Our Fathers Fought Franco by Willy Maley sampler

donald renton: not made with rosewater
the revolution was being crushed by the Soviet army were rejected for
publication. Refusing to be silenced, Fryer wrote Hungarian Tragedy and
on its publication was expelled from the Party.
Don quit the Communist Party over Hungary.
The impulse to build a fairer world was what drew my dad to join the
Communist Party as a teenager. His essential humanity took him, in the
years beyond the CP, into the Labour Party, where he devoted his energies
as an Edinburgh councillor to causes such as better social housing and
was one of the group of people who helped Helen Crummy to start the
Craigmillar Festival Society.
On the longest seat of the caravan at Forsay, I have spread out papers
relating to my dad’s life. Among them is a pile of ‘Don Renton’s Column’
from the Tribune. A couple of months ago, the historian Owen Dudley
Edwards dropped into my bookshop to let me know he had come across
these, published in the late 1930s, during his researches in the National
Library of Scotland. I didn’t know that Don had been a Tribune writer –
none of these columns had been clipped out and put into the big ledger of
cuttings from the 1930s which I had pored over so many times as a little
girl. Owen kindly made photocopies at the library and brought them to me.
As I look through them now, I realise how to approach writing this
chapter. I want to give an idea of the range and trajectory of Don’s
political activities throughout his life; to contextualise his experience as an
International Brigader; to show what he was fighting for, not just what he
was fighting against.
I open the worn ledger which has accompanied me through life. The
cuttings, brown with age, are mostly from the late 1930s – how delicate
the newsprint has become. There are grainy photographs of men in scuffles
with police, blocking the traffic in the centre of London, chained to railings.
Neatly clipped out is a letter published in the Edinburgh Evening News in
December 1960, in which Don denounces Julian Symons’ condescending
account of the activities of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement
(NUWM) in the Hungry Thirties; Don asserts that ‘personal testimony is
much more important than the writing of someone who tries to describe
incidents after they have taken place’. And so, where possible, Don’s own
words tell his story here.
Born on 30 March 1912, Don grew up in a tiny flat in Bridge Street,
Portobello, with six brothers and two sisters. His mother, Julia, had been
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