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Explorers Podcast. Hello everyone and welcome to the history of the Second World War. On this episode of our Spanish Civil War interview series, I was joined by Dr. Frazier Rayburn. This interview continues our series of regional specific discussions, and in this case we talk about Scotland, and how the people in Scotland reacted to the Spanish Civil War, why some of them chose to go to Spain

to fight in the international brigades and the humanitarian efforts that originated

in Scotland.

Hello everyone and welcome to the Spanish Civil War interview series.

Today I'm here with Dr. Frazier Rayburn, author of Scots in the Spanish Civil War,

Solidarity, Activism, and Humanitarianism.

Dr. Rayburn, how's it going today?

Like everyone else in 2020, I am bamboozled, confused, and very grateful to be able to live in the past,

although admittedly, when the past for you is the 1930s, it's not exactly much better.

That is a fantastic way of putting it.

So, when we are discussing sort of Scottish volunteers who went to Spain to fight in the Civil War,

what are we looking at in terms of just general numbers and also maybe like overall political beliefs?

So, I mean, I assume you've been talking to a few other people about the Spanish of War already.

So to contextualize it very briefly what we're

talking about, most Scots who go to Spain do so under the auspices of what become known in

late 1936 as the international brigades. And these are units organized by the Comiton or the Communist International as part of a kind of wider Soviet intervention in the Spanish War.

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