Memorial Meeting, Auckland, 14 May 1939

The small but vigorous New Zealand Communist Party (NZCP) was the driving force behind the local solidarity movement in support of Republican Spain. Its weekly newspaper ran cartoons depicting square-jawed workers confronting sinister fascists on the Spanish battlefields and the Party attempted, though with little success, to pressure the NZ Labour Party into taking a stronger stand on the issue. 

The NZCP was most effective through its contacts within the left wing of the union movement, which passed resolutions in support of the Republic and raised funds to send aid to Spain. The union’s peak body, the Federation of Labour (FoL), spoke out strongly against the attempted military overthrow of the Republican government, and the dangers of global fascism. The FoL’s Spanish Ambulance Fund sent an ambulance to the Madrid front, recouping the cost through a levy on its members. 

Several aid organisations were set up specifically to raise funds for Spain and the Spanish Medical Aid Committee (SMAC) was the largest and most visible of these. Its most active members came from the NZCP and the unions, but it also drew support from Labour MPs, academics, and other well-known figures. It recruited three nurses who left for Spain in May 1937 and funded them through the Paris-based Centrale Sanitaire Internationale. The Dunedin branch of SMAC provided an ambulance in September 1938, and the following month a frontline laundry truck was sent to the Republican forces. SMAC organised speaking tours around New Zealand by volunteers returned from Spain, both combatants and medical workers.  

In May 1939 SMAC held a large and moving memorial service in Auckland ‘to the New Zealanders who died fighting for Spain.’ (The poster for this meeting is shown above.) The waterside workers’ brass band played, a theatre performed a specially written piece to the International Brigades, and the speakers included the doctor Doug Jolly who had recently returned from the Battle of the Ebro.  

SMAC raised funds explicitly for the war effort by Republican Spain, but several smaller organisations such as the Quakers sent funds for non-partisan and non-military purposes, such as aid for homeless and orphaned children.  

The only significant element within New Zealand society to unequivocally support Franco’s Nationalists was the Catholic Church. The Church, whose membership was largely working class, called for prayers for the clergy killed in Spain, and used its considerable influence within the NZ Labour Party to stifle support for the Republican cause from the Party’s left wing. The Church’s widely read magazines reprinted pro-Franco news from other countries, and since most other NZ news media barely mentioned the civil war, those articles proved influential even among non-Catholics. 

Only one New Zealand periodical, the left-wing monthly Tomorrow, covered the Spanish Civil War extensively with political commentary, news reports and short fiction, including work by leading writers of the period.