Sol Frankel
In autumn 1937, committed socialist Sol Frankel decided he would sign up with the International Brigades and go and fight against the fascist Franco in Spain, although his family were bitterly opposed. ‘Being Jewish in the East End they were dead against politics - they thought it best to keep to themselves.’
But Sol felt impelled to fight. ‘Socialism is my religion’ he would tell family and friends. Having seen the rising threat of fascism in London during the early 1930s, he wanted to join the significant number of London Jews who were taking the fight against the far right to Europe (by some estimates around 20 per cent of the International Brigades). The rest of the Continent had already seen the Luftwaffe razing the Spanish Basque city of Guernica, with the aid of Mussolini’s Italian troops, and in support of Spanish fascist leader Franco. If the left were not united, they reasoned, who would be next.
Solomon Frankel was born on 31 March 1914, one of nine children to Polish-Jewish parents in Whitechapel. He left school at 14, working as a tailor in the local sweatshops. By his early twenties he was a committed socialist. In 1936 two events tipped the balance into activism. The first was the Battle of Cable Street, where he had crowbarred up paving stones to make barricades and block the advance of Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts. The cry of the Spanish Communists, ‘No pasaran’ (they shall not pass) had been taken up by the defenders of Cable Street.
A second was his work at a refugee camp outside Southampton in 1937, where he erected tents and dug latrines for some 4000 Basque children who had been evacuated following the blitzing of Guernica. One day, the news came that Bilbao had fallen to Franco’s Nationalist forces. The children rioted and broke camp, desparate to return to Spain and fight for the Republic. The helpers were up all night, rounding up the youngsters, who called Frankel and his fellows ‘fascistas’. It was a clear message to Sol that he was either with the Republicans or against them. He decided to head off to Spain and play a role in the international fight against fascism.
But there was a good chance he would never get to Spain. ‘They were stopping everyone at Dover, trying to stop anyone who looked likely to be heading for Spain,’ he remembered. Sol told the police he was off to visit an uncle in Paris. ‘Lucky they didn’t search me … I had a Spanish dictionary tucked in my pocket!’
Sol reached Paris, sending his worried parents a postcard befor heading south for the Pyrenees and the Spanish border. The crossing was made by night, on foot, the volunteers wearing plimsolls, which afforded a good grip and were silent on the rocks. In the early hours he was gazing down upon the Mediterranean from atop the mountains. ‘A beautiful blue sea … I was excited that night, not scared at all.’
As the soldiers marched through Spain they would meet Spanish peasants, who fired the foreigners up, greeting them with the clenched fist salute, but shortly after leaving their training camp in Albacete, it all became frighteningly real. “We were marching along when the order was given to dig in on the side of the road. Suddenly the order was countermanded. We ran into an ambush of fascist tanks. Blinking tank was so bloody near me, he couldn’t bring his machine guns down to bear on me. He fired right over my head into the side of the mountain. It was my 24th birthday.” A few months later, Sol took a bullet in his right arm at the Battle of the Ebro, the last major Republican offensive in the war, which raged from July to November 1938.
It was the end for Sol. Though he hoped to be back fighting ‘in a couple of weeks’ his right hand was permanently disabled and he had to return home. The defeat at Ebro shattered the Republican Army as a fighting force too. From here it would be a steady process of withdrawal until 1 April 1939, when Franco would declare the war won. The fascist general would rule Spain as dictator until 1975.
Sol returned to London where he took up his old job as a tailor, switching to his left hand and learning to grip the cloth with his disabled right. His injury would rule him out of fighting in World War II, and he worked as a volunteer air-raid patrol warden - vital work in the Blitz of London. He was now a member of the Communist Party, having left Labour in disgust at their lack of active opposition to first Mosley and then to the rise fascism in Europe. During the War he again came up against the Labour leadership. Home secretary Herbert Morrison had banned the Communist Party’s Daily Worker paper for criticising Britain’s war aims.
A new title, the Stepney Worker, took up the fight, and Sol contributed cartoons, penned with his left hand, for the paper. He married editor Peral Simonson in 1943. He remained a Party activist during the fifties and sixties, fighting for nuclear disarmament and against apartheid, but the pair eventually quit the Communists in 1968, protesting against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslavakia. He rejoined Labour.
Sol didn’t return to Spain until the death of Franco in 1975, returning once more in 2003 for the 65th anniversary commemorations for the Battle of the Ebro, when large numbers of International Brigades fighters were reunited. Solomon Frankel died on 18 May, aged 93.