THE North East Volunteers for Liberty group aims to raise awareness of the volunteers who fought fascism in Britain, Italy and Spain.

With the 90th anniversary of the military coup which initiated the Spanish civil war coming up next year we are increasing our events.

We are thrilled that on top of our annual event we are able to host special on-off events. Our May Day Partisans Party was so successful it led to Harry Gallagher’s poem being used in a civic commemoration in Italy.

We are looking forward to hearing from the author Chris Jones this month. I first made contact with Chris after reading Red Mersey: The Communist Party in Liverpool and Birkenhead, 1920-1940. At the time I was researching Joe Rawlings for my forthcoming publication on the International Brigade volunteers from Co Durham.

Rawlings was born in Willington in Co Durham in 1894. He worked in the Brancepeth pit where his father had died just months before his birth. Rawlings’s mother remarried and the family moved to Merseyside when he was nine. 

He served from 1914 to 1919 in the Great War, and was a founding member of the Communist Party. He formed the Birkenhead Communist Party and led the 1932 Birkenhead uprisings before serving as a political commissar in the XV International Brigade in Spain.

While speaking to Jones about Rawlings and the Communist Party in Liverpool and Birkenhead in the 1920s and ’30s he mentioned he had just completed his latest book about the Liverpool-born Alexander Foote.

Jones had given it the title Tinker, Tailor, Scouser, Spy but when the book was published in January 2025 by Pen and Sword they gave it, in my opinion, the less memorable The Spy Who Helped the Soviets Win Stalingrad and Kursk.

Born in Liverpool in 1905, Foote became a member of the Communist Party in Liverpool and he would have known Rawlings well. 

Like Rawlings, Foote was a volunteer for liberty in the XV International Brigade in Spain, serving with Rawlings in the British Battalion. He later became an agent of Soviet military intelligence in Switzerland. He became the key telegraphist of the so-called “Red Three” network of radio stations, communicating top-secret German intelligence to the USSR from under the noses of the Swiss authorities. 

The information from Foote’s Morse key originated from sources in Germany and came to Foote via the enigmatic figure of Rudolph Rossler, known as Agent Lucy. During the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk, Soviet generals came to depend on the information from Foote’s transmitter and those of his comrades.

Jones has given a few talks on Merseyside this year, thus we are thrilled that he has chosen to travel across the Pennines to give two talks in the north-east. The first will be today, Wednesday September 24, in The Chapel in Middlesbrough, and then he will travel up the A19 to give another talk in the Tyneside Irish Centre in Newcastle, on Thursday September 25. Jones will be signing books and giving a presentation on Foote and his involvement with the “Lucy Spy Ring.”

Jones is not the only author to speak at events hosted by the North East Volunteers for Liberty in the coming months. In September 2024 the author Sean Scullion came to Teesside to sign copies and talk about his recently published book Churchill’s Spaniards Continuing the Fight in the British Army 1939-46, and he talked about the recruitment, training and deployment of often battle-hardened Spanish Republican soldiers into the British armed forces; many Spanish Republicans served as members of the elite SAS and Commandos, in the ranks of the Infantry and of the Pioneer Corps and as members of the Special Operations Executive.

Because the paperback edition has just been published, Scullion is returning to Teesside and will be signing books and speaking in St Cuthbert’s Church, Billingham on Friday November 28. He will once again speak about some of the 1,000 Spanish Republicans who volunteered to join the British army during the second world war, he will especially mention those who settled on Teesside after war because we hope to be joined, once again, by descendants of some of these Spanish Republicans who settled on Teesside.

We will also be joining The Young’uns for their Big Boro Birthday Bash, therefore with these talks and our commemorative events we have a very busy time over the next few months. If you would like more details or would like to join the North East Volunteers for Liberty, we can be contacted at NEVolunteersforliberty@gmail.com.