Dr. Douglas Jolly’s Military Passbook

Two New Zealand doctors chose to travel to Spain during the civil war to support the over-stretched and under-resourced Republican Army medical service.  

Doctor Gladys Montgomery was working in the slums of Glasgow in March 1937 when she offered her services to the British Universities Ambulance Unit, set up to provide emergency relief in Spain. She arrived in Almeria, in the south of the country, as 40,000 refugees, fleeing from bombing raids, poured into the city. For the next three months she treated these civilian victims of war, many of them children suffering from malnutrition, in two specially established hospitals. 

Dr Douglas Jolly, from Cromwell in Central Otago, whose Spanish Civil War passbook we see here, was studying in London for specialist qualifications in surgery when the civil war broke out. He abandoned his surgical studies to travel to Spain in December 1936, and was immediately placed in charge of a mobile surgical unit whose 12 members had few common languages. For the next two years his surgical teams were sent wherever the fighting was fiercest, often working out of temporary field hospitals estabished in farmhouses, monasteries, railway tunnels or caves, which were frequently bombed from the air by Franco’s forces. Jolly developed a novel system for treating injured patients within the shortest possible time. He later served in World War Two, where his “three points forward” system was widely used by Allied medical services. Tireless, courageous, dedicted and innovative, he has been described as ‘the most important volunteer [in the International Brigades] to come from the British Commonwealth,’ and is now regarded as one of the greatest military surgeons of the 20th century. 

A young New Zealand journalist and Rhodes scholar, Geoffrey Cox, was working for a London newspaper when the civil war erupted. He was sent to report on the battle of Madrid, and at times slept on the floor of the British Embassy to shelter from aerial bombing. After five weeks he was replaced by a more senior journalist but he vividly recorded his experiences in a book, Defence of Madrid. It was swiftly published in London in 1937, and reprinted 70 years later by Cox’s alma mater, Otago University.