A View North: An old rebel who fought fascist tide

By Jack Holland

It was a coincidence, but a happy one, that I should have met with Bob Doyle on May 1. The spry 84-year-old with his beret cocked jauntily on the side of his head is one of the two last surviving members of the Irish contingent — the Connolly Column — that fought with the International Brigades against Franco’s fascists in Spain. The column, led by the legendary IRA man Frank Ryan, consisted of about 400 Irish republicans and socialists.

Last week, Doyle was in New York to attend the annual reunion of the veterans of the brigades’ Abraham Lincoln Battalion and to talk about his experiences in Spain.

On the morning we met, workers throughout Europe and elsewhere (but not the U.S.) were celebrating working-class solidarity with marches and demonstrations. Doyle was tucking into a hearty Irish breakfast of scramble eggs, bacon and thickly buttered bread in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, where he was visiting with veteran Irish republican George Harrison.

Doyle still had an appetite to match the meal. Perhaps talking about that morning in the spring of 1938 when the fascists put him up against a barn door and got ready to shoot him had given him an appetite.

"It was just before the battle of the Ebro," he recalled. In the early dawn a column from the brigades, ordered to move forward, found themselves caught in an unexpected enemy advance.

"They were Italians — in tanks and on motorcycles; 150 of us were captured," Doyle said, noting that Ryan, too, was caught. "A lorry load of civil guards arrived and we were lined up against a barn." The guard was "the murder squad," Doyle said, used to execute opponents of Franco. His Italian captors started to argue about whether to shoot their prisoners. "I knew that Franco was nearby in Borgos," Doyle said. "The officers decided to wait for orders about the prisoners."

Several hours later, they were told to form two single lines. This was it, the captives thought.

"We weren’t scared. There was a rush to be in the front line to get shot first," Doyle said, to get it over with. But instead, they were marched off to a prison. They were not going to die — not that day, at least.

Franco was endeavoring to improve his image abroad, where he was being regularly accused of atrocities against the civilian population and ill-treatment and torture of prisoners of war. The wife of the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had arrived in Spain to see the conditions in Franco’s jails for herself.

"We were kept alive to prove that he treated prisoners humanely," said Doyle, who would spend a year in jail in Spain.

Bob Doyle was born in Parnell Street in Dublin in 1916 and raised mostly in County Wicklow. His father worked in a soap factory.

Why did he become a socialist, I asked?

"I was always questioning things," he replied, with a matter-of-fact manner. When told in school that God made this and God made that he would always ask, "How?"

At about 20, he joined the Republican Congress, the left-wing republicans led by Peadar O’Donnell and George Gilmore, who wanted to give the republican movement a socialist orientation. They had split from the IRA in 1934.

In July 1936, Franco led a rebellion of right-wing generals against the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic. The fascist dictatorships of Italy and Germany promised not to become involved but soon began supplying their ideological counterparts in Spain with weapons and support. In reaction, progressive forces began organizing to defend the Spanish republic.

"All of Ireland was pro-Franco," Doyle said.

A wave of anti-communist and religious hysteria swept the country.

In January 1937, Bob was recruited into the International Brigades by Corra Hughes, Eamon de Valera’s niece. He stowed away aboard a boat bound for Spain from France and eventually, after several failed attempts, reached the battle front. Because of his IRA experience, he was put in charge of training. He took part in several actions, including the battle of Belchite and the siege of Teruel, which fell to the republicans only to be captured by the fascists weeks later. Beginning in March 1938, Franco launched a major offensive during which Doyle was captured, along with 230 American members of the International Brigades, 144 of whom were killed by the fascists.

Franco’s efforts to appear more "humane" to the POWs did have their limits.

"Every morning we were told to give the fascist salute," Doyle said. "We refused and were beaten until we did."

However, it was only a halfhearted effort, with the arms never raised too high.

Beatings were a regular part of camp life and were often done for no comprehensible reason. On one occasion he and two other prisoners were thrown into the Sala de Tortura for sitting down to eat their lunch, though there was no written rule to say it was an infraction.

They were viciously beaten with a club made from a bull’s penis.

The bemused Irishman was once dragged out with other prisoners — Americans, Italians, French, etc. — to be photographed as "Russian soldiers" — part of Franco’s propaganda campaign to prove the Soviets were sending troops to Spain. Jewish prisoners were always ordered to stand in front.

In April 1939, Doyle was released along with two comrades, Maurice Levitas, an Irish Jew, and Johnny Lemmon. The three went to Paris. There, the Irish ambassador, who Doyle says was a fascist sympathizer, refused to help them get back to Ireland. They made their own way home.

Home was not very welcoming to ex-International brigadiers, and he could not find a job. He returned to England and served in the navy during the war. Then he became a firewatcher in London. As the Nazi bombers attacked, he remembered the old poster he had with him from Spain: "Bombs on Madrid Mean Bombs on London."

Doyle married a Spanish woman, Dolores, and had two children. He spent most of the rest of his life in London, where he worked in the printing trade. His son Julian became friends with John Cleese of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Doyle’s granddaughters were in the film business and worked on several Monty Python projects, including the enormously successful "Monty Python and the Holy Grail."

In it, Doyle appears as a medieval peasant in a scene in which the peasants hurl defiance at the King. We all agreed that it was a most appropriate role for a natural-born rebel.