had a wealth of life experience that they shared passionately with us, educating each of us in the varied ways of their world, whether bird and flower identification, poetry, stories, woodcraft skills and cookery or living history lessons. No classroom could teach a child what we soaked up effortlessly, clamouring for more.”

The stories I’ve introduced over the last few weeks are only outlines. The book, Our Fathers Fought Franco, gives greater detail and depth and demands immersive reading. But the power of resolution it enacts is exemplary. An online comment on last week’s essay on The National website asked the question: “But has fascism been defeated yet?” You can answer that. These stories show us why it needs to be.

NUMEN OF THE BOUGHS

Margaret Tait’s poem, below, from her book Colour Poems 1974 (1982) speaks of the young men returning from Spain: words, images, the meaning of what these men fought for – these stay in the mind.

Well, yes 
I do remember 
the young men 
going off to fight in Spain 
but not Sorley MacLean
not Sorley MacLean in his pain – 

then them coming back, changed, 
and yet not changed enough 
for my notion then, 
of what war might be. 

frozen soldiers of the plains,
stiff in trees,
in photographs
the black showing through the thin snow
on the hard plain of Madrid
as shown to us in newsreels
stick in my vision
and click now
with MacLean’s poem ‘to Eimhir’
and Lorca’s Numen of The Boughs
busy with studies then
and enjoying ourselves,
How much did we notice?

I remember the look of young men
Coming back
Who had been in Spain
And wondering about them
what took them there?
what brought them back?
What had they learned?
what sad knowledge was for evermore
buried deep inside them?