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BORN in 1911 in Cambridge, Frida Stewart enjoyed a sheltered and privileged childhood.
But, conscious of the widespread poverty and unemployment of the 1930s, she took a job organising music and drama in Ancoats.
She visited Moscow in 1935 and “felt I’d had a glimpse of a new world … After Moscow, Manchester seemed very grim” and joined the Communist Party.
Returning from a visit to Popular Front France, she learned of Franco’s military coup against the democratic government of Spain.
Aid Spain committees sprang up across Britain and in 1937 she drove an ambulance to Almeria, where she helped feed starving refugees, assisted at a children’s hospital and visited severely wounded International Brigaders.
In Madrid, Frida was horrified by the desolation of the streets which had been bombed or shelled in the raids of 1936.
She was persuaded to go back to England and “tell ’em the truth, make ’em wake up and send us arms.” She worked as a fundraiser for Basque refugee children.
The leaders of the Labour Party, she felt, “knew the full extent of the evil, and spoke fair words about helping Spain … [but] did next to nothing” and, when Spain fell to Franco in March 1939, “we simply could not take it in.”
She volunteered to go to the refugee camps in France where she became aware of the immensity of the problem. Too few came out of the camps — to enter Britain they had to have a personal invitation and a guarantee that they “would not become a charge on the taxpayer.”
On her way home via Paris, Frida volunteered to work for a Spanish refugee organisation but was trapped after the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940.
All British women were rounded up and interned at Vittel but she escaped to Vichy France and finally back to Britain, where she broadcast for the BBC Foreign Service to tell the world about the resistance.
Where Firing a Shot for Freedom ends, editor Angela Jackson picks up the threads. “For Frida this meant almost another 50 years of continuous activity” in CND, the anti-Vietnam war movement, opposition to the fascist Greek junta and the Pinochet coup in Chile.
And she also wrote for the Morning Star under her married name of Knight.
Firing a Shot for Freedom: The Memoirs of Frida Stewart is published by The Clapton Press, price £9.99.
