Merriman continues to be at Murcia for the rest of the month of March although now he is mobile and is able to walk around the town to see it. We know that Murcia had considerable damage in 1936 at the beginning of the Civil War and by the end, the skyline was unrecognizable. Many of the buildings that Merriman would have seen in his stroll around town have since been torn down, but one nice view from Google’s Panoramia™ viewer allows us to still go there today.
News from the front was not good. Merriman heard that Stember had lost control at Jarama and the story of him waving his pistol around to get control must have been relayed to Merriman by Peter Kerrigan. Merriman says the story got to the leadership of the CP in Valencia and it forced Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the British Communist Party to intervene. Merriman says there was even discussion about combining the British and American battalions and Merriman did not object to that. Since hundreds of Americans were pouring into Spain at the time, that combination of battalions did not take place.
Merriman mentions “Brent” from Canada. As we progress in the diary, we are calling out authoritative texts on the subject of the Spanish Civil War. Brent is not mentioned in three of those concerning the Canadians in the war: Victor Hoar (Victor Howard)¹, William Beeching², or Mark Zuehlke³. We have Michael Petrou4 to thank who has published an authoritative list of the Canadians in Spain and has identified Jack Brent of Cobourg, Ontario who was born in 1912 and survived the war. But his injury at Jarama seems to be unremarkable. Brent, it seems, returned to Scotland as a child.
Thus, the fun begins in figuring out who Jack Brent was. He was George (Geordie) Dickie of Scotland and can be found in web accounts of his time in Spain. Whithorn in Scotland honored him in 2005.
Jack Brent was a leader of the International Brigades Memorial Trust and even had a book written about him.5
Thanks to Kevin Buyers of Aberdeen, Scotland, for this quote by Larry Ryan of Toronto who was also in the Lincoln’s Number 2 Company about that morning on February 27, 1937:
“Answering just such a call Jack {Brent} went to rescue a wounded comrade. As he bent down to pick him up a rapid burst of machine gun fire cut him down, immediately after he was shot, he was dazed and his legs paralysed. He crawled first toward the enemy lines, but realizing his mistake he got back to his own lines in spite of enemy fire. He had been in Spain only a few days, and the action took place three days after his 25th birthday”.
Here is Geordie’s story in video. Sam Wild’s daughter Delores is in Jack Brent’s lap on this book cover.
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¹ Victor Hoar (Victor Howard) and Mac Reynolds, The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, Copp Clark Publishing, 1969
² William C. Beeching, Canadian Volunteers, Spain 1936-1939, University of Regina, 1989
³ Mark Zuehlke, The Gallant Cause, Wiley, 2007
4 Michael Petrou, Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War, UBC Press, Vancouver, 2008.
5 Stanley Harrison, Good to Be Alive: The Story of Jack Brent, Dumfries & Galloway Council, 1949.