"Jim Carroll, was your dad British? I don't think he fought against the British in Spain? "
He was British and he fought in Spain -
You seem to have crossed wires here - - the International Brigades didn't fight against the British - they went to fight Franco and his Moroccan mercenaries who instigated a civil war against the legally elected Republican Government
Rather than support the Republicans, the British watched as Hitler tested his newly re-established Luftwaffe on the People of Spain, those who did fight were criminalised - preetty much as these Muslim kids have been for fighting Franco's equivalent, Assad
My dad's name appears in several autobiographies of others who fought there, including that of American film screenwriter, Alvah Bessie (one of the Hollywood Ten who were hounded out of their jobs by Mad Joe McCarthy)
Bessie describes in his book, 'Men in Battle' how, during the journey into Spain over the Pyrenees, he saw a "young Scots lad sitting asleep on the floor of the railway truck with his mouth hanging open (p 82, I think)
My dad was a Liverpudlian actually born in Glasgow because his market-trader parents were there at the time - he acquired the nickname, 'Scottie'.
Jim Carroll