EXACTLY 85 years ago on December 7 1938, the surviving members of the British Battalion arrived back from Spain. As their train pulled into London’s Victoria Station, the 305 men were greeted by tens of thousands of well-wishers.
 
Among those on board were men who had fought in all the great battles of the war, the names of which were inscribed on the banners they held aloft as they were cheered through the throng.
 
The longest-serving was Hugh Barker, a 28-year-old machinist from Collyhurst, Manchester. He set foot in Spain in December 1936 and was in action within a few weeks at Cordoba. He was injured twice, at Jarama and Brunete, but recovered to take part in the epic Battle of the Ebro in the summer and autumn of 1938.
 
Barker was one of 2,500 anti-fascists from Britain and Ireland who had served in the International Brigades — of whom 530 gave their lives.
 
They in turn were part of a larger international army of more than 35,000 volunteers who came to help Spain’s beleaguered republic when it was attacked by Europe’s fascist dictators and throttled by Britain’s arms embargo on Spain’s elected progressive government.
 
Britain’s leaders feigned neutrality under the guise of so-called “non-intervention.” But in reality, they supported Franco’s fascist rebellion. Archival evidence now proves what supporters of Spanish democracy suspected at the time.
 
Britain’s shameful actions, which were integral to the wider policy of appeasement towards the fascist powers, were just as decisive in securing Franco’s victory as the troops, planes and armaments that Hitler and Mussolini poured into Spain.
 
The British Establishment, as one historian has concluded, preferred to put its class interests above the national interest.
 
In London the returning International Brigaders were led off the train by their commander, Manchester firebrand and rebel Sam Wild, and by their popular commissar, hardened Aberdeen anti-fascist Bob Cooney. They received a tumultuous reception.
 
Victoria station had never seen anything like it, one railway worker was quoted as saying, and most likely never would again.
 
Crowds spilt out from the station concourse onto the streets outside. They sang the Internationale, while battalion banners and the flags of all the 52 nations represented in the International Brigades floated above them.
 
Among those to greet the volunteers and give speeches of solidarity were Labour leader Clem Attlee and Willie Gallacher, the Communist MP for West Fife. He told them they had “written a page in history that will never fade.”
 
Similar sentiments had come from Daily Worker reporter Frank Pitcairn, better known as the journalist Claud Cockburn, himself a veteran of the International Brigades.
 
Witnessing the battalion cross the frontier from Spain for the start of the journey home, he wrote: “It was an extraordinary moment as these men, who have played such an enormous part in the history of our times, arrived in France.”
 
His words echoed those of Spanish republican leader Dolores Iraburri, better known as “la Pasionaria.” She told them before their departure from Spain: “You are history. You are legend.”
 
With their example of solidarity and anti-fascism, the International Brigades inspired the world — and continue to do so today. In Spain, they helped check the advance of fascism for two and a half years — and exposed the wretched complicity of their own governments in siding with Franco.
 
But, however heroic their role and however rapturous their reception at home, the fact remains that victory in Spain was not achieved.
 
The Popular Front government of the republic fought bravely on, but the odds were stacked against it. Franco declared victory in April 1939, with the drumbeat of all-out war growing louder across Europe.
 
Spain’s fate had been sealed six months earlier in the Munich Pact of September 1938, when Neville Chamberlain returned from Germany declaring “peace for our time.”
 
Another democracy, Czechoslovakia, was being thrown to the fascist wolves. Responding to these developments, Spanish premier Juan Negrin announced the standing-down of the international volunteers.
 
He hoped this move might put diplomatic pressure on Britain and France to urge a negotiated end to the war. The best his government could now hope for was an honourable peace, with guarantees of safety for republican supporters.
 
Negrin knew full well the extent of the bloody reprisals and repression that was taking place in parts of Spain occupied by the fascists.
 
The “Men of Munich” in the Tory hierarchy would not be moved. For them, the enemy was, not fascism or Nazism, but the USSR and any other government that threatened elite British interests and investments.
 
It was no surprise therefore when Chamberlain rushed to recognise Franco as the government of Spain after Barcelona’s fall in January 1939.
 
These momentous events are not part of an ever-receding distant past. Their lessons tumble down through history and are still with us today.
 
As one International Brigade veteran, Bob Doyle, would always insist: nothing has changed.
 
Speaking in 2006 in the long wake of the US-UK invasion of Iraq, Dublin-born Doyle said whenever he was told that Spain was the last great noble cause: “I know that I am speaking to someone who doesn’t want to see the obvious truth.”
 
The powers that had supported Franco in Spain were still active, he pointed out, but today their reach was global.
 
“The same US corporations that supplied the fascists with oil in Spain are today pilfering the oil of the Iraqi people.
 
“The British government that lied to the people while secretly giving financial credits and hypocritically allowing arms to be smuggled to the Spanish fascists is the same government that lied about weapons of mass destruction and led the British people into a war that they did not want.
 
“And those who lie and cheat to hold on to power, who exploit child and slave labour to make yet more profits, who torture, murder and massacre in defence of their interests, are still in control.”
 
Jim Jump is the chair of the International Brigade Memorial Trust.
 
There are events around the country throughout this week to commemorate the anniversary of the return of the volunteers. See the www.international-brigades.org.uk for details.