35 British people of the Spanish Civil War

Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as "Funeral Blues"; on political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles"; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae".

Ralph Bates was an English novelist, writer, journalist and political activist. He is best known for his writings on pre–Civil War Spain.

Captain Charles William Henry "Cecil" Bebb was a British commercial pilot and later airline executive, notable for flying General Francisco Franco from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco in 1936, a journey which was to trigger the onset of the Spanish Civil War.

Julian Heward Bell was an English poet, and the son of Clive and Vanessa Bell. The writer Quentin Bell was his younger brother and the writer and painter Angelica Garnett was his half-sister. His relationship with his mother is explored in Susan Sellers' novel Vanessa and Virginia.

John Edward Boulting and Roy Alfred Clarence Boulting, known collectively as the Boulting brothers, were English filmmakers and identical twins who became known for their popular series of satirical comedies in the 1950s and 1960s. They produced many of their films through their own production company, Charter Film Productions, which they set up in 1937.

Archibald Fenner Brockway, Baron Brockway, was a British socialist politician and anti-war activist.

George Brown was an Irish born communist activist and trade unionist who was based in Manchester, England for most of his life. He was a brigadista in the International Brigades fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and was killed in the Battle of Brunete in 1937.

Felicia Mary Browne was an English artist and leftist. She was the first British volunteer to die in the Spanish Civil War. Her body was not recovered.

Ignatius Royston Dunnachie Campbell – better known as Roy Campbell – was a South African poet and satirist of Scottish and Scotch-Irish descent.

Christopher Caudwell was the pseudonym of Christopher St John Sprigg, a British Marxist writer.

Colonel Victor Alexander Cazalet, MC was a British Conservative Party Member of Parliament for nineteen years. He came from a prominent aristocratic English family.

Frederick Bayes Copeman OBE (1907–1983) was an English volunteer in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, commanding the British Battalion. He is also notable for contributing to London's air raid defences during the Second World War.

Rupert John Cornford was an English poet and communist. He was the son of Francis Cornford and Frances Cornford, and was a great-grandson of Charles Darwin and Emma Darwin. During the first year of the Spanish Civil War, he was a member of the POUM militia and later the International Brigades. He died while fighting against the Nationalists, at Lopera, near Córdoba.

Nancy Clara Cunard was a writer, heiress and political activist. She was born into the British upper class, and devoted much of her life to fighting racism and fascism. She became a muse to some of the 20th century's most distinguished writers and artists, including Wyndham Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Tristan Tzara, Ezra Pound and Louis Aragon—who were among her lovers—as well as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Constantin Brâncuși, Langston Hughes, Man Ray and William Carlos Williams. MI5 documents reveal that she was involved with Indian socialist leader VK Krishna Menon. In later years she suffered from mental illness, and her physical health deteriorated. When she died in the Hôpital Cochin, Paris, she weighed only 26 kg.

Andrew Fountaine was an activist involved in the British far right. After military service in a number of conflicts Fountaine joined the Conservative Party and was selected as a parliamentary candidate until his outspoken views resulted in his being disowned by the party.

William James Tatem, 1st Baron Glanely, known as Sir William Tatem, Bt, between 1916 and 1918, was a Cardiff ship-owner and thoroughbred racehorse owner and breeder.

Brian Christian de Claiborne Howard was an English poet and later a writer for the New Statesman.

Douglas Francis Jerrold was a British journalist and publisher. As editor of The English Review from 1931 to 1935, he was a vocal supporter of fascism in Italy and of Francoist Spain. He was personally involved in the events of July 1936 when two British intelligence agents piloted an aircraft from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco, taking General Francisco Franco with them and thereby helped to spark the military coup that ignited the Spanish Civil War.

James Larkin Jones, known as Jack Jones, was a British trade union leader and General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union.

James Robertson Justice was a British film actor, best known in comedies, where he would play the pompous authority-figure. He also co-starred with Gregory Peck in several adventure movies, notably The Guns of Navarone. Born in south London, he exaggerated his Scottish roots, but was in fact prominent in Scottish public life, helping to launch Scottish Television and serving as Rector of the University of Edinburgh.

Major Henry Kelly VC, MC & Bar was an English recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest and most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces.

Rose Kerrigan was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain

Arthur Koestler, was a Hungarian British author and journalist. Koestler was born in Budapest and, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. In 1931, Koestler joined the Communist Party of Germany, but he resigned in 1938 because Stalinism disillusioned him.

Laurence Edward Alan "Laurie" Lee, MBE was an English poet, novelist and screenwriter, who was brought up in the small village of Slad in Gloucestershire.

Sam Lesser was a British journalist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War's International Brigades. Lesser was one of the last surviving British veterans of the Spanish Civil War, and went on to serve as chair of the International Brigade Memorial Trust (IBMT), and write for the Daily Worker and its successor, the Morning Star.

Camelia Ethel MacDonald was a Glasgow-based Scottish anarchist and activist and, in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, a broadcaster on Barcelona Loyalist radio.

Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a British intelligence officer and a double agent for the Soviet Union. In 1963 he was revealed to be a member of the Cambridge Five, a spy ring which passed information to the Soviet Union during World War II and in the early stages of the Cold War. Of the five, Philby is believed to have been most successful in providing secret information to the Soviets.

Major Hugh Bertie Campbell Pollard was an author, firearms expert, and a British SOE officer. He is chiefly known for his intelligence work during the Irish War of Independence and for the events of July 1936, when he and Cecil Bebb flew General Francisco Franco from the Canary Islands to Morocco, thereby helping to trigger the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He was the author of many published works on weaponry, in particular on sporting firearms.

Esmond Marcus David Romilly was a British socialist, anti-fascist and journalist, who was in turn a schoolboy rebel, a veteran with the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War and, following the outbreak of the Second World War, an observer with the Royal Canadian Air Force. He is perhaps best remembered for his teenage elopement with his distant cousin Jessica Mitford, the second youngest of the Mitford sisters.

William Charles Rust was a British newspaper editor and communist activist.

John Sommerfield was a British writer and left-wing activist known for his influential novel May Day, which fictionalised a Communist upheaval in 1930s London. Sommerfield volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War and wrote one of the first combatant accounts of that conflict. He later served in the Royal Air Force in World War II.

Sir Stephen Harold Spender was an English poet, novelist and essayist whose work concentrated on themes of social injustice and the class struggle. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress in 1965.

Douglas Frank Springhall, known as Dave Springhall, was a British communist activist.

Violetta Thurstan, MM was an English nurse, weaver, and administrator whose work included help for refugees and prisoners of war. She knew several languages, travelled frequently and wrote a number of books. The first was about her experiences of nursing in dangerous troublespots during the First World War. She was honoured by three countries for her courage while nursing in the war, and was awarded the Military Medal.

Thomas Henry Wintringham was a British soldier, military historian, journalist, poet, Marxist, politician and author. He was a supporter of the Home Guard during the Second World War and was one of the founders of the Common Wealth Party.