Hundreds of people will gather on London’s South Bank on Saturday 2 July to pay respects to the legendary International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War.

The 80th anniversary of the start of the war on 18 July 1936 will be marked at this year’s event.

Paul Preston, foremost historian of civil war, will deliver the keynote address. And there will be songs from a forthcoming play about the International Brigades, ‘Dare Devil Rides to Jarama’, which the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT) has specially commissioned from Townsend Productions for the anniversary.

Other performers will include actor Maxine Peake, folk-duo na-mara and Spanish rapper Perro Lobo.

There will be contributions too from trade union veteran Rodney Bickerstaffe and Almudena Cros, president of the Madrid based Association of Friends of the International Brigades (AABI).

Organised by the IBMT, the commemoration takes place at the International Brigade Memorial in Jubilee Gardens (off Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX) from 1pm to 2pm.

Wreaths will be laid by, among others, representatives of the Spanish embassy, the Catalan government’s delegation in London, Spanish exile and refugee groups and the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women. This will be followed by a minute's silence.

The park's memorial is dedicated to the 2,500 volunteers from the British Isles who defended the elected government of the Spanish Republic against Franco, Hitler and Mussolini. Of these, 526 gave their lives.

Only one British veteran of the International Brigades survives: Stan Hilton, aged 98, a former merchant seaman from Newhaven, Sussex, who lives in a nursing home near Melbourne, Australia.



