IN April 1945, British troops liberated the Belsen concentration camp. What they witnessed there stayed with them for life. They saw 60,000 survivors of the Nazi death camp, all seriously ill and starving, and 13,000 unburied corpses laying on the ground.
 
One of those troops was a 27-year-old black soldier from Oxfordshire, Charlie Hutchison. What was unique about him was that the sight of the horrifying death camp he saw in Belsen was the culmination of nine years he had been physically fighting that evil ideology: from Cable Street in 1936 to that day in 1945, Hutchison had dedicated his life to the struggle against racism and fascism.

Born on May 10 1918 in Oxfordshire, his mother was a local woman and his father came from the Gold Coast, now Ghana. The latter spent much time travelling back to Africa, and after one journey, did not return, which left Hutchison’s mother in financial hardship as well as mental anguish.

Under duress, she arranged for him and his sister to be taken temporarily into the care of the National Children’s Home and Orphanage in Harpenden. Unfortunately for the mother and children, this temporary stay went on for years, with her unable to take the two back into her care.

Eventually, Hutchison, now aged 17, was able to join his mother living in Fulham in London. He was very aware of both his class and his race and joined the local Young Communist League — very soon he was elected chair of the branch.

By October 1936, he alongside thousands of other communists and activists, answered the call to go to Cable Street in east London where the fascist Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirts were attempting their provocative march through the mainly Jewish area. This was his first physical fight against racism and fascism.

Within two months of the triumph over Mosley, Hutchison volunteered to join the International Brigades to fight to defend the Spanish Republic, under attack from Franco’s fascists who were aided hugely by Mussolini in Italy and Hitler’s Nazi Germany.
 
He arrived in Spain before the end of 1936 and fought at the battle of Lopera where a number of British International Brigaders, including the great communist and poet John Cornford, gave their lives fighting fascism. Hutchison himself was wounded and after recovering from his wounds refused to be repatriated despite his young age.
 
Asked why he went to Spain, he said: “I am half black, I grew up in the National Children’s Home and Orphanage. Fascism meant hunger and war.” He has the distinction of being the only black volunteer from Britain to serve in the International Brigades and did not return home until December 1938.
 
Many years later, when asked why so many women and men went to Spain, he said: “The Brigaders came out of the working class, they came out of the battle of Cable Street, they came out of the struggles on the side turnings. They weren’t necessarily communists or socialists, but they were anti-fascists.”

Hutchison’s fight against fascism had not ended as the second world war broke out within months of his return to London and he enlisted to continue that fight. He was at Dunkirk in 1940 when a combination of small boats manned by volunteers and the Royal Navy successfully evacuated him and many British troops from France.
 
He served in north Africa and then in the long very bloody campaign in Italy, until, by 1945, he fought in France and into Germany itself where he witnessed the true barbarism of fascism in Belsen.

On his return to London, he married fellow communist Patricia Holloway, and together they raised a family. On their retirement, the couple moved to Bournemouth and he remained an active member of his party until his death in 1993.
 
He rarely spoke about the horrors of war he had witnessed first in Spain and then in Nazi-occupied north Africa and Europe, and was very modest about his achievements, especially those years fighting fascism.

In a family celebration of his life in 2019, his son John perhaps best summed up the influence of his father in these words: “Unusually for the ’50s and ’60s, he had friends from all over the world through the communist movement; my father believed in the family of man.”

Hutchison’s dedication to fighting the twin evils of racism and fascism from 1936 to 1945 needs to be celebrated and commemorated.

This tribute is taken from my biographical piece in the book Red Lives published by Manifesto Press.