Description
The Francoist army conquered Lopera on Christmas Day 1936 without being prevented by the blowing up of the bridge over the Salado stream by the Republicans. In the following three days, troops from the republican XIV International Brigade under the command of General Walter, tried to recover the population without success. During the attacks and counterattacks, the British company of the La Marseillesa battalion reached the first houses of the town, but was forced to retreat. The Republicans suffered about three hundred dead and more than twice as many wounded. A considerable number of casualties, the knowledge of which greatly affected our Oriolano poet. Among the seventy-eight fatalities of the 145 men that made up the British company were the poet Rupert John Cornford and the novelist Ralph Winston Fox. Their bodies were never recovered. Cornford came from a well-known intellectual family - his father was a professor of Ancient Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and his great-grandfather was none other than the natural scientist Charles Darwin. Following his convictions and strong communist ideals, he volunteered at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was killed by a machine gun burst when, heroically, he was trying to help a comrade in the Battle of Lopera on December 28, 1936. He had just turned 21 and had a promising literary career ahead of him. Among the poems written in Spain we can highlight Full Moon at Tierz, A Lefter from Aragón, To Margot Heinemann, Grieve in a new way for new losses and On a Lost Battle in the Spanish War. Fox also came from a wealthy English family, but following a trip to the Soviet Union, his social and literary commitment was marked forever. In the summer of 1936 he joined the International Brigades, where he became Deputy Political Commissar of the 12th Battalion. He died in the Battle of Lopera, during the day of December 27, 1936 when he was trying to conquer the place known as “Cerro del Calvario”, when he was only 36 years old. Among his published books, the titles Capitan Youth, A comedi in three acts, People of the Steppes, A Biography, Marx and Engels on the Irish Questío and Genghis Khan stand out. The town of Lopera pays proud tribute to these British volunteers with a simple monolith to both writers and a bronze plaque commemorating the poet John Cornford, made by the Scottish sculptor Frank Casey and donated to the Lopera Town Council by the British historian Alan D. P. Warren.
