HISTORY  |  AUSTRALIA

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by Michael Samaras

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Ted Dickinson was one of the most remarkable of the International Brigaders, those prescient individuals who fought the fascist forces of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini in the Spanish Civil War. He was born in England and as a child migrated with his family to Australia. At 20, he joined the politically radical Industrial Workers of the World and became one of its leading identities. He was physically impressive, with brown hair, blue eyes, and was described as “strikingly handsome” with a carriage as “straight as a ramrod”.

In 1928, as the economy worsened, Dickinson, with his friend Jim McNeill, campaigned for a better deal for the unemployed and led marches, protests and anti-eviction actions. The pair started a newspaper, Direct Action, and it was because of its radical articles that Dickinson was charged with sedition and imprisoned for six months.

On his release, Dickinson left Australia and sailed for England where he continued his political activism. In 1931, he organised a welcome procession for Gandhi, who was visiting London for a constitutional conference.

In 1935, during the Abyssinian crisis, Labour’s Clement Attlee spoke out against Mussolini. This prompted a Captain Fanelli, the editor of a fascist newspaper, to challenge Attlee to a duel. Attlee dismissed the challenge, but Dickinson made headlines when he volunteered to stand in for him:

I sent this Capt. Fanelli a registered letter, in which I said that I would consider it an honour if he would allow me to take Major Attlee’s place. If this fire-eating Italian fellow wants to eat fire, I will give it to him to eat.

In 1936, Nazi Germany attempted to showcase itself to the world by hosting the Berlin Olympics. The public relations campaign was successful. In October 1936, the World Jewish Congress met President Roosevelt who said he had received reports from recent visitors to Germany: “The synagogues were crowded and apparently there is nothing very wrong in the situation at present.”

Dickinson was not so easily fooled. In mid-1936, he formed the Legion of Blue and White Shirts to confront Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts on the streets of London. The Blackshirts sarcastically referred to the Legion as the “storm troops of Jewry.”

There was a succession of confrontations and the premises of the Blue and White Shirts were attacked by fascist gangs. There were wild scenes with a door broken down and six plate-glass windows smashed amid shouts of “Kill the Jews.”

At this point, in September 1936, Dickinson published a remarkable booklet, The Black Plague: An Exposure of Fascism. In it, he described fascism:

Fascism means war; Fascism worships war; Fascism is war – a war waged on everything decent, everything human. Fascism is devoid of all feeling. Fascism is a merciless machine, leaving in its tracks only horror, suffering, death, and imprisonment.

The most extraordinary part of the booklet, written a full two years two years before Kristallnacht and three years before the Second World War, was Dickinson’s warning of the genocidal intent of Nazism:

We see these power-lusting maniacs reintroducing that terrible blot on world history – pogroms of members of the Jewish faith.

It is nauseating to an Englishman to read of, or witness, men, women and children slaughtered, tortured and imprisoned just because they have committed the awful crime to be born, and, being born, demand the right to think, to study, to express themselves in their unions, guilds, or societies.

It is even more nauseating for us, in England, to witness the unpardonable attempt to wipe out of existence a whole race of people, their only alleged crime that of being of the Jewish race. [Emphasis in the original].

In December 1936, Dickinson went to Spain and joined the International Brigades. He was second-in-command of the Machine Gun Company of the British Battalion. In February 1937, he fought in the Battle of Jarama, a critical battle to save Madrid from falling to Franco. Disaster struck when troops guarding the Company’s flank withdrew, and about 40 men were taken prisoner and marched behind the fascists’ lines.

Dickinson was pulled from the group and executed. One of the captured soldiers, Tommy Bloomfield, a labourer from Scotland, gave this account:

He was given the choice of dying or soldiering for Franco. He chose death. He marched up to a tree like a soldier on parade, did a military about turn saying ‘Salud comrades’ the second he died.

What a man!

When he was shot, I felt my hair stand on end, my scalp prickle, then my life flashed through my mind, things that happened to me in my early youth, then a cold sweat and my senses went completely blank.

I felt like fainting. But when I saw that man die he put the backbone right back in my body, and I said to myself: “Tam, if you get out of this ye’re coming back to have another go.”

It took six months for the news to reach Australia. The newspapers reported the death: “Defiant to Last: Australian Knew How to Die”; “An Australian’s Bravery”; and “Spanish Rebel Troops Shoot Former Adelaide Radical”.

Jim McNeill, Dickinson’s great friend from his earlier days in Australia, would soon leave for Spain.

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Michael Samaras’ new book, Anti-Fascists: Jim McNeill and his Mates in the Spanish Civil War, is published by Connor Court.