A PACKED meeting in central London paid tribute to Charlie Hutchison on Saturday, the only black Briton who is known to have volunteered with the International Brigades.

As part of Black History Month celebrations, the Marx Memorial Library event hosted a series of presentations, poetry readings and art displays by students at Newham Sixth Form College to commemorate the life of Mr Hutchison.

Alongside the scores of students taking part were 16 members of Mr Hutchison’s family.

Born in 1918 to a Ghanaian father and an English mother, Mr Hutchison was brought up in the National Children’s Home in Harpenden with his sister.

He left the home to move to Fulham in the early ’30s and took up work as a lorry driver.

It was there that he joined the Young Communist League, where he quickly became the Fulham branch chair.

After fighting the British Union of Fascists at the battle of Cable Street in October 1936, Mr Hutchison, still only 17, was one of the first British volunteers to travel to Spain to defend the democratically elected Republican government from a fascist uprising.

He was appointed as a machine-gunner and was wounded at the battle of Lopera on the Cordoba front, where the communist poet John Cornford was killed.

Mr Hutchison then fought for the next two years with the International Brigades and was one of the last British volunteers to be repatriated after the Brigades were withdrawn from service in late 1938.

After the war he joined the British army to continue the fight against fascism and was evacuated from Dunkirk in June 1940.

He married Patricia Holloway after the war and died in Bournemouth in 1993.

Mr Hutchinson’s son John spoke passionately about his parents, who were both lifelong communists and active trade unionists.

Describing how their house was full of “books by Marx, Salinger, Steinbeck and Hugo,” he recalled his father’s “voracious” love of reading, as well as boxing and other sports.

He added how, unusually for the ’50s and ’60s, he had friends all over the world through the communist movement.

He said: “My father believed in the family of man.”