Malcolm Dunbar

Ronald Malcolm (Michael) Loraine Dunbar (1912-1963) was a Chief of Staff of the 15th International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War.

There is some confusion over his first name. It appears to be interchangeable.

A mention in a letter from the Secretary of State for the colonies

THE SECRETARY OF STATE FOR THE COLONIES (Viscount Cranborne) reply regarding Malcolm Dunbar;- Let me take the case of Mr. Dunbar. Speaking about Mr. Dunbar the noble Lord said: In the Spanish Civil War, Malcolm Dunbar rose to be Chief of Staff of the International Brigade, and by his brilliant tactics won the Battle of the Ebro. He proved himself a great leader and a brilliant tactician. He joined the British Army at the outbreak of the present war and is still a corporal in the Tank Corps. The impression given by that—I do not know if it was intentional—was that he was prevented from rising in the British Army, prevented from getting commissioned rank. He is not in fact a corporal, but it is true to say he is still a sergeant. It would not, however, be at all true to say that he was not permitted to rise from the ranks. On the contrary, he was in fact recommended for a Commission and recommended for training at an O.C.T.U., for that purpose. But, greatly to Mr. Dunbar's credit, he himself refused to take a Commission because his unit was mobilized for service overseas and he wished to go with it. Mr. Dunbar, who comes, as the noble Lord knows, of a very old military family and who was educated at Repton and at Cambridge, appears to be a typical case of a young independent-minded public school boy who enlisted to fight for his country in the struggle against tyranny. I hope Mr. Dunbar will rise and that he will fill the place to which his ability and experience entitle him. But the point is that the military authorities have not prevented him from getting a Commission, which unfortunately was the impression which the noble Lord gave to the American people.

The Manchester Guardian (9 December 1938)

The following piece appeared in Manchester Guardian by Tom Wintringham.

I have read with some surprise in a London paper that the International Brigades consisted of 'the lowest dregs of the unemployed' and of 'Marxist hordes that desecrated churches'. Desecrating churches has not been an English habit for 300 years. We had unemployed in our ranks whose courage and endurance proved what a waste it is to keep men of such quality eating their hearts out in idleness. But most of our volunteers gave up jobs to come to Spain.

Some of those who are buried in Spain would have enriched English literature if they had lived: Ralph Fox, as novelist: and four poets, John Comford, Julian Bell, Christopher St. John Sprigg, and Charles Donnelly from Ireland.

Our brigades have been called 'international gunmen'. Let me run through names that seem strangely at variance with this and other labels stuck on us by those who choose to write without knowing the men they are writing about.

Traill, a journalist from Bloomsbury, Chief of Staff of the 86th Brigade; Bee, our map-maker, an architect; David McKenzie, son of an admiral; Giles and Esmond Romilly, relatives of Winston Churchill; Malcolm Dunbar, son of Lady Dunbar, our last Chief of Staff of the Brigade; Hugh Slater, journalist, and very neat with his anti-tank guns; Clive Branson; Peter Whittaker; Ralph Bates, the novelist.

Speech by Aneurin Bevan

Bevan was critical of the leadership of the British Army which he felt was class bound and inflexible. After Auchinleck's defeat by Rommel and his disastrous retreat across Cyrenaica in 1942, Bevan made one of his most memorable speeches in the Commons in support of a motion of censure against the Churchill government. In this he said, "The Prime Minister must realise that in this country there is a taunt on everyone's lips that if Rommel had been in the British Army he would still have been a sergeant...There is a man in the British Army who flung 150,000 men across the Ebro in Spain, Michael Dunbar. He is at present a sergeant...He was Chief of Staff in Spain, he won the Battle of the Ebro, and he is a sergeant." How angry this criticism made Churchill can be seen from the following. Churchill devotes almost an entire page in his history "The Second World War" to a lengthy quotation of this speech, yet he never mentions Bevan as the speaker, referring to him only as, "One Member."