James Keogh's politics?

THE New Year issue of the International Brigade Memorial Trust's (IBMT) Newsletter reports on last year's Blue Plaque unveiling for Ashton-under-Lyne's Spanish Civil War volunteer, James Keogh.  It says that  James Keogh's sister 'Joyce Harrison unveiled a plaque to her brother, James Keogh at Tameside Central Library, Ashton-under-Lyne on 25 November 2011.'  The author of the IBMT Newsletter piece then writes:  'Keogh, who died in Spain at the age of 22, was the eldest of 11 children and as a self-taught socialist spent many hours in the library before giving up his tailoring apprenticeship and heading for Spain in May 1937.'

Tameside TUC researched James Keogh's life and involvement in the Spanish Civil War over a number of years, and could find no evidence that he was affiliated to any party or trade union and this was confirmed by the family.  There was certainly nothing in his letters to suggest that he was a 'socialist' or an 'anarchist' or anything else.  There is much more evidence to show what he was not politically rather than what he was:  despite being dismissed as a 'commie' on one right-wing web site up North there is a strong support that James was not held in great esteem by the Communist Party during the Spanish conflict.  The booklet produced by Tameside TUC in memory of James Keogh states that  'James Keogh like the nurse Lillian Urmston from Stalybridge were both flattered by being mentioned in dispatches in the Russian Archives in Moscow:  Lillian was in these secret files to be denounced for being "too friendly with the Spaniards" and James was accused of going "absent without leave".'   These files were compiled by the trusted Communist Party officials like the middle-class woman, Winifred Bates, sympathetic to Russia and sent to Spain to spy on the volunteers.  The Tameside TUC booklet reports:  'Some of the utterances in the files of the spies who reported back to Moscow suggest a particularly spiteful frame of mind of the kind we might attributed to the classroom creep:  the reference to Lillian Urmstone being "too friendly" or the false claim of James having a "criminal conviction" seem to be typical of this.'  As the author of the booklet remarks:  'People who write this kind of thing don't, unlike James, end up in an unmarked grave.'

Furthermore it is noted in the Tameside booklet that 'The fact that James Keogh was not a member of the Communist Party or indeed any other party or trade union, would mark him down as "politically unreliable" in the eyes of the Communist Party.'  Those people on certain right-wing websites who dismiss James Keogh as a 'dupe of the Reds' would do well to remember this spirit of independence about James as would those on the left who are keen to categorise James as 'a self-taught socialist'.  The fact is, as Orwell perceived, few people in England grasped the nature of the conflict in the Spanish Civil War where as Gerald Brenan said 'words of which most of history is made - feudalism, autocracy, liberalism, Church, Army, Parliament, trade union and so forth - have quite other meanings there to what they have in France or England.'  James Keogh may not have fully understood that even when he died, but nor do many of those of the British Left and the Right who write today.  Listening to Professor Paul Preston yesterday on Andrew Marr's Radio 4 program 'Start the Week', going on about the Civil War and crudely dismissing George Orwell's ethnography 'Homage to Catalonia', as someone who worked, lived and even had a son born in Spain, I sometimes wonder how much  Professor Preston has really grasped about the culture and nature of the Spanish people, despite his proud boast last month at the People's History Museum that he has studied Spain for some 40 years.
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The printed version of NORTHERN VOICES 13, with our report on Tameside TUC's application for a Blue Plaque for James Keogh, covers all sorts of stuff others won't touch and may be obtained as follows:

Postal subscription: £5 for the next two issues (post included) Cheques payable to 'Northern Voices' at
c/o 52, Todmorden Road, Burnley, Lancashire BB10 4AH. 
Tel.: 0161 793 5122.
email: northernvoices@hotmail.com









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Statistics, Official Statistics & Reports:

Doubt & uncertainty from the BLACKLIST FILES to the SPANISH CIVIL WAR RECORDS...

LAST night, just before the meeting of Tameside Trade Union Council in Ashton-under-Lyne, I and Derek Pattison - President of Tameside TUC - were handed the recently released MI5 files on the 4,000 or so British volunteers who have been recorded as going to fight or work as medical aid in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. On top of the pile was George Orwell's file which read as follows:

Reference: PF 62,162.

Name: BLAIR, Eric. ORWELL, George.
Address: 77, Parliament Hill, N.W.
Born: 25.6.02. Motihari, Bengal.
Occupation: Journalist and author.

General History.
30.4.37. Member of the I.L.P. (Independent Labour Party) fighting with the International Brigade in Spain. (cutting from "The New Leader".) 1938. Was one fo (sic) the signatories to a Joint Peace Manifesto, issued by the P.P.U., No More War Movt., etc. Resigned from the Indeian (sic) Police, and when in Paris took an interest in the activities of the French C.P. (Communist Party)
21.1.50. Died.

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This is immediately recognisable as an inaccurate record in so far as all the evidence shows that George Orwell never joined the International Brigade in Spain and that he fought with the POUM militia as a member of the I.L.P. He resigned from the Indian Imperial Police as from 1st, January 1928 and went to Paris in the spring of that year. According to Peter Davison in his book on Orwell 'Facing Unpleasant Facts: 1937-39', Orwell 'is said to have "paid a membership subscription to the Peace Pledge Union (PPU)" in December 1937.' Davidson believes that '... the evidence he (Orwell) joined the PPU is based on a misreading of a receipt in the Orwell Archive.' It seems this misreading is based on an acknowledgement of a 'receipt for 2s 6d, dated 12th, December 1937, from Mrs E. Blair - Eileen, not Eric', and Davison thinks that she was buying pamphlets for her husband. No mention in Davison's book of Orwell signing the Peace Manifesto, though he may well have done so even if he had not been a member of the PPU.

The moral of this is that we should approach all these documents with caution. Whether it be the dodgy blacklist files of the unlicensed data bank of Ian Kerr's Consulting Association, the MI5 files and official records, the contents of the Moscow Archives, the lists of volunteers in the Marx Memorial Library or the oddly assembled booklet, written by Bernard Barry, 'From Manchester to Spain', published in 2009 by the Working Class Movement Library. Ian Kerr's blacklist files on the workers and trade unionists in the British building trade were full of errors; the current MI5 records on Spanish Civil War volunteers are at times speculative and flawed; some of the material in the Moscow Archives is 'bitchy' about people from Tameside like Lillian Urmston and James Keogh; and Bernard Barry's 2009 booklet on the local volunteers from Greater Manchester has a poorly categorised and misleading 'Roll of Honour'. The ethnomethodologists urge us to study how lists, files, Rolls of Honour and official statistics are assembled by the people collecting the data. One consideration should be the motives of the data collectors in these cases, whether it be the blacklister, Ian Kerr, or Bernard Barry on behalf of the Working Class Movement Library, or the spies snooping on their comrades fighting in Spain to send stuff to Stalin and the Moscow Archives, or the agents employed by MI5 counting how many went to Spain and who was in the Communist Party: all of these parties may have an incentive to exaggerate and inflate their figures.

In the light of the recently released MI5 new data and the fact that Tameside TUC may have been misled by the 'Roll of Honour' in Bernard Barry's booklet 'From Manchester to Spain' to include people in the 3rd edition of our booklet commemorating the Spanish Civil War who did not qualify for recognition, it ought now to be revised in the production of a 4th edition later this year.

History of Tameside - James Keogh

Here's the section of the Tameside episode of the History of Greater Manchester, broadcast on BBC Radio Manchester this Wednesday. Our very own Bammy is interviewed about Tameside's volunteers, in particular James Keogh. TMBC plan later in the year to unveil a Blue Plaque in memory of James Keogh at the site of his former workplace in Ashton-under-Lyne.

History of Greater Manchester on Radio Manchester

IF IT'S WEDNESDAY! IT MUST BE TAMESIDE!!!

YESTERDAY it was Salford, last Friday it was Rochdale, today it's Stockport but Wednesday it will be Tameside. John Stapleton's 'History of Greater Manchester' continues tomorrow on BBC Radio Manchester with coverage of the Tameside towns: Ashton, Stalybridge, Hyde, Dukinfield etc. With Salford it was Marx and Engels drinking at The Crescent pub, L.S. Lowry, 'Love on the Dole', 'The Classic Slum', Ruth Frow and the Working Class Movement Library, the wealth of local actors and playwrights and, horror of horrors, even Hazel Blears. The Rochdale one included Rochdale's neo-Gothic Town Hall and its architect, the Co-op and the Pioneers, the Chartists, Our Gracie and even former Chairman of the Planning Committee Councillor Norman Smith on his brother Big Cyril Smith - the notorious local politician who dominated politics in the town for decades. Former Alderman Cyril Smith, who died last September, was a giant character rather like 'The Workhouse Donkey', Charlie Butterwaite, in John Arden's play of the same name: Butterwaite was born in a Yorkshire Workhouse and Smith was born in a Rochdale slum and both went on to triumph in politics. John Stapleton’s had an emotional interview with Norman Smith, who describes growing up with his brother Cyril in 1930’s Rochdale. He reflects on his brother’s political career and recalls how Cyril made his mum Mayoress in 1966.

Yet, on Wednesday the 13th April it will be Tameside's turn. Tameside is a name for a collection of small towns in East Manchester. It will be Tameside's link to the Spanish Civil War that will interest some of our readers. From Tameside more than half a dozen of its citizens in the 1930s set off for Spain to fight in Civil War to defend the young Spanish democratic republic, plus one young woman, Lillian Urmston from Stalybridge, by then in her twenties, who went off to nurse the wounded in that war. At that time, in 1936, there were only three democracies left in Western Europe; these included Great Britain, France and the then threatened Spanish Republic, which at the time in July 1936 had been presented with the treachery of military uprising by many of its Generals led by General Franco and General Mola and supported by the dictators Chancellor Hitler of Germany and the Italian Mussolini. This year Tameside MBC is going to commemorate one of their number, James Keogh, from Ashton who died fighting in Spain in March 1938 in the mountains of Aragon where George Orwell earlier had served in the POUM militia, by installing a Blue Plaque for him and other local combatants in the town. Tameside Trade Union Council and the local publication Northern Voices have been campaigning for this almost since the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War in 2006. Besides the young James Keogh and Lillian Urmston, other Tamesiders who are known to have gone to fight in Spain in the 1930s included: Albert Godwin from Dukinfield, Daniel Albert Boon, William Brown, James Greenwood - all from Ashton. Some others are suspected to have lodged or stayed in the Tameside towns and also believed to have served in Spain. None of these seem to have been affiliated to a political party of any kind and in James Keogh's case, as an apprentice tailor working in central Ashton, he was not even a member of a trade union. This suggests great strength of character in Keogh's case and in that of Lillian Urmston for she didn't belong to a political party either: and yet both of these, perhaps because they were not members of the Communist Party had derogatory references to them when recently documents were revealed in the Moscow Archives - containing reports of them both from communist spies to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The Secretary of Tameside Trade Union Council will be being interviewed on the participation of these volunteers in the program.

With this years Oscar winner (for his part in 'The King's Speech') Colin Firth about to play George Orwell in the coming film 'Homage to Catalonia', which records Orwell's own experiences in the Spanish Civil War between Christmas 1936 and May 1937, any coverage of the Spanish Civil War is bound to be topical. This is the 75th anniversary of the start of that war in July 1936.