Our Fight: Frontline Organ of the 15 B. 3 July 1938 Issue

This issue of Our Fight, the newsletter of the XV International Brigade, belonged to Dubliner Liam McGregor, who would die in combat two months after its publication.  

Born on 26 August 1914, Liam McGregor was one of three sons raised in a communist household in Inchicore, Dublin. This was a distinctly unusual – almost unique – family background in early twentieth century Ireland, even among other Irish volunteers. Liam’s mother Esther McGregor lost her husband in the First World War and was radicalised by the conditions she experienced as a working-class, widowed mother of three young children.  

Esther McGregor was one of the few women to remain a stalwart of the various Irish communist organisations that arose throughout the twenties and the thirties. She encouraged her sons – Robert, Liam and Donald – to become politically active. Donald recalled their Inchicore home as a meeting place for international radical visitors making their way through Dublin, including the Communist MP Shapurji Saklatvala and a German communist seaman who jumped ship in Ireland to evade Gestapo pursuers.  

In 1935, Liam McGregor was selected as one of the Irish students to attend the International Lenin School in Moscow, where he underwent political training. The School required its students to adhere to rules of conspiracy, including the use of false names. Liam McGregor adopted the name ‘William Citrine’ for the duration of his studies. Before and after his time in the USSR, McGregor was active in a number of Irish groups, including the Irish Republican Army, the Republican Congress and the Communist Party of Ireland. 

He returned home in June 1937 to a country where the Communist Party operated in a distinctly hostile atmosphere and under the watchful gaze of police surveillance. In April 1938, Liam McGregor arrived in Spain and fought with the XV International Brigade.  

Our Fight provided political education to its readers and tried to raise their morale. In this edition, McGregor would have encountered a notice for the Lincoln-Washington battalion’s 4th of July Celebrations, a list of useful Spanish vocabulary and news about the first ‘Activist Congress of the 35th Division’.  

He sent his final letter home to his mother in Dublin on 16 September 1938. He died in combat less than a week later on 23 September 1938 in the Battle of the Ebro, two days after Prime Minister Negrín announced the withdrawal of the International Brigades.