ALTHOUGH fit and healthy until near the end of his life, Stan Hilton, the 98-year-old veteran of the Spanish civil war and the second world war, could no longer recall his four-month adventure in Spain in late 1937 and early 1938. Thankfully, his son Gordon and grandson Adam, still keep alive the stories and recollections he told them over many years.

Stan was born into poverty and hardship. His first memories were of being dumped at a workhouse near Brighton. He was then fostered before ending up in a school where orphans were trained to be servants.

Things got even worse and, while still a teenager, he began sleeping rough in Brighton, until one day a policewoman got him on a marine training course. This was around 1933. As a ship’s steward he served on several merchant navy ships, going to ports around the world. 

In November 1937, while on the Oakworth, he jumped ship at the port of Alicante. On the voyage south there had been an altercation with a ship’s officer which ended in fisticuffs. The officer was “a real swine,” and Stan had a short fuse in those days — he was a bit of a fighter. 

Ashore, he met a fellow Briton: “Why don’t you come with me? I’m joining the International Brigades?” Stan immediately agreed. “I saw people parading around and saw all these fellows who had been injured, and I felt pity,” he told an interviewer in 2010. “The Spanish people needed help. It was the right thing to do.” Stan and his companion made their way to the British Battalion base near Albacete.

There he remembered the Russian trainers as the International Brigades used a lot of the Soviet equipment, such as the Dikterov submachine-gun. 

Unlike most of his comrades, Stan was not overtly political. And the reality of going to war really scared him.

Despite all this, Stan understood that the republican side was the “underdog” in the civil war and he instinctively felt compelled to fight on their side and against Franco. He was fond too of singing their songs, like The Internationale.

At one point, he attended a concert by Paul Robeson, when he was entertaining and visiting the International Brigades.

He fought at the battle of the Teruel, managing to retreat after Franco’s fascist forces finally reconquered the city in February 1938. 

Then in March that year, with Franco’s forces launching a major offensive in Aragon, Stan and the rest of the British Battalion found themselves in full retreat and fighting a rearguard action. The battalion was scattered. “It was every man for himself,” Stan recalled. Cut off and lost, he took shelter in a hut with two comrades.

They were killed when the hut was attacked, but Stan, who happened to be outside, managed to flee.

Being a very good swimmer, he was able to swim across the River Ebro to safety.

He reached Tortosa, from where he caught a train to Barcelona.

He was there during the merciless bombing by Mussolini’s airforce.

After a few days he boarded a ship bound for England, the Lake Lugano, and the crew put him to work.

Some weeks after he landed in London, MI5 came knocking on his door to question him about his time with the International Brigades.

Thankfully, the threat of the wider war in Europe and the overall mood in Britain allowed Stan to put his skills and knowledge to use.

Almost immediately, he enrolled into a naval college and eventually returned to being a ship’s steward. 

He spent a lot of his time on tankers and tramp steamers, small cargo ships that would go from one port to another without going back to a home port for years.

He was serving on the oil tanker San Casimiro when it was captured by the German battle cruiser Gneisenau in March 1941.

Stan and the other seamen were treated with a surprising amount of decency by the German officers who allowed the them to take whatever they needed from the ship’s storeroom.

They were taken off San Casimiro and put on boats, and the tanker was rigged with explosive charges to be scuttled off the Azores. However, the British battleship HMS Renown arrived on the scene and captured the German crew. 

Unfortunately all of Stan’s possessions, including those from his time in the International Brigades were lost with the San Casimiro and now resides on the bottom of the Atlantic.  

Following the end of the second world war, Stan joined the Royal Marines Reserves, taking the frogman’s course. 

He was also employed by a large number of construction companies, tasked with restoring and rebuilding bombed-out towns around the country. 

In 1958, Stan moved to Australia, after his wife Sylvia, his son Gordon and their three other siblings had already moved there around 1956. During the 1950s, as part of a government scheme, whole families were able to secure passages to Australia. 

Stan and his family initially settled in Perth. But, after separating with Sylvia and seeing no more job prospects in Perth, he decided to move to Melbourne.

He spent the rest of his life as an artisan and tradesman, perfecting floor cutting and layering and tiling. 

In his final years, Stan’s memories started to fade and he was in an intensive full-time care unit in a nursing home in Ocean Grove, Victoria. 

“He had the luck of the Devil,” says grandson Adam. “He’d jump ship in Spain and do all right. He’d return back to England and not get arrested. He’d get captured by Germans and turn out OK.

“Everything always seemed to work out well for him in the end.”