The International Brigades Memorial at the Old Spotted Dog Ground

Clapton Community Football Club stalwart and local activist, Kevin Blowe, writes about a significant anniversary and memorial unveiling of the Spanish International Brigades at Clapton's ground on Saturday 26 April.

Since launching its International Brigades-inspired away kit in 2018, Clapton Community Football Club (CCFC), the owners of the Old Spotted Dog Ground on Upton Lane, has wanted to mark the debt of gratitude owed to those who volunteered to join the fight against fascism in Spain. The club also recognises the part that the red, yellow and purple kit has played in the growth of the club and its links to the struggle in Spain.

The now-famous CCFC away kit, featuring the colours of the International Brigades, launched in 2018 with sales in excess of 20,000

We are grateful for the many new friends we have made along the way and it gives us great pride that CCFC has been able to finance a significant memorial to those with who aided the fight for the Spanish Republic between 1936 and 1939. In March 2019, the club had asked to site a memorial in West Ham Park, but our proposal was rejected by the City of London Corporation.

After securing the Old Spotted Dog Ground in 2020, the plan shifted to installing it inside our ground, but a combination of the ongoing pandemic and then the need to have the Old Spotted Dog Ground ready for men’s and women’s first team games meant further delays.

International Brigades banner - proudly on display at many marches and events, courtesy IBMT's website 

However, after six years of planning, the Newham International Brigades memorial is unveiled on Saturday 26 April 2025. The significance of 26 April is also that it marked the anniversary of the ‘carpet bombing’ of the Basque town of Guernica by combined German, Italian and Spanish fascist forces, which became the subject of Picasso’s famous painting. This finally convinced the British government to allow refugee children to travel to Southampton and a number of these children later went on to become professional football players in England and Spain.

Picasso's Guernica painting

We have worked closely with the International Brigade Memorial Trust, whose President Marlene Sidaway lives close to the Old Spotted Dog Ground. Her partner, David Marshall, served in Spain and the poem inscribed upon the memorial was written by David, who is also remembered on a bench in nearby West Ham Park.

The Newham memorial

The club asked local firm Rodwell Memorials, based in Manor Park, to create the memorial in red granite, which was ordered in September 2024. In February 2025, volunteers began work on the concrete base, which was laid by some of the team from Hackney Bumps, an outdoor skate park in Clapton that we previously worked with to raise funds for Gaza Sunbirds and Pal Gaza.

The Newham memorial taking shape )courtesy IBMT website

Fighters against fascism

The memorial pays special tribute to those from the area around the Old Spotted Dog who made that journey, whether to take up arms or to tend to the wounded. The details of those with a link to the local area are given below, along with their dates of birth and death, as well as any known political or trades union affiliations. Lost records as well as changes in the boundaries and administration of the area means that our list may have some omissions.

Newham was not created until 1965 and births before that would have been registered to the boroughs of West and East Ham. Volunteers born in the area may also have only been known by their last address before signing up. Below we list those registered as coming from, or having a strong relationship with West Ham.

If you do know of any further volunteers from the area then please let us know, or inform the International Brigade Memorial Trust on admin@international-brigades.org.uk. You can search for further volunteers in the IBMT database.

Volunteers for Spain

Fred Adams

1911-1994 - Transport & General Workers’ Union

Born in West Ham, Fred Adams was a builder’s labourer, who fought at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937. He received two thigh wounds and was repatriated on medical grounds after eight months in Spain.

Joseph Caleno

1912-1963 - Communist Party

Originally a boot repairer by trade, Leicester-born Joe Caleno spent 13 months in Spain and was cited for bravery at the Battle of Brunete. He was sent home after sustaining an injury, and in 1939 he was living and working in West Ham Lane, Stratford, as a shopkeeper and tobacconist.

Percy Cohen

1901-1974 - Transport & General Workers’ Union

Stratford-born Percy Cohen served  as an ambulance driver in Spain for 18 months, before being repatriated in August 1938. His occupation was given as a provision merchant.

Max Colin

1912-1997 - Young Communist League

Born in Stepney, Max Colin lived in Rosebery Avenue, Newham. He was a driver and mechanic, serving in that capacity for 10 months in Spain. He was wounded at the Battle of Brunete in the summer of 1937.

Charles Cormack

1912-1938 - Communist Party

Born in Forest Gate, where he lived in Vansittart Road, Charles Cormack was killed on 27 August 1938 in the Battle of the Ebro on his 26th birthday. He had been in Spain for five months. He worked as a driver before joining the International Brigades.

James Cormack

1910-1991 - Communist Party

James was the brother of Charles Cormack and lived in the same house on Vansittart Road. The pair arrived together in Spain in March 1938. The Lambeth-born painter was wounded in the Battle of the Ebro in August 1938, losing three fingers. He returned home four months later and then lived in Field Road, Forest Gate.

Cecil Cranfield

1906-1976 - Labour Party

A former lightweight amateur boxing champion, Cecil Cranfield was born in Camberwell and worked as a salesman. When he joined the International Brigades, his address was given as Romford Road, Forest Gate. He was a machine-gunner in Spain, where he remained for eight months, and was wounded in January 1938 at the Battle of Teruel.

George Degude

1910-1937 - Communist Party

Born in West Ham, George Degude lived at Newington Hall Villas, Church Street, Stoke Newington. He arrived in Spain in February 1937 and was an ambulance driver. He sustained a fatal head injury at the Battle of Brunete in July 1937 and died soon afterwards.

Edward Dickinson

1903-1937 - Industrial Workers of the World

Born in Grimsby, Edward Dickinson was a salesman who gave his address as Upton Lane, Forest Gate. He arrived in Spain in December 1936 and was captured at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937 while second-in-command of the British Battalion’s machine-gun company. He was shot on 13 March 1937 after protesting over the shooting of a fellow prisoner.

Gerrard Doyle

1907-1970 - Communist Party

Limerick-born driver and moulder Gerrard Doyle served in Spain for 17 months and was wounded in fighting at Jarama and at Brunete, in February and July of 1937. In March 1938 he was captured at Calaceite and held at the prisoner of war camp at San Pedro de Cardeña, near Burgos, until returning home in October 1938 in a prisoner exchange with Italian troops. He gave his address as Vale Road, Forest Gate.

Thomas Duncombe

1913-1938 - Communist Party, National Union of General & Municipal Workers

Born in West Ham, Thomas Duncombe gave an address at Rosher Road, Stratford, when he arrived in Spain in February 1938. He was a labourer and was listed as missing, presumed killed, at Gandesa on 3 April of that year.

Leslie Huson

1907-1938 - Communist Party, Transport & General Workers’ Union

Metallurgist Leslie Huson was born in West Ham and emigrated to Canada when he was 18, but had returned home and was living in Clerkenwell when he joined the International Brigades in February 1938. He survived for only two months, dying of pneumonia in hospital in Valls, Catalonia.

David Marshall

1916-2005 - Young Communist League

David Marshall, a civil servant from Middlesbrough, was one of the first volunteers in Spain. Arriving in Spain in August 1936, he was wounded at Cerro de los Ángeles, near Madrid, and repatriated in January 1937. After service in the British Army, he became a set designer and carpenter with Joan Littlewood’s theatre company at Stratford’s Theatre Royal, eventually settling in Forest Gate. He lived in Reginald Road, close to West Ham Park, where there is a memorial bench to him.

John O’Connor

1915-1999 - Communist Party, National Union of Railwaymen

Steel fixer John O’Connor was born in Poplar and was living on Upton Lane, Forest Gate when he volunteered, arriving in Spain in February 1938. He was in the International Brigades for 10 months, serving as a cartographer and lookout with the British Battalion at the Battle of the Ebro in the summer of 1938.

Pat O’Mahoney

1890-Unknown

Canadian-born Pat O’Mahoney was a veteran of the First World War who lived in Geere Road, Stratford. He was a nurse/masseur and arrived in Spain in February 1937. He was wounded at the Battle of Jarama later that month and sent home in May 1937.

Gordon Siebert

1910-1990 - Labour Party

Gordon Siebert was a clerk, born in West Ham. He arrived in Spain in October 1937 and did not return home until the end of the Spanish Civil War in April 1939, having been imprisoned for disciplinary offences.

 

What the papers say about Claremont Road: (1) adverts for servants

We’ve dived deep into the British Library’s newspaper archive (available on subscription direct and via Find My Past) to find out what British newspapers have had to say about the Woodgrange estate’s Claremont Road since its construction in the late 1870s, and some fascinating stories have emerged.

Claremont Road 1913

The archive has digitized over 90 million pages from almost 2,500 different publications, and their contents can be accessed by increasingly sophisticated search engines and optical character recognition (OCR) techniques. A search for “Claremont Road Forest Gate” reveals over 1,600 references.

The most significant number of these (more than 10%, or 167) are advertisements for domestic servants, which paint an interesting picture. This article is the first in a series examining how the press has covered this street, focusing on the advertisements for domestic servants.

167 is almost certainly a serious underestimate of those placed for servants in the street. The most prominent local newspaper for nearly all of the period since Claremont Road was constructed, the Stratford Express, for some baffling reason (and despite numerous requests by local historians to fully digitize the paper), only has a handful of years, seemingly chosen at random, digitized and available through this source for examination.

Claremont Road c1910

 

Also, somewhat annoyingly, the national publication that has traditionally been the go-to for domestic servants' advertisements—The Lady, first published in 1885—has also not been digitized. Doubtlessly, buried within the pages of these two publications are many more advertisements seeking domestic servants for Claremont Road since its construction.

What follows is what we know and conclude about the lives of domestic servants in Claremont Road, primarily based on press accounts.

Census returns

We have previously examined the number of servants living on the road in our coverage of the 1881 and 1891 censuses (see here and here). In summary, these articles showed that in 1881, 50 (83%) of the 67 houses that had been constructed by then had a live-in servant, and 13 (22%) had both a female domestic servant and a “nurse” (live-in nanny).

A decade later, we examined 98 houses on the street, 80 of which had at least one servant, and 11 had two (typically the second was a nurse). All the servants in both surveys were women who were overwhelmingly young and unmarried.

Houses covered by adverts

For most of the time covered by the newspaper advertisements surveyed, there were approximately 160 houses on Claremont Road (fewer in the first few years, as construction had not been completed), and fewer since 1940, as around 25 houses at the Woodgrange Road end of the road had been destroyed by bomb damage.

Although over 80% of houses in the 1881 and 1891 snapshot census figures reported having domestic servants, we have found newspaper advertisements for approximately only 36% of them (58 houses) for the entire period covered by the survey (from 1880 onwards).

This suggests that either households found their domestics through other means (such as word of mouth, recommendations, agencies, or informal advertisements) or that the more obvious publication sources (Stratford Express and The Lady) offer a rich source of material for future examination once they become available through the British Newspaper Archive.

Approximately two-thirds of the houses on Claremont Road have triple frontages. Not surprisingly, adverts for those houses are disproportionately more likely to have sought domestic help than the double-fronted houses at the street's eastern end. A complete list of houses advertising for servants is included in the footnote. Anyone who would like a copy of the adverts for their home can be supplied with one on request.

One of the smaller, double fronted houses at the eastern end of Claremont Road

 

Pay

Only about a third of the adverts mentioned pay for the servants, and by today’s standards, the rewards were shockingly low. Almost all the advertisements sought live-in female help, typically for girls or young women in their teens and early twenties. Presumably, these individuals would have been perceived as being cheaper and less likely to get married or pregnant than older women.

The fact that they lived with their employers would have meant that they were at their beck and call almost relentlessly, but also that free board and lodging (and possibly work attire) was a considerable bonus to their meagre wages.

The pay offered to servants in the 1880s was in the region of £10-£12 per year (£1,103 - £1,324 in real terms today, using the Bank of England inflation calculator). Pay offered in the 1890s was more varied, but at current valuations, it was within the range of £862 to £1,675 per annum.

A typical 1880s advert- Leytonstone Express 1 Nov 1888

Rates increased considerably in the first decade of the twentieth century, suggesting that attracting very low-paid girls and young women was becoming more challenging. Pay in the first decade of the twentieth century was typically in the range of £1,800 - £2,500.

The higher pay rates presumably reduced the number of households able or prepared to employ servants. The number of adverts for servants decreased considerably in the decade before the onset of World War One, and it never recovered. We found only two advertisements in the entire post-World War One period—both from 1927. The rates offered were £1,868 and £2,773, respectively.

Yarmouth Independent 22 October 1927 - offering the equivalent of £1,868 pa.

The 1880s and 1890s saw the most significant demand for servants, which coincided with the lowest wages. The apparent decline in demand occurred in the first decade of the twentieth century, in contrast to the popular myth that the First World War caused the decline and collapse of domestic service as an occupation.

Most of the advertisements we have traced were for full-time, live-in servants, but there were occasional ones for “daily help,” such as the one below. It is from 1891 and offers a maximum of £5 per week (adjusted for inflation) for someone who would have had to pay for their accommodation elsewhere.  Another shows a maximum of 30p per week in 1917 (£15 per week at today’s rates), when there were considerable competing demands for women in the wartime workforce.

The hours of the “dailys” were rarely mentioned, but if the 1891 advert was typical, an 11-hour day (8am – 7pm), possibly six days a week, would have seemed likely.

11 hour day for "daily", West Ham and South Essex Independent 25 July 1891

 

Conditions

None of the advertisements provided a job description, so it isn't easy to accurately describe what work was expected or what the hours were. The nearest equivalent is for jobs as “nurses” when it was clear that the job was essentially that of a nanny who would have been employed in addition to a general housemaid.

The advertisement below, from 1888, is presumably for new house occupants, seeking two young women or girls. The nanny was expected to “Take entire CHARGE of Four, and to teach three young children English and music” for £10 per year (£1,103 today)! And for a ”GIRL, about 14, for housework” (no salary mentioned).

 

Essex Newsman 7 Jan 1888

A typical housemaid would have been expected to light the fires, carry coal to various rooms in the house, and perform household chores, including clearing up the mess caused by the soot from the fires. In an era before refrigeration, daily shopping was necessary, and most advertisements featured cooking – usually emphasizing “simple” or “plain” cooking.

Washing was an issue and an undesired task for servants (heating the water, transferring it to large vessels, hand washing many and heavy clothes with crude soaps, drying—particularly in bad weather—ironing in the pre-electric iron days, etc.). As recruitment became more expensive and difficult in the first decade of the twentieth century, would-be employers found it advantageous to offer “no washing” as an inducement to potential staff. 

An early C20th "no washing" advert - Leytonstone Express 5 May 1902

 

This would have coincided with the growth of commercial laundries. There was one between what is now the Fox and Hounds and Forest Tavern on Woodgrange Road (see the faint traces of signage in the photo below) and a larger one on Upton Lane (see the second photo).

Laundry to the left of the Fox and Hounds

 

Substantial Steam Laundry on Upton Lane - 1902 - now a petrol station. Location of Minnie Baldock's campaign on behalf of workers' conditions in 1911

The working life for women in these establishments was appalling – see the correspondence between local suffragette leader Minnie Baldock and workers at the Upton Lane establishment in the early twentieth century here.

It is reasonable to assume that the smaller the employer’s family was, the less demanding the work would have been for the servants, so – as with the washing issue – many adverts stressed small family sizes, where appropriate in the early years of the twentieth century, as potential inducements to the girls/young women they were seeking to attract.

Media used and timings of advertisements

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of advertisements accessed were in East London and Essex newspapers. However, the Daily Express became favoured in the early years of the twentieth century, at a time when the overall demand had reduced. Presumably, a national newspaper was used to advertise to attract a wider pool of would-be applicants as local sources dried up.

Daily Express 14 Feb 1904

 

A couple of adverts were placed when potential employers had a specific requirement. In 1902, the Percy Turner family of 89 Claremont Road felt a little homesick when they advertised in the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, seeking a locally based person to work for a Devonshire family.

Exeter and Plymouth Gazette 22 May 1902

 

In 1882, Mrs. Allen of 31 Claremont specifically requested a “churchwoman,” and the owners of 24 Claremont advertised in the Catholic Times in 1907, seeking “clerical references.” In 1891, Mrs. Bliss of 52 was quite clear, in an era when the temperance movement was most active, that she wanted “an abstainer.”

News reports

Claremont Road domestic servants were explicitly mentioned in three news reports in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

Suicide

The first case involved 16-year-old Constance Susan Hand, a nursemaid employed by the Berry family of number 56.

Eastern Post 2 April 1881

 

It would appear that she had only been employed by the family for two weeks and had received a letter from her fiancé breaking off their engagement. However, the coroner’s court heard that she was pleased this had happened.

On the day of her death, she borrowed 6d from her mother and bought vermin killer from Dyer’s, the chemist and druggist on Woodgrange Road.

She returned to number 56, appeared to have taken the poison, and was found by Mrs Berry, the employer, “convulsed and repeatedly calling on God to help her”. She died an hour later. Mrs Berry described her as a “very quiet, modest young woman”. The court could discover no cause for her suicide.

Railway accident

Six years later, another nursemaid, 24-year-old Ellen Taylor, the daughter of a Kent policeman, employed by Joseph Benton at 87 Claremont Road was involved in a strange, self-generated railway accident. 

Chelmsford Chronicle 5 Aug 1887

 

While in charge of two of her employer’s children on a train journey to Southend, she tested the carriage's door to ensure it had been adequately closed when they left Liverpool Street. It hadn’t been, and she fell out, sustaining injuries. She was taken to Chelmsford hospital, where her damaged arm was treated, and the family accompanied her back to Forest Gate.

Duped in a theft

The third case was less dramatic. “Miss Rayner,” a domestic servant of 26 Claremont Road, was an unwitting accessory to a theft from an ironmonger’s shop. The shop’s employee, who had duped her, was convicted of theft and given a one-month sentence with hard labour.

East End News 3 June 1896

Footnote. House numbers placing (sometimes multiple) adverts for servants: 3,6, 7, 13, 14, 18, 20, 24, 26, 29, 31, 35, 36, 39, 44, 50, 52, 53, 57, 59, 62, 63, 64, 67, 68, 72, 77, 78, 82, 84, 89, 90, 9, 92, 93, 95, 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 106, 107, 11, 113, 114, 124, 125, 131, 133, 136, 138, 140, 141, 145, 148, 158.