Dave
Marshall,
the son of a railwayman, was
born in Middlesbrough in 1916. After leaving school in 1934 he worked
as a civil servant.
On the outbreak of the
Spanish
Civil War, Marshall
travelled to Spain and joined the International
Brigades at Albacete. He became a member of the Thaelmann
Battalion and was sent to defend Madrid.
He was badly wounded at Cerro de los Angeles and was sent back to
England.
In the Second
World War Marshall joined the Royal Engineers and took part in
the Normandy landings on D-Day.
Members of the British Tom
Mann unit in Barcelona in September
1936. Left to right: Sid
Avner, Nat Cohen, Ramona, Tom
Winteringham,
George Tioli, Jack Barry and David
Marshall.
(1)
David
Marshall,
interviewed by Stephen Moss in the Guardian
(10th November, 2000)
By
chance one day I bought the Times and in it there was a one-inch
paragraph that said there was no doubt that if the republican
government won, there would be some sort of socialist state set up
in Spain. Although I wasn't political, I had enough reading to realise
there was a chance of a different way of life.
At the end of that month,
I got my pay and bought a second pair of specs. By the end of the
next month, I had enough money to get me there. I discovered that
if you were under 21, you needed your parents' permission, so I forged
my father's signature.
(2)
David
Marshall was badly wounded at Cerro
de los Angeles while defending Madrid in 1937.
We
were due to capture Cerro de Los Angeles - the Hill of the Angels
- eight miles south of Madrid. It was a bollocks of a battle, but
you don't see that at the time. We had to attack across a flat plain,
in the face of artillery fire and machine-gunning.
A bloke got on to me, a sharpshooter, and he put four or five bullets
around me. You could hear them hitting the soil nearby. Then I got
hit in the foot. It went clean through.
I was panicking by then.
I was doubly frightened because they said that our flank was open
and there were Moroccan troops on that side. I crawled back to some
olive trees and sat down, and while I was sitting there a bloke came
at me with a fixed bayonet. Luckily, it was one of the brigade, a
Belgian bloke, who was as disorientated as I was. A lad helped me
limp back until we met stretcher bearers and they put me on the floor
of a lorry. We drove back for quite a long time until we got to a
field hospital. I spent the night shivering.
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