THE DEATH OF BOB SMILLIE: A REPLY

Abstract

In my article in The Historical Journal, 40 (1997) pp. 435–61 I concluded, primarily on the evidence collected by the Independent Labour Party's (ILP) investigator David Murray, that Bob Smillie, a volunteer with the ILP's contingent in the Spanish Civil War, had died of appendicitis. However, he had been the victim of an appalling degree of neglect by the prison authorities in Valencia. I also concluded that the ILP leadership had deliberately prevented Smillie's death from becoming a matter of political debate. The account by Georges Kopp presented by John Newsinger in The Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 575–8 suggests a very different story: that the appendicitis was ‘imaginary’ and that Smillie was, in fact, kicked to death by his Communist interrogators for refusing to co-operate. Does Kopp's evidence necessitate a rethink of the Smillie case? I do not think so, and I believe that there are serious doubts surrounding both the nature of this evidence and the version of events that it presents.