TOMORROW hundreds will gather on London’s South Bank to remember the heroic struggle of the International Brigaders who fought fascism in Spain almost 80 years ago in the Spanish civil war of 1936-39. 

Over 2,500 men and women from the British Isles went to Spain. They volunteered to defend the elected Popular Front government of the Spanish republic against the forces of Franco, Hitler and Mussolini.The 40,000 volunteers from across the globe are an unprecedented example of international solidarity. 

Confronted with the rise of fascism in Europe, they gave up everything, thousands of them their lives. While Western powers turned a blind eye, over 500 volunteers from Britain and Ireland alone died in the struggle. And yet this story, and particularly the central role of communists and socialists in opposing and defeating fascism in the 1930s and ’40s, is being written out of history. 

At a time when fascism is rearing its head in eastern Europe and we are being asked to remember the glorious dead of imperialist wars, it is all the more important that the memory of these men and women is kept alive.

In October 1938 when La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibarruri, bade farewell to the departing International Brigaders in Barcelona she asked: “Mothers! Women! When the years pass by and the wounds of war are stanched … when the rancours have died out and pride in a free country is felt equally by all Spaniards, speak to your children.

Tell them of these men of the International Brigades.“Recount for them how… these men reached our country as crusaders for freedom, to fight and die for Spain’s liberty and independence threatened by German and Italian fascism.”

The Marx Memorial Library, home to the Spanish Collection, has a central role to play in this battle for memory. The archive is a treasure trove, comprised of diaries, pamphlets, photographs and memoirs. It tells the story of this struggle which took place, not only on the battlefields and streets of Spain, but in communities across Britain. 

A grassroots Aid Spain movement grew up in sympathy with the Spanish republic. Medical aid and food parcels were ferried across the channel and through France.

Throughout the Francoist dictatorship the campaigns against the repression continued.

The library is in the second phase of a funding bid to enable the complete cataloguing of the Spanish Collection. This will ensure these unique items are preserved, accessible and that many of them are digitised. Along with our friends in the International Brigades Memorial Trust, we plan a series of events to commemorate anniversaries next year, including 80 years since the formation of the International Brigades in October. 

A key component will be an online education resource aimed at the next generation of schoolchildren. This year is the 30th anniversary since the unveiling of the memorial to the International Brigades in Jubilee Gardens. The Ian Walters sculpture is engraved with the words: “We went because our open eyes could see no other way,” a paraphrasing of a quotation from the Cecil Day-Lewis poem The Volunteer. My grandfather James R Jump was secretary of the International Brigade Memorial Appeal which raised the funds for the erection of this magnificent monument. 

I have attended the commemoration every year of my life, and recently dug up photographs showing my grandfather with my twin sister and me in a pram, barely six months old, at the unveiling. This year I’ll have the privilege of laying a wreath on behalf of the Marx Memorial Library.

• Meirian Jump is the Marx Memorial Library’s archivist and library development officer.
• The annual commemoration, organised by the International Brigades Memorial Trust, takes place in Jubilee Gardens at the foot of the London Eye, from 1pm to 2pm. Owen Jones, political commentator, and Carmen Negrin, granddaughter of Juan Negrin, the last prime minister of the Spanish republic, will speak. There will be music from Ewan McLennan and Karl Lewkowitz and poetry from Francesca Beard.