The International Brigades are reborn on an east London football pitch.

LondonWhat's a monument to the International Brigades doing on an amateur football pitch in East London? Football may always be political, for example, when Barça and Madrid play a Copa del Rey final Or when three ministers, from the PP or the PSOE, appear in the Bernabéu box? Probably. Football, moreover, is also personal memory and emotional ties between fathers, mothers, and sons and daughters. And it is also, of course, a collective history.

Even more so. Contradicting what the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano wrote with great insight in Football in sun and shadeThis sport can sometimes be used not as an instrument of "manipulation and distraction of the masses," but as a tool for raising social awareness of solidarity and progressive values. This has been demonstrated once again by the modest but very popular Clapton CFC –founded in 2018–, which plays in the Southern Counties East Football League Division One, eight categories below the famous Premier.

The entity, with an "anti-fascist, anti-racist, feminist and inclusive" spirit, according to its statutes, and communally owned (each member has one vote and the club is owned by the members, who have members in thirty countries), became internationally known in 2018 when, as a second second, it added the Spanish flag to the Spanish flag. And it included on the neck of the shirt, on the back, the historic slogan of "They shall not pass!", which were popularized by the Republican forces defending Madrid during the Civil War.

The initiative, which went viral on social media, was a huge success. The club has since sold more than 20,000 of them worldwide, with the more than £400,000 at the ground in the Newham district, in the east of the British capital.

And inside the grounds, on Saturday, April 26, coinciding with the 88th anniversary of the bombing of Gernika, a memorial was inaugurated in tribute to the 16 International Brigade members who left Newham to fight against General Francisco Franco's army. As Clapton CFC's Kevin Blowe explains, since they launched the "away kit," they wanted to "pay tribute to the debt of gratitude to those who volunteered to join the fight against fascism in Spain." "Seven years later, we are deeply proud that Clapton CFC has been able to fund a memorial to those who helped defend the Spanish Republic between 1936 and 1939," he says.

Dozens of memorials

The monument, which joins dozens of memorials commemorating the Brigades across the UK, includes a poem by David Marshall, one of the volunteers who went to Spain at the age of 18. Marshall died in 2005, but his widow, actress Marlene Sidaway – best known in the UK for her role as Brenda Taylor in The Last Supper – attended with great emotion. Coronation Street–, honorary president of theInternational Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT), the organization that preserves the legacy and memory of the brigadiers—some 2,500 from the United Kingdom and Ireland—who fought against Franco. The last living Briton, Geoffrey Servante, He passed away in 2019, just shy of his 100th birthday.

What for some might be considered an act of historical nostalgia or preservation of memory, for the executive director of the IBMT, Jim Jump, himself the son of a brigadista and an exile from San Sebastián, the inauguration of the memorial also constituted an evocation "of the values of the Spanish Republic: equality between women and men, respect for the historical nations of Spain, healthcare, education and universal values to which we still remain faithful today."

To cushion the event with an even epic tone, Billy Bragg, the author of songs such as In New England, offered some almost hymns linked to the Spanish Civil War: among others, Jarama Valley, written by Alex McDade, a volunteer with the British Battalion of the 15th International Brigade. All of this, along with the discreet presence of historian Paul Preston among the audience, helped evoke what was lost with the victory of Franco. In turn, the need to continue remembering, as the historian does in his monumental The Spanish Holocaust;as he doesInternational Brigade Memorial Trust And how does Clapton CFC do with its initiative? In this case, from a modest football pitch in East London.