GILBERTO HERNANDEZ is Chilean and lives in Leeds. As a young journalist in 1973, he was imprisoned in Chile because he worked for a newspaper which supported the left-wing government of Salvadore Allende.

Allende’s government was overthrown in the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet, with the complicity of the CIA. Thousands of Allende supporters were murdered or “disappeared.”

Hernandez was freed after international pressure won an agreement from Pinochet’s military dictatorship that political prisoners would be released but on condition they went into exile.

He told the Morning Star: “I came to Britain in October 1975. I managed to change my five-year sentence for exile. I was a journalist for a newspaper that supported Allende.

“In 1973 all the newspapers that opposed the military were closed down. I managed to stay free for a month before they arrested me. They said we had a paramilitary group at the newspaper! Also, I was a member of the Socialist Party of Chile, the same party as Allende.

“I was kept in different concentration camps like many people who opposed the military coup.”

Before he left Chile for Britain, he married his partner Fresia so that she could go into exile with him. The marriage ceremony took place in prison.

“We arrived in London and were welcomed by a member of Chile Solidarity. I wanted to stay in London, but there were too many of us there. They found another place in Leeds where there was a Chile Solidarity group helping people who had arrived.”

The Leeds group was led by the late Barry Cooper, a Communist Party member. Cooper, who was later a professor of mathematics at Leeds University, died in 2015.

Sue Buckle was his partner and worked alongside him with the Chilean refugees. In 1974, the two were among a welcoming committee for the first group of refugees who arrived at Leeds Trades Club, a large building in Savile Mount in Chapeltown and the epicentre of left-wing and trade union activity in the city.

“It was a really cold, wet, windy night in November 1974,” she said. “Those of us who had arranged to host Chileans in our houses, we turned up at the Trades Club to meet our guests. This coach turned up and parked outside the Trades Club.

“We saw these people, some with children, getting off this bus with just a kitbag or a suitcase, whatever they could carry ... At least a couple of them had guitars.

“Roy and Cathy Rix had put on a welcome buffet.”

Roy Rix was the full-time steward of the Trades Club, and also a member of the Communist Party. The Rix family had a house next to the club.

“There were some people who spoke Spanish, but most of us didn’t have a clue. There was food and drink and a kind of settling down for them after their journey,” said Buckle.

“Then one of the Chilean guitars came out and we got some Chilean songs. Victor Jara songs, I think.”

Chilean political singer and songwriter Jara was murdered with hundreds of others in Chile’s national football stadium in Santiago in the weeks after the coup.

The arrival of the refugees in Leeds was met with a concerted effort by the labour and trade union movement to help them settle in the city.

Emergency accommodation was provided by volunteers in their own homes. In the longer term, Labour-controlled Leeds City Council provided empty council properties, many of which had been condemned.

Among them was an ageing block of flats, Hunslet Grange. Council electricians, plasterers, plumbers and other workers made them fit for habitation by the Chileans.

Former Labour councillor Geoff Driver, now 85, said: “We had people who made sure we identified the places that there were in terms of housing. There were sympathetic officials searching for properties.

“Then there was furniture to provide. There was a concert in Leeds town hall with Inti-Ilimani (a Chilean band) to raise support.”

Furniture was donated. More was bought through fund-raising efforts.

Park Lane College in Leeds organised English language lessons.

Jobs for the refugees were found through the Leeds TUC and its affiliated unions. Leeds TUC was at that time run by a combination of communists and left-wing Labour Party activists.

The secretary was the late Beryl Huffinley, a communist. Her husband Ron, also a communist, was a branch officer of the train drivers’ union Aslef in Leeds. The president of Leeds TUC was a Labour Party member and also an Aslef branch officer. Some refugees were given jobs on the railways.

Buckle said: “Some of the Chileans were skilled workers but had to take other jobs.” Journalist Hernandez was one of them.

He took a job as the librarian at Yorkshire Post Newspapers, publishers of the Yorkshire Post and the Yorkshire Evening Post, in Leeds. He worked there for 20 years.

Similar solidarity took place in Sheffield, involving communist and Labour Party activists, trade unions and a supportive Labour Council.

Maria Vasquez-Aguilar was three years old when she arrived in exile in the city with her parents in 1978.

“When we arrived in Sheffield we were picked up by a social worker and a steel worker shop steward,” she said. “We were put in Dalton in Rotherham — so we went from dictatorship to Dalton.

“In Chile, my dad had been involved in MIR, a resistance group against the coup. The secret police caught up with him in 1974. He was detained by secret police.

“Both mum and dad were picked up at the same time. Mum was pregnant with me. They let her go. Then my dad disappeared.

“It turned out he was in various torture centres. He spent the next two years in various concentration camps. I learned to walk in a concentration camp.

“Then after international pressure, he was released in 1977. But there was nowhere to work and there was the repression.”

By now the family had three children.

“We started to receive correspondence from abroad in solidarity,” she said. “They sent two plane tickets for Mum and Dad for Italy and said they would raise funds for tickets for the kids. We all wanted to go together so we said no.

“Then we got five tickets sent to us for the UK. We don’t know who sent them. From what dad remembers, they were from a group of Jewish activists. That is how we ended up in Sheffield, arriving early in 1978.”

In exile her father remained active with MIR, organising events with trade unions and Constituency Labour Parties.

“He and another comrade set up a Chilean Society and started activities at universities supporting the resistance back home, raising awareness,” she said.

Her family became involved in British politics and trade union solidarity as well.

“There was the miners’ strike, demonstrations against cuts, anti-apartheid, anti-racism, Troops Out of Northern Ireland. To me that is what integration is about,” she said.

There were negatives.

“In Dalton we experienced racism,” she said. “On the other side we were going to all these events and to me it was a very beautiful time. People wanted to help even though they had never been to Chile. I thank those people. I do not think they realised the impact that had on us.”

Not surprisingly, having been brought up in a “hub of political activity” as she puts it, she is today a leading activist in her own right, still passionate about the current repression in Chile where campaigns continue to discover the fate of more than 1,000 of those “disappeared” after the coup.

“The military has the information but they won’t release it. There has been no truth, justice and reparation,” she said.

“There is a lot of denial going on in Chile of the extent of the horror of the Pinochet regime, even questioning whether there was the use of torture. One politician has declared it an ‘urban myth.’ But they used dogs to rape women.

“And the repression goes on. To me, it is the legacy of Pinochet. There has been no reckoning. The security forces easily go back to repression. Chile still needs to deal with that.” she said.

On Saturday September 9, 500 people marched and rallied in Sheffield marking the 50th anniversary of the coup. It was organised by Vasquez-Aguilar and the Chile Solidarity Network her family established in the city.

The human stories of the Chilean refugees and the solidarity shown by communists, socialists, trade unionists and left-wing local authorities were repeated in cities like Birmingham, Manchester and many more, including in Liverpool, where activist Alec McFadden recalls dockers refusing to deal with Chilean ships moored in the docks, and the help given to exiled Chilean sailors.

“The dockers said ‘those ships aren’t going anywhere,’ and that was that,” said McFadden.

“One of the Chilean sailors was 16. He went to college, learned the language and became a chef. He got married and opened his own restaurant.

“What the labour and trade union movement did was quite staggering. Liverpool had a Labour council and it was on the left. MPs and councillors worked together. Liverpool came up trumps.”

Gilberto and Fresia Hernandez, who married in a Chilean prison, raised two children in Leeds and have two grandchildren who live with their parents in London. “We’ve been married for 48 years,” he told me.

The experiences of the Chilean political refugees cannot be easily compared to what is happening to refugees in Britain today — but what happened 50 years ago is a testimony to the effectiveness of the labour and trade union movement’s solidarity.