This is an article in the current issue (no. 158) of The Historian, the magazine of the Historical Association. It was triggered by walking with my dog Django in the churchyard of St Nicholas in Brockenhurst on a mission to find Adeline Vaughan Williams’ grave in the Fisher family plot. I found the grave and an intriguing reference to the Spanish Civil War on another Fisher headstone…
Hearing the call to arms
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Herbert Douglas Fisher, the International Brigader from a famous family forgotten for eight decades
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The intellectual aristocracy of late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain constitutes a Venn diagram of familiar names â the Stracheys and the Stephens, the Wedgwoods and the Darwins, the Keynes and the Trevelyans. These affluent, upper middle-class pillars of public life espoused a secular, liberal view of the world. Their depth of learning and keen sense of duty generated strongly held opinions on every aspect of science, culture and society. These were high profile members of the great and the good, equally at home in the Treasury or the London Library, Trinity high table or the Palace of Westminster. Neither by the early twentieth century was this a wholly male world: women writers and thinkers like Virginia Woolf drew deeply on the work of pioneering feminists like George Eliot and Philippa Fawcett. By the late 1900s Cambridge and Bloomsbury constituted the twin epicentres for these hard-working, well-intentioned and yet at the same time highly privileged scientists, scholars, artists and public servants. An unlikely outpost would be deep in the New Forest, for Brockenhurst was home to three generations of high achievers, all boasting a healthy respect for professionalism and for the power of the intellect: the Fisher family. The Fishers were a model of late Victorian patriarchy. Head of the household was Herbert Fisher, his first name passed down to son and grandson. Fisher was father to eleven children, almost all of whom made waves in later life.
Herbert Fisherâs varied career combined writing popular histories with keeping the future Edward VII on the straight and narrow. Well into middle age Herbert married Mary Jackson, a child of the Raj. One of Maryâs sisters, Julia Jackson, was the second wife of Lesley Stephen, founder of The Dictionary of National Biography. Their children included (using their married names) Virginia Woolf and the artist Vanessa Bell, thereby linking the Fisher clan with the Bloomsbury Group. Vanessaâs eldest son, Julian Bell, features later in this story. Another of Maryâs sisters, Adeline Jackson, was the wife of Oxfordâs Regius Professor of History, Henry Halford Vaughan. Herbert and Mary Fisherâs eldest daughter married Frederick Maitland, doyen of English legal history, while their eldest son would become H.A.L. Fisher, distinguished don and wartime President of the Board of Education. Here then was a dynasty of historians, but here also was a family swift to respond in times of national emergency.
H.A.L. Fisher â the second Herbert â served King and Country by patrolling the corridors of power. The others saw active service in the Boer War and the First World War: Jack died in South Africa, while William and Charles Fisher both saw action at the Battle of Jutland. Charles, a renowned classicist and cricketer, died when HMS Invincible took a direct hit. William survived the battle and in due course rose to become an admiral. He had chosen the Royal Navy as a career, but in 1914 none of his brothers were under any obligation to fight as they were all too old. This was certainly the case for Edmund Fisher, Mary and Herbertâs sixth child. He was aged forty-five when repeated attempts to join the Royal Field Artillery finally bore fruit. At the start of the war Edmund had shut down his highly successful architectural practice to work as a ward orderly. From mid-1917 he saw active service as a second lieutenant with the Ulster Division until invalided home with severe appendicitis early the following year: on Easter Sunday 1918 he died of peritonitis.
Like his mother and father Edmund Montagu Prinsep Fisher was buried in a dedicated burial ground at St Nicholas Church on the edge of Brockenhurst village. Nor was he the only sibling whose last resting place was where they considered their real home: in 1951 Adeline, Herbert and Maryâs third daughter and Ralph Vaughan Williamsâ first wife, was interred alongside her parents. Edmund Fisher shares a headstone with his wife, Janie Freshfield, who survived him by almost half a century. Close examination of the badly worn inscription reveals a third name, their son Herbert. Astonishingly, the headstone lists this third Herbert as having died in Spain in March 1938. Once more a male member of the Fisher family had heard the call to arms and felt it his duty to fight; but this time in a very different sort of war, defending the Spanish Republic. Hidden in the long grass, unseen from the Anzac war memorial that stands at the heart of St Nicholasâs graveyard, the headstone constitutes a very different sort of commemoration. The men and women who journeyed from around the world to join the International Brigades are remembered in a variety of locations. Least likely, and long ignored, is a half-forgotten family plot in Hampshire and a stone slab bearing the name Herbert Douglas Fisher, son of Edmund and Janie.
Herbert Fisher was eight when his father died. He inherited Edmundâs fine eye for ceramics, and in 1929 left the family home in Chelsea to serve a three-year apprenticeship at the Ashtead Pottery in Surrey. Located on the North Downs, Ashtead was a benevolent institution for disabled ex-service men, and Fisher drew on a family connection with the company chairman, Sir Stafford Cripps. Cripps was both a well-known barrister and a maverick figure within the Labour Party, but during the war he had run a chemical factory. He advised Herbert to maintain a life very different from the rest of the family â in the Potteries. Thus in 1932 Fisher secured work as a department manager at W.T. Copeland & Sons, a major producer of industrial china and earthenware.
Witnessing first-hand working-class life in Stoke-on-Trent radicalised Fisher, previously a devout Anglican. His night-time reading shifted from the Bible to Marx. In January 1935 he described to Hugh Derry, an old school friend, how he felt when supervising undernourished and under-paid packing girls in âa sort of Danteâs Infernoâ.[1] By the following year socialism, he told Derry, had become âthe only religion worth havingâ, with Fisher evangelical in his secular, materialist analysis of poverty and capitalist exploitation.[2] The archetypal fellow traveller, Fisherâs idealism was tempered by the harsh political reality of a demoralised Labour Party and a Communist Party contemptuous of social democracy. Hope came in 1935 when Stalin initiated a dramatic change in the party line. Henceforth the Comintern â the Moscow-based Communist International â promoted an anti-fascist âPopular Frontâ strategy of communist alliance with other parties of the left, most crucially in France and Spain.
Fisher became ever more enthusiastic in his embrace of left-wing politics. So much so that after four years at Copeland his employers forced him out. He moved to the Tunstall pottery firm of W.H. Grindley & Company. As a manager and member of the National Society of Pottery Workers he was in a unique position to improve working conditions. Fisher saw adolescent workers as especially vulnerable to Grindleyâs unashamed exploitation of its workforce. Thus he organised a camping holiday for young families, and he called on directors to raise wages: on 7 December 1937 he described to his friend Eleanor Clough how, âI was forced to undermine the moral integrity of those above me. To put back their self-respect they had to get rid of me.â[3] Sacked in September 1936, Fisher marked his dismissal by joining the Communist Party of Great Britain. He was no longer in work, but he did have a party card.
Meanwhile, after fourteen months of brutal fighting the Spanish Republic remained in desperate need of more weapons and more volunteers. The failure of Spanish conservative forces to regain power in July 1936 had seen an abortive military coup translate into a visceral struggle between the Second Republicâs recently elected leftist government and the Nationalist insurgents united around Francisco Franco, a fiercely traditionalist general determined to destroy secular liberalism. The arrival of foreign volunteers and the formation of the International Brigades, matched by the intervention of Hitler and Mussolini in support of the Nationalists, had seen Spainâs civil war transcend frontiers and acquire an ideological and great power dimension. Keen to contain the war and avoid a European-wide confrontation, the governments of leading liberal democracies like Britain, France and the USA keenly maintained a policy of non-intervention. The Republic therefore relied heavily upon the Soviet Union for military support: a growing dependence upon Stalin saw the Communists, whether Spanish or from outside, exercise growing influence inside both the government and the military. Nowhere was this more obvious than within the International Brigades (IB), first formed in the autumn of 1936. The IB battalions were overwhelmingly under communist control, their exploits securing them an elite status within the Republicâs hard-pressed, overstretched armed forces.
Herbert Douglas Fisher was young and fit, with no family responsibilities and no job. Having only just joined the Communist Party he had no responsibilities. Thus, unlike the early communist fighters in Spain, many of whom were veteran activists back home, he was expendable. It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that he was encouraged to join the International Brigades. The Communist Party of Great Britain was coming under considerable pressure from the Comintern and thus the Kremlin to boost the size of its contingent. Across the winter of 1937-8 a total of 267 volunteers left London for Spain. Among them was the future trade union leader Jack Jones, the gifted philosopher and mathematician David Guest, the Olympic rower and gold medallist Lewis Clive, and the now ex-pottery manager Herbert Fisher. Born into a Lancashire working-class family Jones was more typical of the British volunteers than the others; he was also the only one who made it home.
On 21 November 1937 Special Branch listed Fisher as having passed through Dover. He duly made his way from Dunkirk to Paris, and to the Comintern office that organised the passage of volunteers south to Spain. Under regular surveillance by the French authorities, the Brigadesâ transit centre was an open secret. At the start of December Fisher took a train down to BĂ©ziers, describing the town to Janie Fisher on 24 November 1937 as âcharmingâŠhot sunshine and lovely foodâ â unlike his proletarian comrades he enthusiastically embraced Mediterranean cuisine.[4] All passengers on their way to Spain were under strict orders not to congregate nor communicate. On arrival at the base of the Pyrenees Fisher and his fellow volunteers were led over the mountains, across the border and down into Catalonia. By the time these new recruits passed through Barcelona the Anarchists and the POUM, an anti-Stalinist Marxist workers party, were no longer the predominant political force. Social revolution was no longer a priority, with the authorities reassuring a previously alarmed middle class that the war effort was focused solely on saving the Republic. Fisher no doubt applauded the degree of discipline and control imposed by the new regime. The Catalan government was now Communist dominated, aligned with Madrid and ruthless in suppressing dissent. The new recruit did not live long enough to experience disillusion, let alone read Homage To Catalonia, George Orwellâs recollection of the bloody power struggle that had convulsed the city the previous spring.
Orwell had fought with the POUM militia on the Aragon front, which at the time was relatively quiet. However, in the spring of 1938 Franco switched the focus of his attack away from Madrid and east into Aragon and towards Valencia. In late 1937 a successful winter offensive had seen the Republicâs restructured, much improved Popular Army seize the provincial capital of Teruel, high in the southern Aragonese mountains. Early the following year the Nationalists overcame appalling weather conditions and fierce resistance to recapture the city. They gained fresh momentum at a critical moment for the outcome of the war: air supremacy plus superior armour and artillery saw the insurgents succeed in splitting Catalonia from Madrid and the rest of the Republic. Soviet military aid was vital for the survival of the Republic, but it never matched the level of support the rebels received from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy: the Luftwaffe airmen of the Condor Legion and the Blackshirt militia of the Corpo Troppo Volontarie formed the vanguard of the Francoist forcesâ merciless advance to the Mediterranean coast.
By late February 1938 Herbert Fisher had spent three months at Tarazona da la Mancha, an outpost of the International Brigadesâ main training depot in Albacete. Preparation for front-line duties was now all but complete. Overseen by the ruthless, often manic, commandant AndrĂ© Marty, the induction of volunteers was a brutal reality check. Yet, despite the harsh discipline and the intensity of the training, Fisher relished the environment. Surviving letters to family and friends are genuinely enthusiastic about the other trainees, who were mostly tough Canadians already hardened to military life (but âmany of them have had occasion to visit the doctor which I have not!â he told Janie Fisher on 9 January 1938), and about the local population, all of whom were extraordinarily generous despite living in stark poverty.[5] On 6 February 1938 he reassured Hugh Derry that: âAlthough Spain in England is still a controversial subject, in loyalist Spain the people are of one mind. We know they all want to win the war and back up the government by the way they help us. This makes a peaceful atmosphere in this country at warâŠonly bitterness of experience has brought this singleness of purpose and peace of mind to a people, whose education has been sadly neglected by past rulers.â[6]
Spurred on by a Paul Robeson concert and a morale-boosting speech from the radical writer Charlotte Haldane, Fisher was keen to enter the fray. As he told Janie Fisher on 14 December 1937, âI must go on with the fight â for me it has shifted from the potteries to Spain. It is quite natural, and many people who have been engaged in productive work and have gained working class experience have done just what I have done.â[7] Fisher had been in Spain over three months before finally he came under fire. This contrasted starkly with those raw recruits who earlier in the war had found themselves thrown into battle ill-prepared and ill-equipped. By mid-1938 the completion of basic training had become a priority. Even Marty, a man wholly indifferent to the well-being of his supposed comrades, could see the argument for producing soldiers with some chance of survival, rather than simply despatching lambs for the slaughter. An idealistic Fisher insisted in letters home that the maintenance of discipline and morale was more humane than âmilitary life in the service of the capitalist forcesâ. Thus back on 9 January 1938 he had complained to Janie Fisher how âthe British press do not do justice to the huge strides the Popular Front Government has made during the past few monthsâ.[8]
The Nationalistsâ spring dash for the sea saw a reversion to throwing freshly arrived volunteers into the line, their unnecessary deaths confirming the case for deploying fully trained soldiers. Fisher himself felt fully trained, and on 12 February 1938 joined the XV International Brigadeâs British Battalion, known originally as the XVI Saklatvala. By early March the Battalion was holding ground in a cypress grove outside Belchite. As a runner for his company commander Fisher was in continuous danger. In due course all his companyâs officers were killed, and by mid-March Fisher himself was listed as missing in action. Ten months later the news of Herbert Fisherâs disappearance was finally passed on to his mother, by someone he had become friendly with at Albacete. John Penman was a Fife miner and a staunch party member who had spent five years in Russia digging coal in the Donbass and Siberia and tunnelling metro lines in Moscow. In the retreat from Belchite he had been captured by the Nationalists. As a commissar Penman was lucky not to be shot, and in early 1939 he formed part of a prisoner exchange. Once back in London he wrote on 8 February 1939 to Janie Fisher passing on the meagre information he had gleaned concerning the loss of her son: âHe gave his life in a cause in which he sincerely believed and you should be proud of him as I and others are that knew him.â[9]
The wording on the Fisher family headstone in Brockenhurst is a direct consequence of John Penmanâs letter to Janie Fisher. She lived for another twenty-four years, and in all that time saw no reason to consider any different narrative. Yet from scanty evidence in Moscow and London the International Brigades archivist Jim Carmody and historian Richard Baxell pieced together an alternative version of Herbert Fisherâs final months, which a later generation of Fishers considers the more credible. In May 1938 did Fisher [IB identity number 1472] join the Servicio Sanitario Internacional (SSI), the International Brigades Medical Service, serving as a sanitario with one of the two Sanidad units assigned to the British? It would make sense if in fact he had survived the torrid baptism of fire at Belchite. Neither Carmody nor Baxell could say their version of events was definitive. Baxell worked on the assumption that this little known Brigader had lived. Hence he felt confident in questioning the claim of Bill Alexander, arguably the British Battalionâs most impressive commander, that Fisher had died in the Battle of the Ebro. How could Alexander be so sure when he had been repatriated home before the battle began, having sustained serious wounds at Segura de los Baños?
The alternative narrative is that Herbert Fisher did not die at Belchite nor in battle a few months later. More likely, he was badly wounded when Republican forces in Upper Aragon launched their last great offensive of the war: twelve divisions â including the battle-hardened 35th and its three International Brigades â crossed en masse from the east to the west bank of the Ebro River in a concerted effort to counter the Nationalistsâ earlier success in splitting the Republic. The Popular Army incurred huge losses trying to break out of its bridgehead across the river, and then in resisting a ferocious counter-offensive by the Nationalists. One of Fisherâs fellow sanitarios with the British Battalion, Alun Menai Williams, described the battle as âtwelve weeks of organised, unyielding, mass slaughterâ.[10] Exposed to relentless strafing and ground fire, a succession of stretcher-bearers died while carrying the wounded from the trenches to ambulances and emergency medical posts.
The British Battalion and its Sanidad support numbered around 650 men: casualties sustained at the battles of Jarama, Brunete and Belchite had seen the XVI undergo serial reconstruction, and by mid-1938 two-thirds of the troops were Spanish. On the far bank of the Ebro the Battalion was once more decimated: after the first fortnight of fighting only 150 men were left out of 558. This was when David Guest and Lewis Clive were killed, and Jack Jones saw his right arm shattered. Horrendous casualties were sustained in hilltop battles outside Gandesa and in a final fighting retreat to the river. By the last week in September the XVI Battalion was back on the east bank, where it was stood down for the last time â since late July 48 of its 106 British Brigaders had been killed, taken prisoner or listed as missing in action. Across two years over five hundred British volunteers in Spain â around a quarter â had died. Around five thousand of all Brigaders had been killed during this time â about one in seven â and a similar number were unaccounted for.
The miraculously unscathed and the walking wounded were entrained to Ripol, a town in the foothills of the Pyrenees close to the French frontier. The Ebro offensive was by now in its death throes, success seen solely in the Republicâs ability to survive a further four months. The Popular Armyâs combat effectiveness had been shattered. Furthermore, its foreign fighters were due to depart, in a last desperate gesture to court the support of France, Britain and the United States. The Munich agreement ceding the Sudetenland to Germany from Czechoslovakia soon ended Republican hopes of the civil war becoming part of a Europe-wide great powers conflict. Although over seven thousand Brigaders were fit enough to leave Spain, a further three thousand or so were still in hospital. Exiled Germans and Italians faced the prospect of internment in France, but not the British, for whom League of Nations representatives negotiated an unhindered passage home. In Barcelona on 28 October 1938, two hundred thousand Catalans lined the streets to see the men of the XVI Battalion take their place in the International Brigadesâ farewell parade. Three weeks later the British contingent left Catalonia, a sealed train taking them through France to the Channel. At Victoria Station on 7 December thousands gave a heroesâ welcome to the surviving veterans of the two thousand or so volunteers who since July 1936 had travelled from Britain to fight fascism in Spain. Sadly, Herbert Douglas Fisher was not among those now safely home.
While his comrades were marching down the Ramblas, listening to a grateful Dolores IbĂĄrruri â the legendary La Pasionaria â hail them as heroes and martyrs, Fisher was fighting for his life in a hospital twenty-seven miles north of Barcelona. The SSI had taken over a medieval infirmary in the town centre of Vic (in Spanish, Vich) and the beds of wounded Brigaders filled the dark, vaulted wards. A long painful journey from the Ebro had seen Fisher arrive in Vic on 25 September 1938. Back in England, with John Penman yet to arrive home, none of his family knew whether he was dead or alive. They probably contacted Bill Rust, the Daily Workerâs correspondent in Spain, as late in November he wrote to Peter Kerrigan asking for information of Fisherâs whereabouts. Rust was the British Communist Partyâs most senior representative in Spain and Kerrigan served as a base commissar. The two men strictly imposed Stalinist orthodoxy and party discipline, and yet at the same time they displayed a genuine concern for the welfare of their fellow countrymen. Kerrigan would almost certainly have known that Fisher had died of his wounds on 11 November, but presumably he was too preoccupied with evacuating the hospital to inform Janie Fisher. Herbert Fisher was buried in Vic, where today a memorial records the names of those Brigaders interred at a site that was shunned by fearful residents until the restoration of democracy in 1976.
With scanty records and multiple Fishers serving in Spain the confusion surrounding Herbert Fisherâs final months is understandable â he does not appear at all in the database of one reputable website. Did the fog of war swallow him up in the spring of 1938, or did he survive a further eight months? When late in life the Lincoln Battalionâs Harry Fisher wrote his memoirs, he listed Herbert as having died in the spring of 1938. This may explain why the Polish volunteer Chaskel Honigstein, who died of his wounds on 4 October, was designated the last Brigader to die in Spain. The Americanâs claim chimed of course with what John Penman had told Janie Fisher, hence the reference to March 1938 on the headstone she shares with her husband and son. Clearly, neither Rust nor Kerrigan provided her or close relatives with accurate information.
Those relatives included the Stephen sisters, cousins of Edmund Fisher on his motherâs side and better known as Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Julian, the older of Vanessaâs two sons, was killed by shrapnel at Brunete sixteen months before Herbert Fisher finally succumbed to his wounds. Bell had been in Spain for only a few weeks. Joining the British Medical Unit had been a compromise choice, intended to placate his mother and his aunt. The two women believed driving an ambulance was far safer than volunteering to fight, but with cruel irony Bellâs vehicle took a direct hit. Here was the golden boy, struck down in his prime with an abundance of talent unfulfilled. Successive generations of the Bloomsbury Group, not least his younger brother Quentin, mythologised Bell. Leonard Woolf, and on occasion even his wife, polemicised in support of the Spanish Republic, but Julian represented a younger Bloomsburyâs direct engagement in left-wing politics: given his growing political ambitions, admirers asked, what might he have achieved had he lived? Unrecognised until now is that the Woolfs and the Bells had another personal connection with the war in Spain: the third Herbert Fisher was Julian Bellâs second cousin.
The sophisticated world of Bloomsbury seems a long way from the rural quiet of a Brockenhurst churchyard. Recording Fisherâs death in Spain below the graveside details of his fatherâs life accorded with a tradition established during and after the First World War: the names of offspring missing in action presumed dead would often be included on the headstones of their parents when they died. This appears to be the case at the family plot in St Nicholas churchyard. The weathered headstone contrasts starkly with the quietly imposing commemorative stone in Vic. Visitors to the Catalan burial ground can scarcely ignore the name of Herbert Douglas Fisher, a committed socialist and anti-fascist who, despite his distinguished family, died far from home and was soon forgotten. Whatever the circumstances of his death, here surely was a brave man fighting for a fine cause. Herbert deserves rediscovery after eighty years of obscurity. Hampshire was home to several men and women who served in Spain â Bill Alexander, for example, was born in Ringwood, and David Guest taught in Southampton â but the memory of Herbert Douglas Fisher is unique to the New Forest. Herbert, the least known member of his extended family, links Brockenhurst directly with Barcelona in a Catalan connection previously unknown and yet surely deserving of celebration.
Thank you to Richard Baxell, Linda Palfreeman, Vanessa Winchester (niece of Herbert Fisher), and the staff of the Marx Memorial Library and the University of Warwick Modern Records Centre.
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Further Reading
Palfreeman, L., ÂĄSalud! British Volunteers in the Republican Medical Service During the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (Sussex Academic Press, Brighton, 2012)
Preston, P., A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War (Fontana, London, 1996)
Tremlett, G., The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War (Bloomsbury, London, 2020)
[1] Herbert Fisher to Hugh Derry, [?] January 1935, University of Warwick Modern Records Centre [MRC].
[2] Ibid., âSpring 1936â, MRC.
[3] Herbert Fisher to Eleanor Clough, 7 December 1937, MRC.
[4] Herbert Fisher to Janie Fisher [mother], 24 November 1937, MRC.
[5] Herbert Fisher to Janie Fisher, 9 January 1938, MRC.
[6] Herbert Fisher to Hugh Derry, 6 February 1938, MRC.
[7] Herbert Fisher to Janie Fisher, 14 December 1937, Marx Memorial Library [MML].
[8] Herbert Fisher to Vera Reid and to Janie Fisher, 3 December 1937 and 9 January 1938, MRC.
[9] John Penman to Jamie Fisher, 8 February 1939, MML.
[10] Alun Menai Williams, From the Rhondda to the Ebro: the story of a long life and its survival in the first half of the 20th Century (Warren & Pell, Pontypool, 2004), p. 176.
