Garry Otton

Author of ‘Religious Fascism (The Repeal of Section 28)

Part One: The last time the world demonstrated such a lack of humanity toward migrants was in 1939. Archie Dickson shone a light in that darkness.

I pass him on my morning jog. The raucous crowds still pouring out of the Alicante City nightclubs onto the marina at sunrise on a Sunday morning. They don’t see him. They hardly see the crumpled plastic bottles they leave in their wake, still buzzing from dancing the night away on Tequila shots. If there was a flat space around him, he’d be holding their empty glasses. But Archie’s eyes can’t see. Neither will he remember any youthful exuberance growing up in Wales with twelve siblings. He joined the Merchant Navy at 15. Now he faces the other direction, which is where, in 1939, he watched the ragged crowds flooding towards him begging for help. He is, after all, just a memorial bust sitting on the quayside, frozen at the age of 47 when he died.

I leave a flower to the crew of the SS Stanbrook and their captain, father of two, Archibald Dickson and quietly say, ‘thank you, Archie.’

The SS Stanbrook saw Spain in 1939, polarised and divided. Tearing itself apart by civil war. On the one side was Franco’s Falange and right-wing Nationalists. Mostly landowners, businessmen, socially conservative Roman Catholics and members of the military. On the other side were the Republicans: Workers, mostly agricultural labourers and an educated middle class including many writers, poets and artists like Pablo Picasso who painted his anti-war ‘Guernica’ in 1937. With chronic shortages, some lice-ridden soldiers were fighting in bare feet. After serious injuries they might find themselves in a hospital with just one syringe and discharged practically naked due to a shortage of clothes.

The port at Alicante had been blockaded not only by the encroaching Spanish Nationalists, but by Hitler’s Nazi war planes and some of Mussolini’s 80,000 Italian troops. By dodging one of Franco’s destroyers in bad weather, the British merchant cargo ship SS Stanbrook, a 230-foot-long tramp steamer, made it into Alicante port on the 19 March 1939 with orders from the ship’s owner to load only oranges, tobacco and saffron and get out. What Archie saw on arrival was a far cry from tourists sipping Cava or skinny lattes at the beachfront tapas bars today. He was met by thousands of hungry Republican refugees in ragged clothes clutching their few possessions on the quay of Alicante City. Amongst them were soldiers of the Republican army, International Brigade members, academics, artists, trade unionists, politicians, foreign advisers, and women and children of all ages. They were fleeing the Nationalists and waiting for ships to take them to safety. But they waited in vain. The Stanbrook was one of the last ships to leave Alicante harbour before it fell to the fascists. Alicante City was in chaos. The fascists were blockading and conquering the city as the elected democratic Republican government fell.

The cities of Murcia and Valencia had already fallen into the hands of the Falange on 8 March 1939. Thousands headed to the port city of Alicante, still held by the Republicans, to try to escape into exile on the last few ships to leave.

In total, somewhere between 10,000 and 12,000 Spanish Republicans fled to Africa. They were arriving on the French Algerian coastline in anything that would carry them. Coastguard vessels, ships, sailboats or small boats. But they were going to be made to feel as welcome as a one-way ticket to Rwanda.

The Republicans were in no position to organise evacuations. As the conflict neared a gruesome end, about 500,000 had already died and things were going badly for the army of their democratically elected government. Their navy of about 4,000 men had already fled. Almost three years earlier, in August 1936, France joined Britain, the Soviet Union, Germany and Italy in signing a non-intervention agreement that would be ignored by the Germans, Italians and Soviets. Many civilians decided not to turn their backs on Spain. About 40,000 foreigners fought on the Republican side in the International Brigades, largely under the command of the Communists, with another 20,000 serving in medical or auxiliary units. ‘Aid Spain’ groups were set up across Britain to get supplies to the Republicans. But before the civil war was over, Britain and France threw in their hat with the Falange fascists and recognised Franco as victor and leader of Spain on 27 February 1939. It contributed to the fascists winning the war after Franco’s Falange went on to capture Madrid on 28 March which led to the surrender of the Republican government the very next day.

The world was in a febrile state. The second world war was only months away. In May 1939, with tens of thousands of supporters, Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, the British Union of Fascists (BUF), were marching through London giving their Nazi salutes. Under the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’, the Daily Mail showed its true colours. Then, as now, I’m sure readers will tell you they ‘just buy it for the crossword.’

Two of the world’s worst despots at the time got together for a deal. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact saw Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin work on a secret protocol to partition Poland and divide Eastern Europe into German and Soviet ‘spheres of influence.’ Law-breaking authoritarians and criminals were taking a wrecking ball to world order. Sound familiar…?

In a letter to the Sunday Dispatch, published on 4 April 1939, Archie explained what he saw in Alicante City: “Among the refugees were all classes of people, some of them appearing very poor indeed and looking half starved and ill clad and attired in a variety of clothes ranging from boiler suits to old and ragged pieces of uniform and even blankets and other odd pieces of clothing.”

“Owing to the large number of refugees, I was in a quandary as to my own position, as my instructions were not to take refugees unless they were in real need. However, after seeing the condition of the refugees, I decided from a humanitarian point of view to take them aboard as I anticipated that they would soon be landed at Oran.”

Archie claimed that only some of his cargo had arrived and that the port authorities asked if he could ship 1,000 refugees to Algeria, so he started loading the refugees instead. The port authorities soon lost control of the “stampede”- in Archie’s words – clamouring to board the Stanbrook. The gangway “became choked with a struggling mass of people,” including guards and customs men abandoning their weapons to climb onboard.

On 28 March 1939, late in the evening, the Stanbrook slipped away with an estimated 2,638 passengers huddled together onboard.

As a little girl of 4-years old, Helia González remembered that cold night. “We arrived at the port by train from Elche; once there, a very long line separated us from a ship that seemed enormous to me, with a strange name and a lot of people. We, like everyone else, were afraid we wouldn’t be able to reach the gangplank that would allow us to get on board.” Helia’s father was a marked man. A union leader and founder of the Young Republican Left Party in her hometown of Elche. She added: “Finally, we reached the ship. Strong arms lifted me up. I saw a smiling face, a sailor’s cap, and he kissed me on the cheek. He didn’t say a single word, but that hug, that look, promised something good… it was him, it was Dickson, and there was no more danger. It rained that night. Mother shared an omelette with a family from Malaga, a couple and a boy my age, made with one egg and two potatoes and a little fat.” Archie wrote: “I was able to provide the weakest refugees with some coffee and some food. The vast majority had enough bread to last them all the way to Oran; the night was clear but cold, and I think the suffering of these people standing on the deck all night must have been very bad.”

“We had only just got clear of the port when the air raid rumour or bombardment proved to be true and within 10 minutes of leaving the port a most terrific bombardment of the town and port was made and the flash of the explosions could be seen quite clearly from onboard my vessel and the shock of the exploding shells could almost be felt.”

A German bomb was dropped where the SS Stanbrook had been moored.

The vessel reached Oran in French Algeria some 20 hours later. But packed together on that cold night, their ordeal was not over. The port authorities wouldn’t allow the ship to dock. After some wrangling – including threatening to ram the ship into Oran’s harbour – Archie got his way. Then, under French rules, the port authorities impounded the Stanbrook and refused to let the refugees disembark.

Archie persuaded the authorities to at least let the women and children off. Their destination would be a men’s prison where they suffered the indignity of being stripped naked and washed and disinfected in front of the guards.

After three weeks, the Manchester Guardian reported: “Still 1,000 men on the ship who since they left Spain have had no opportunity to wash or change their clothes and have hardly enough space to lie down. They are never allowed on the deck for exercise…  their food consists of half a loaf of bread a day and either tinned sardines or tinned paste.” According to Archie, their appearance was “pathetic, especially since they haven’t had a chance to wash or shave. Some of them have stripped off their clothes.”

The French authorities were openly hostile to the Spanish refugees. Yet, alarmed by the health hazards posed by housing over 1,000 refugees onboard an old tramp steamer, they finally gave up and interned the starving men along with the women in cold, lice-ridden concentration camps. Food was delivered to them by the Quakers, but still, many died.

At first, Franco demanded the Republican refugees be returned to Spain, but after some negotiations the French saw an opportunity to use most of the refugees of the Stanbrook as forced labour to build the Trans-Saharan Railway.

The French authorities initially demanded 205,000 French francs for the Stanbrook’s release from Juan Negrin’s Republican Government-in-exile, then raised the amount to 250,000 before finally settling for 170,000.

There were limited choices for Republicans fleeing for their lives. Most of the refugees arriving in Algeria were sent to Camp Morand near Boghari in the Sahara. The facilities at the camp were so wretched that its closure was recommended at the International Conference for Assistance to Spanish Refugees held in Paris in 1939. Nevertheless, it remained open.

Living in tents in the guarded camps would have been unbearable in the searing heat of the Algerian summer. And freezing in winter. Some tried to make an income to supplement the food shortages, making household items and selling them secretly. Some tried to escape and paid with their lives. Eventually, the refugees were released to integrate, to work or set up businesses. Most took up the opportunity to flee to other European countries or Argentina, Mexico or Cuba after the colonies gained their independence.  

In France itself, hundreds of refugees escaping across the Spanish border into France were interned in squalid camps scattered across 15 improvised sites. They were often just barbed-wire enclosures without sanitation, some erected on deserted beaches. In the first six months almost 15,000 refugees died of malnutrition or dysentery in these ‘reception centres.’ The Vichy government moved many refugees to Nazi-controlled concentration camps. Almost 5,000 Spanish civil war veterans were to meet their death in the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.

Once the French had emptied the internment camps of Spaniards after the Second World War, they filled them again with more foreign refugees from its war to keep its colonial hands on Algeria. After the eight-year war of independence in 1962, around 90,000 Harkis, mostly uneducated Muslims who had fought with the French, tried to seek asylum in France. Despite their persecution in Algeria for fighting against independence, they were refused the right to become citizens. Rather than exciting anti-immigrant feeling with an influx of poor Muslims, many were eventually turfed out of the concentration camps and rehoused in remote forest villages away from cities. Not until 2012, by way of an apology (and to pocket their vote), did President Nicolas Sarkozy publicly recognise France’s ‘historical responsibility’ in abandoning and interning the Harkis. Emanuel Macron followed suit in 2021.

It was the acerbic American writer, Gore Vidal who wrote: ‘A good deed never goes unpunished.’ And there could have been no more horrible a demonstration of this when, only a few months after landing his shipload of refugees in French Algeria, sailing the SS Stanbrook from Antwerp to England on 19 November 1939, a German U-57 torpedo struck the port side. The ship sank, and the crew of 20, including poor Archie, were lost.

Once news of the death of Archie and the Stranbrook crew reached the inmates of the Boghari concentration camp in Algeria, they stopped what they were doing, bowed their heads, and observed a minute’s silence.

Part 2: What happened to the Republicans Archie left behind?