Jim Higgins, Author
Born in 1907, Jim Higgins was orphaned during the Great War when a German bomb exploded over his parents’ London house. He stood up to tyrants from a young age, and by the 1930s he was a workers’ rights activist living in Depression-era Canada.
In 1937, alarmed by Hitler and Mussolini’s support of General Franco’s coup d’etat Jim, along with 35,000 other international volunteers, including close to 1700 from Canada, volunteered to fight on the side of Spain’s democratically elected government.
Jim signed on as an anti-fascist. He was trusted in Communist Party circles, but his cause was social democracy, and he joined the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) when it was established in 1932. He was a committed union man, and became one of the first members of the New Democratic Party when he worked on Walter Pitman’s 1960 New Party campaign.
Jim wrote most of his memoir in 1977, but part was written in 1939 for an intended book about Canada’s volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. The book never happened—a few months later the world’s attention was captured by the Second World War. Many Spanish Civil War veterans signed up to fight the same enemy they’d been fighting in Spain, but some were considered “security risks,” including Jim.
Jim married Reta Palliser in 1942. They lived in Peterborough, Ontario, where they raised five children: Janette, Jim, Barbara, Maggie, and Susan. Reta died of breast cancer in 1961 at age fifty-one. Jim died of a series of strokes at the age of seventy-five on September 18, 1982.
Janette Higgins, Editor
Janette Higgins graduated with distinction from the University of Toronto in 1986 with a Bachelor’s degree in the Sociology of Work and Organizations.
Her father’s material lay fallow until 2017 when she began organizing and editing his manuscript, adding additional biographical detail in her prologue and epilogue. She considers herself fortunate to have had the generous assistance of academics, historians and archivists in four countries.
Janette has twenty-eight years experience writing and publishing six editions of a best-selling travel guide, “The Best Places to B&B in Ontario.” The book (and companion website set up in 1998) received critical acclaim from many, including Canadian icon, Adrienne Clarkson.
Janette published the last edition of her B&B book in 2000, and closed the website in 2015. She then wound down a landscape design business, sold her century cottage in Port Hope, and took a year-long, North-American road trip, before turning her full attention to her father’s story.
Born in 1944, Janette is the oldest of Jim Higgins’s five children. She lives in mid-town Toronto, and likes to spend her winters in the Mexican mountain town of San Miguel de Allende.
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Fighting for Democracy: The True Story of Jim Higgins (1907-1982), A Canadian Activist in Spain’s Civil War by Jim Higgins
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Fighting for Democracy by Jim Higgins is the latest book about the Mac-Paps, Canadians who fought in the Mackenzie Papineau Battalion, which was part of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.
The most recent 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, A Chance to Fight Hitler by David Goutor, and Renegades by Michael Petrou.