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A Spanish pilgrimage ... to Hampstead Heath

19/10/2021

A transatlantic pilgrimage achieved its goal today when the relatives of men who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War gathered around a newly refurbished bench honouring the volunteers on Hampstead Heath.

Mariah Wilson - the grand-daughter of International Brigade member Joe Gibbons - flew in from New York and was joined by her father David Wilson from Florida. They met up with Mariah's London-based cousin, Ted Sandling - a relative of another of the men honoured, Milt Cohen - to visit the bench and to pay tribute to the courage of their forbears.

The original bench with an inscription honouring the Gibbons brothers and their comrades was in such disrepair that it was set to be removed. Heath runner Martin Plaut was familiar with the bench and wanted to ensure that well-wishers had an opportunity to keep alive the memory of this band of International Brigaders. That led to a blog here all of six years ago - which eventually caught the attention of Mariah Wilson in the US.

Until then. Mariah was entirely unaware that her family members had a memorial bench on the Heath. For her, organising a replacement bench with a slightly modified inscription became a Pandemic mission. The bench was installed in June - the story is told here along with an account of the volunteers and what befell them in Spain and afterwards. And this morning, she and David flew in and made more-or-less straight away, along with Ted, to see the bench.

They were joined by Marlene Sidaway, president of the International Brigade Memorial Trust which seeks to keep alive the memory and spirit of those who volunteered to resist fascism in 1930s Spain.

Quite by chance, as the group approached the bench today a young man was sitting there enjoying the view. He had noticed the inscription and it bore a powerful echo of his own family's experience. Alex Baro, a freelance film maker, is from Barcelona, and lost family members in the brutal Battle of the Ebro in 1938 which sealed the fate of the Republican forces.

The bench is in a wonderful, tranquil spot - looking out on the ponds and beyond towards Highgate. It's a beautiful spot for the Brigaders to be remembered.

Mariah commented: "I'd like to think Joe and his brothers, as well as Milt Cohen and Pat Dooley were all smiling down at our gathering today :)"

For all those who paid homage on the Heath today, it was a special moment!

L to R: Martin Plaut; Marlene Sidaway; David Wilson; Mariah Wilson; Ted Sandling; Andrew Whitehead

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Coming Up for Air

9/12/2015

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The damming work on Hampstead Heath (it's supposed to be a flood prevention scheme, but when this is one of the highest points in the city, what exactly is the flood peril?) is making quite a mess of the 'model boat' pond and surrounding area. But some curious relics are being uncovered after decades under water.

What is that you see in this picture? Yes, it really is a car - coming up for air after many waterlogged years in NW3.

True car afficionados may be able to make out the model (a Cortina, possibly?) - all I can say is that the scrap value could well be very modest And how did this car get to the bottom of a Heath pond? Someone, somewhere, must know more.

This mud-coloured sedan is even more of a talking point on the Heath than the heron, the parakeets, the ever-declining standard of cappuccino at the cafe. And the big question - will it be hauled out and junked, or once more consigned to a watery resting place when the flood prevention work is done?

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The Gibbons brothers - still proudly remembered !! WITH UPDATES !!

24/7/2015

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DANNY TOMMY JOE GIBBONS INTERNATIONAL BRIGADERS 1936-1938
PAT DOOLEY SPEAKER AT PARLIAMENT HILL EDITOR 1901-1958
THEIR FAMILY PROUDLY REMEMBERS APRIL 1980

That's the inscription on a bench on Hampstead Heath - just a five-minute stroll from Kite Hill, bordering a copse of pine trees, and looking out east to Highgate. My friend Martin Plaut came across this rather out-of-the-way bench while doing his morning sit-ups. It's in some disrepair. He's trying to contact the family to see if they would be on board for a bit of fund-raising to spruce up this rather touching memorial.

The International Brigaders were those left-wingers who went to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. More than 2,000 headed out from Britain - 500 or so never returned. I had the privilege to meet and interview a few of them towards the end of their lives. The International Brigade Memorial Trust keeps their memory and spirit alive - though this modest memorial seems to have escaped the otherwise comprehensive list on their website.

Danny Gibbons, a Scotsman who moved to Camden, was a communist and for a while the political commissar of the British contingent of the Brigades - there's a brief biographical note about him here. He was wounded at Jarama in February 1937 and was sent home to recuperate. He insisted on going back to Spain, was arrested by Franco's troops, and was eventually released in a prisoner exchange involving German and Italian officers. His younger brother Tommy died in Spain, in the battle for Brunete in July 1937.

Joe (his real name was Patrick) volunteered with the American battalion in Spain - there's some details on this site. And there was a fourth brother, John Gibbons, who was apparently refused permission to join the International Brigades - according to some accounts, the CPGB leader Harry Pollitt, said with three brothers risking their lives, it would be wrong to have a fourth Gibbons fighting in Spain. He was, all the same, a very loyal member of the Communist Party and spent many years in Moscow.

Kathleen Gibbons was Danny's second wife, and her maiden name was Dooley. That may be the link with Pat Dooley - about whom I have been able to find out little. (Can anyone help?) A biography of the bohemian inter-war poet Anna Wickham mentions Pat (his real name was Lawrence) Dooley as an activist who made rousing left-wing speech at the top of Parliament Hill in the 1930s and '40s. Strange to think of this as a pitch for outdoor speakers!

I have a feeling that this blog will be returning to the story of the Gibbons brothers ...

UPDATED WITH PAT DOOLEY'S OBITUARY

The comments posted on this blog add valuable information about the Gibbons brothers, but it's only now - in July 2020, so five years after the original post - that I have found out more about the other name commemorated on the bench, Pat Dooley.

Steve Savage very kindly got in touch with an obituary of Pat Dooley which appeared in The Newsletter in February 1958. The Newsletter became the weekly paper of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League, and this article - initialled 'P.F.' - was almost certainly written by its editor Peter Fryer, a former Communist who was a founder member of the SLL (and who was later expelled from its successor organisation, the Workers' Revolutionary Party).

Steve Savage also shared a link to reminiscences of the Connolly Association, an Irish Republican and left-wing organisation, which also contains many references to Pat Dooley.

AND A NOTE FROM MARIAH WILSON

In December 2020 Mariah Wilson got in touch and with her permission we are posting her note and the document that she sent about her grandmother:

My name is Mariah. I ran across your blog and wanted to reach out, about this post in particular: "The Gibbons Brothers". Thank you so much for posting about this bench, I had no idea it existed! I am actually the granddaughter of Joe Gibbons (Patrick Joseph Gibbons), and am trying to research and gather as much info on him as possible in hopes of one day writing a story about him and my grandmother.

I saw in the comments of the post that Mike Arnott posted about the Gibbons brothers commemoration in Renton (which I hope to visit next year, once Covid restrictions have lifted) and more details about the brothers themselves, including about the torpedo strike on the boat carrying my grandfather. There's more info about that on this website, too, and a picture of my grandfather Joe Gibbons: https://ciudaddebarcelona1937.wordpress.com/

But the story gets even crazier...!

So it's mentioned that Joe helped two other men who couldn't swim get to safety after the ship had been hit. One of those men was Milt Cohen, who went on to be a major political figure in Chicago's left, and went up against McCarthy's HUAC in the 1950s. Milt and my grandfather Joe became close after their ordeal together, nearly losing their lives on that ship.

Back home, Joe had married my grandmother Florence Greenberg (her bio below) shortly before leaving for Spain. They actually married in secret, because she was Jewish and he was Catholic. Well, my grandmother Florence had a sister named Sue. Joe got it in his head that Sue and Milt would be just perfect for each other. Sue had gotten divorced recently (very uncommon in those days), and was looking to find another partner. As soon as Joe was able to, he phoned back to the U.S. from abroad, and told Florence "tell your sister not to get married to anyone! I found the perfect guy for her!" ... well, wouldn't you know it, she and Milt married just a few months after they met, after Joe and Milt returned from Spain. Joe had been right :)

Now, here's the final twist for you:

Across the ocean, on the VERY SAME DAY that my Great Uncle Milt and grandfather Joe almost lost their lives on the torpedoed boat, my grandmother Florence and Great Aunt Sue nearly died also. They were both union activists and organizers protesting at the May 30, 1937 Memorial Day Massacre/ Republic Steel Workers Strike. They spent their day running away from bullets and protecting their fellow activists from the brutal police backlash.

All four of them lived extraordinary lives, fighting for justice, human rights, workers rights, and progressive ideals. I never knew my grandfather, as he died before I was born. I knew my grandmother a bit from my early childhood, but didn't appreciate the extraordinary human being she was until later in my life. You can probably see why I want to write their story one day. It's truly stranger than fiction!

Thanks again for posting the picture of the bench at Hempstead Heath. I just reached out to the park to see if they are still looking for sponsors for the bench.. they may have already torn it down since it was in a bit of disrepair, not sure. Hopefully I am not too late. [The bench is in disrepair and has been removed - the Hampstead Heath authorities are seeking donations which might make it possible to repair or replace the bench - AW]

Mariah Wilson - www.mariahewilson.com

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The Vale of Health ...

6/10/2013

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The hamlet of the Vale of Health ... probably the most isolated community in inner London, though it's cheek-by-jowl with the city's best known park, Hampstead Heath. It was originally known as Hatchett's Bottom, and seems to have been marshy and distinctly unhealthy, so the name was either ironic or a deliberate rebranding. It's now a collection of fifty or so houses along a small web of streets and alleyways, with a fairground workers' caravan park attached.

You reach the Vale of Health along what is basically a cul-de-sac from East Heath Road. It's surrounded by the Heath on all sides. There's a few hundred yards between the Vale and the nearest other houses. Legend has it that the romantic poets spent time here. Blue plaques reveal that D.H. Lawrence, Rabindranath Tagore and the historian Barbara Hammond once lived in the Vale of Health.

Thee's not much here though apart from some charming and well-appointed houses - no pub, cafe, place of worship ... nothing which serves as a focus for the community.

... and the source of the Fleet

The Vale of Health is sometimes cited as the source of the most renowned of London's lost rivers, the Fleet. Whitestone Pond stands at a higher altitude, near Jack Straw's Castle at the brow of the Heath. But that's the source not of the Fleet but of the Westbourne, which flows much more to the west. There were two main tributaries of the Fleet, rising either side of Parliament Hill - and their damming created both the Highgate and Hampstead ponds. So it reasonable to imagine that one of the sources of the Fleet lies close to here.

The river now flows underground - in culverts, pipes, and beyond the bounds of the Heath in Bazalgette's sewers, until it spills into the Thames near Blackfriars Bridge. But every ditch stream and rivulet round here - even the distinctly puny one featured in this photo which I came across this afternoon - once fed and nourished the river Fleet.

So where exactly did the Fleet once run? The most authoritative answer is given in a fold-out map at the back of Nicholas Barton's The Lost Rivers of London, first published in 1962. I came across a copy this weekend priced at a fiver at the excellent Walden Books in Harmood Street - here's a samizdat copy of part of that map:

You can still follow the Fleet in London's street names - Fleet Road in Gospel Oak, Anglers Lane in Kentish Town, Turnmill Street in Clerkenwell, Fleet Street near Blackfriars. And it all starts near the Vale of Health.

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Bowls away!

2/6/2013

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An action shot taken on Hampstead Heath this afternoon - at least it's open to men and women, which isn't so evident at the cricket match just a couple of minutes' stroll away.

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Hampstead Heath's Garden of Delights

27/5/2013

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Athlone Gardens, in the north-east corner of Hampstead Heath, this afternoon - stunningly beautiful, and really hidden away. There was hardly anyone there. I'd never come across this wonderfully well kept glade before - it seems to have become part of the Heath quite recently. A big thank you to the friends who introduced me to this most enchanting corner of the Heath - a beautiful place to lie down, gossip, rest and wonder.

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Winter wonderland

18/11/2012

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Two successive spellbindingly beautiful sunny, wintery Sundays. Last weekend, I climbed the 'great hill' from Willesden to Archway (see the previous blog entry). This Sunday, I stayed closer to home - I guess the last bike ride of the year, through and around the Heath. The autumn colours are now fading, but there are enough ochres and mustards around catching the dazzling low sun to excite even the most faded eye.

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Walking Zadie Smith's 'NW'

11/11/2012

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The view from suicide bridge

Towards the end of Zadie Smith's new novel NW, the central character, Natalie/Keisha, walks out of her home near Queen's Park - walks out on her husband, her old life - and makes her way across north London. It's a memorable walk. And today - with the bright winter sun making every aspect of the city sparkle and shine - I retraced Keisha's steps. It took me three hours. Well worthwhile!

Winchester Avenue, NW6, looking east

You can follow in outline Keisha's walk by the chapter titles: 'Willesden Lane to Kilburn High Road', 'Shoot Up Hill to Fortune Green', 'Hampstead to Archway', 'Hampstead Heath', 'Corner of Hornsey Lane', 'Hornsey Lane'.

Whatever truth you look for from a novelist, it's not cartographic precision. But Zadie Smith maps out her character's route pretty precisely.

The walk emphasises how much the lives of the main characters in NW intersect with the author's own. It walk starts at Keisha's house on the Willesden Lane side of Queen's Park. Within minutes she has passed her friend Leah's house - and the Caldwell estate which plays such a big part in the novel.

This is exactly where Zadie Smith was brought up. She went to Malorees primary school just a stone's throw away. Her mother, it's said, still lives here. So too does Zadie Smith, not now in a council flat but a three-storey Victorian house. It makes you wonder how much of Keisha's story is Zadie Smith's exploration of 'the other path', the way her own life might have worked out.

Fiveways, NW6

Where Winchester Avenue meets Willesden Lane, cheek-by-jowl with more gentrified Brondesbury, stands the Fiveways estate. Not quite the model for Caldwell, but with much in common - including the stout boundary wall. Caldwell has five blocks linked by walkways and bridges. 'The smell of weed was everywhere'. On a Sunday morning, Fiveways was quiet, almost sylvan, and entirely odour free.

Keisha at one point ends up in Albert Road - quite a way to the south. She can't get through - there's a police cordon - and has to retrace her steps. The geography doesn't quite add up. But trying to make sense of it, I make the detour. Past the entrance to Paddington cemetery on Willesden Lane - where, as the novel glancingly mentions, Arthur Orton, the Tichborne claimant is buried. Past the basketball court. Along stylish Lonsdale Road - reminding me of Hackney's Broadway Market - and into Salusbury Road with its book shop and library ...

Paddington Cemetery gates

Off Willesden Lane

When I reach Albert Road, the other side of the tracks from up-market Queen's Park, I feel that perhaps this is also Caldwell - the estate is an amalgam. The sun is strong, the sky so blue, every vista has an enchantment. But there's also something a little spooky about the estates off Albert Road. For one thing, at midday on a beautiful Sunday, there's no one around. Hardly a soul. And then there's the hardness to the architecture. It's a little forbidding.

Albert Road

If Natalie/Keisha had managed to thread her way through the length of Albert Road and beyond - at least if she was doing it today - just before reaching Kilburn High Road, she would have come across a remarkable sight. Beirut come to north London. A wreck, a ruin, an estate block which looks as if it has been ravaged by a tsunami. Part demolished and - it seems - abandoned. A really unsettling and arresting image.

Cathedral Walk, by Kilburn High Road

By the time she hits Kilburn High Road and heads north (as she sets out on her walk, her intention is clear: 'Without looking where she was going, she began climbing the hill that begins in Willesden and ends in Highgate') she has teamed up with Nathan Bogle. He's flying on something or other, and rolling joints. And as they pass Kilburn tube, it also becomes apparent that he's poncing girls.

Kilburn High Road

They head up Shoot Up Hill. The area changes. 'The world of council flats lay far behind them, at the bottom of the hill. Victorian houses began to appear ...'. This is an area Zadie Smith knows with easy familiarity - close by is her old secondary school, Hampstead (though it's not Hampstead - Hampstead cemetery lies here, yes, but this is NW6 not NW3).

Not too far up the hill, however, it crests. If you want to continue going up, you have to turn along Mill Lane, Hillfield Road, Fortune Green Road, and then still more sharply ascending, to Platt's Lane and an outlying section of Hampstead Heath.

This seems to be the route Keisha and Nathan follow - pausing, briefly, on the margins of the Heath for squalid, feral sex.

They stop in the doorway of Jack Straw's Castle, the highest point of the walk - and indeed just about the highest point in London - then head down towards Archway.

The Heath near Golder's Hill

The view near Jack Straw's Castle

The walk ends at suicide bridge on Hornsey Lane, which runs sixty feet above the busy dual carriageway that's Archway Road. She has headed here for a purpose but 'had forgotten that the bridge was not purely functional. She tried her best but could not completely ignore its beauty.' She steps on the ledge, and peers out at London as best the railings allow. She doesn't attempt to jump, but instead abandons Nathan and hurries off after a night bus. The journey is over.

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The solstice sun

23/9/2012

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The bright solstice sun enlivened Hampstead Heath this weekend, as autumn starts to grip.

The blackberry bushes are spent - the leaves are beginning to fall - the sun bathers by the men's pond look both forlorn and foolhardy.

This path leads from the model boating pond - where I've seen grebes recently - towards Kenwood. The best blackberrying is just up here and on the right.

But it was the light, the shadows, and the play of the branches that caught my attention on Saturday.

I was surprised how few strollers were out and about - the Heath was a long way from empty, and indeed the cafe at Kenwood was jiving, but it wasn't the sort of crush I would have expected to mark this Indian summer. It may be a while before we see the Heath bathed in bright sunlight again.

I have discovered a fondness for caramel ice cream, satisfied this weekend at the ice cream kiosk at Kenwood. The ice cream season too is almost gone - the rhythms of the seasons give some shape to life, even urban life in a technology-led era, still it's sad to see the summer depart.

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How to buck the (blackberry) market

18/9/2012

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£4 for a small punnet. The price of blackberries in a Highgate fruit shop. It puts a market price on a modest sized blackberry of 10 pence. I feel a touch of the Victor Meldrews coming on!

It has been a miserable summer for blackberriers. A bumper crop needs sun and rain in harmony, not one and then the other. So the blackberrying picking season has been late, and deeply unsatisfactory.

Still, on Sunday, I was able to pick enough on the Heath - without my teenage kids, who seem to have lost their appetite for blackberrying tho not for crumbles - to sustain us through the autumn. Today's blackberry and apple crumble (I don't have a big repertoire, you understand) was a classic of its kind, and as you can see was devoured keenly by all the stay-at-home family members as well as by the sole picker among us.

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Andrew Whitehead's
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A Spanish pilgrimage ... to Hampstead Heath

Coming Up for Air

The Gibbons brothers - still proudly remembered !! WITH UPDATES !!

UPDATED WITH PAT DOOLEY'S OBITUARY

AND A NOTE FROM MARIAH WILSON

The Vale of Health ...

... and the source of the Fleet

Bowls away!

Hampstead Heath's Garden of Delights

Winter wonderland

Walking Zadie Smith's 'NW'

The solstice sun

How to buck the (blackberry) market

Andrew Whitehead's blog

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​UPDATED WITH PAT DOOLEY'S OBITUARY

AND A NOTE FROM MARIAH WILSON

... and the source of the Fleet

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UPDATED WITH PAT DOOLEY'S OBITUARY