Not Ice Cream Boys
I’m not a historian by training so when I read histories I find myself swinging wildly between grasping the overall flow of events and hunting out tiny details. This makes reading books like Michael Petrou’s Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War especially pleasurable.
On the one hand reading Petrou’s meticulously documented account reveals the vistas of my ignorance—take Morocco, for example. I had no idea that Franco’s coup began in Morocco and that many of the Nationalist troops were from North Africa. I was also surprised, but probably shouldn’t have been, to learn that much of the Spanish Civil War was trench warfare. Being sent into an International Brigades disciplinary unit (euphemistically referred to an engineering, fortification, or labour battalion) meant night work repairing often too shallow trenches and a very high casualty rate. Hard to tell if disappearing into one of the Republicans’ secret, extra-legal prisons—Prevention Houses—was a worse fate. Hugh Garner ended up in a labour batallion for attempted desertion but accusations of Trotskyism could also have near fatal results.
Detail from photo taken near Teruel, probably in January or February 1938
On the other end of the scale, there are tiny details derive ultimately from Petrou’s work with Comintern records and in other archives.
Petrou’s research turned up this photo from the Imperial War Museum—an ambulance named after Tom Ewen (also known as Tom McEwen), father of Jean and of two sons who fought in Spain.
It also turns out that Stewart “Paddy” O’Neil—one of the leaders of the On-to-Ottawa Trek—was born Stewart Homer. (He died on July 6, 1937 during the Brunette offensive.)
Like O’Neil many of the Canadians fighting in the International Brigades had spent the early 30s as itinerant workers and logged time in Bennett’s work camps. Having lived rough for many years, the Canadians were unlikely to leave their bedrolls or shovels behind because they were too heavy. They left that particular mistake to those they dismissed as “New York ice cream boys”. Not surprisingly the American and Comintern officers of the International Brigades thought the Canadians had an attitude problem.
