BOADILLA ESMOND ROMILLY THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR INTERNATIONAL BRIGADE. HARDBACK EDITION

The book’s dust jacket is in good condition although it has a price tag scar on the book title. There is the name of a previous owner written small and neatly on the blank endpaper. That said the book is in very nice condition. It shows little signs of reading or handling wear, it is unthumbed. With all the pages clean and tight to the spine. The book is the one in the photographs.

Esmond Romilly was one of the very few survivors from the English contingent in the International Brigade. He was also Winston Churchill’s nephew and even rumoured to be his illegitimate son. Already notorious as a teenage runaway from Wellington College, one of the leading English public schools, Romilly was among the first British volunteers to join the International Brigades in Spain.

Cycling across France to fight on the side of the Spanish Republican Government against Franco’s insurrection. He saw intensive front line action in defence of Madrid, culminating in the battle of Boadilla del Monte in December 1936.

This is his personal account of those events, in which many fellow comrades lost their lives.

As well as a highly readable and moving memoir, it has served as a primary historical source for many leading scholars writing about the Spanish Civil War, including Paul Preston, Hugh Thomas and Anthony Beevor. Romilly later joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and was killed in action when his plane was shot down over the Atlantic in 1941.