Where did Ken Loach get his ideas from?
Not from the 2,400 or so people who went to Spain from Britain to fight in the international brigades. It was illegal at that time to go to Spain to fight, because of the Non-Intervention treaty. What one had to do was to go to Paris on a non-passport trip, and then make one’s way to Spain from there. Because of this illegality, it was impossible to know exactly how many British people went to fight in Spain, but the approximate number is 2400. 526 of these were killed. Who were these people? In the early days they were mainly writers and artists who realised that fascism was a threat to culture, because they knew that Hitler had been burning books. These people also had the know-how to get out of Britain and get to Spain. It was only later on that miners, dockers, and generally the cream of British industrial workers went out. They were joined by people who were fighting against British imperialism -27 from Cyprus, of whom nearly half were killed in Spain, and 120 from the Republic of
