I have no doubt that my Dad, Jim Higgins, was writing about his experiences in the Spanish Civil War in early February 1939, while still on the boat back to Canada .

Major Cecil-Smith,  a journalist before volunteering for Spain, was to be editor of a book about the Canadian volunteers who fought in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion.  He asked Dad to make some contributions; they wanted it out as quickly as possible.

I know Dad was close to Cecil-Smith because he was his commissar on that boat. I don’t doubt they had many conversations about the plans for the book. And so it was that sometime before April 1, 1939, Dad wrote what have now become four chapters of his soon-to-be-published memoir.

So why did the book never materialize?  I’d (naively?) thought that maybe it was laid aside because of the start of the Second World War; that those involved were otherwise occupied.

Then, just recently, I learned about an upcoming biography of Edward Cecil-Smith, Not for King or Country, to be published this fall, by the University of Toronto Press. The author is Tyler Wentzell. Maybe there would be some answers there.

I’d known about Wentzell’s book because Schlomo at Indigo Books in Toronto’s Manulife Centre, told me about it. I’d been asking him about his take on publishers (doing a little research), when he told me the book was coming out in November; that they had it on order.

Then, when I joined Facebook in August, Tyler Wentzell somehow found my FB Page, and was excited to learn about my Dad’s memoir. We got together in September. It was such a pleasure to spend an hour-and-a-half making interesting connections between our two protagonists.

After our meeting, I was leafing through The Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion, by Victor Hoar and Mac Reynolds, my father’s dog-eared, marked-up copy of the first book that was published about the Canadians who fought in Spain. The publication date was 1969.

As I browsed through the familiar photos, I realized that one featured our two subjects side-by-side, arriving with other Mac-Paps at Toronto’s Union Station, on February 4, 1939. Cecil-Smith is wearing his trademark wire rimmed glasses and my father has circled his own head in red, so there’s no mistaking it’s him. I sent a copy off to Tyler.

Then, a few days ago, whilst doing some checks of my father’s manuscript against the background materials, I came across something on an obscure scrap of paper that took me aback. In his own handwriting, Jim Higgins had written:

Although I wrote some of my memoir in 1939, the material was not published. The planned book was halted because the writers, who were gathering material from the vets, disagreed with the political editors.

Cecil-Smith, commander of the Mac-Pap battalion during most of the time I spent in Spain, wrote to me of the problem. He suggested I should not send any more material for the proposed book until the problem was resolved.

I am sorry that the problem was not resolved. The writers wanted to have the pros as well as the cons, incorporated into the book, but the politicals wanted only the good points written.

I recall some of my own experiences there were not so good. In fact, I was close to being shot to death by a communist officer; except for the intervention by a Canadian corporal. Anyway, I was sent to a hospital the next day because of wounds in my back.

I immediately sent a copy to Tyler. It turns out that my father’s revelation was in line with Tyler’s theory about why the 1939 book never got published but, until now, he’d not seen it confirmed.

I’m convinced there’s more to the story that I’ll learn from Tyler Wentzell’s book*, but at least, for now, I better understand the reason for my father’s hand-written inscription on the flyleaf of the Hoar book.

Published too late by 30 years.

© Janette Higgins

*Tyler Wentzell’s book is now published by U of T Press. Click here to see it: Not for King or Country: Edward Cecil-Smith, the Communist Party of Canada and the Spanish Civil War

***

NOW PUBLISHED: Fighting for Democracy: The True Story of Jim Higgins (1907-1982), A Canadian Activist in Spain’s Civil War (2020) is available worldwide from Independent Bookstores, Chapters-Indigo, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. Kindle version on Amazon. Orders of three or more: Friesen Press.

I encourage you to obtain it from your local Indie bookseller or library. And if you can leave a review or “star” it somewhere, like Amazon or Goodreads, that would be much appreciated!

Fighting for Democracy by Jim Higgins is the latest book about the Mac-Paps, Canadians in the Mackenzie Papineau Battalion, which was part of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Other books about Canadians in the Spanish Civil War include Not For King or Country by Tyler Wentzell , Mac-Pap by Ronald Liversedge with David Yorke and Renegades by Michael Petrou.