Obituary: James Maley, a born fighter, threw himself headfirst into the fray on February 19, 1908. In 1936, James answered the call of the Spanish Republic after hearing La Pasionaria on the radio.
Scottish Communist and Spanish Civil War combatant;
Born February 19, 1908;
Died April 9, 2007.

This is the original tribute, a version of which appeared in the Herald, which was read at Maryhill Crematorium on 14th April 2008 and written by James' son, Willy Maley:


James Maley, a born fighter, threw himself headfirst into the fray on 19th February 1908. His father, Edward (Ned) was from Mayo, his mother, Anne Sherlock, from Glasgow. Raised in Stevenson Street in the Calton district of Glasgow’s East End, James attended St Alphonsus. An older brother – Edward, an altar boy – died aged ten in 1911, leaving James, an older sister, Annie, two younger brothers, Willie and Timmy, and a younger sister, Mary. James worked from an early age, helping his mother, who was a hawker, wheel her barrow all over Glasgow. Sometimes he’d take the empty barrow home with his wee brothers sitting in it.

Out on an errand in 1919, aged eleven, James took a detour to George Square, where the tanks had rolled in to crush dissent. In the 1920s, James listened to his father and his friends talk at the close mouth and the corner about politics and the state of the world. Men who had come back from the war had views shaped by their experiences and expectations. This was the era of Red Clydeside, and James developed strong political convictions. In the Calton, a hotbed of radicalism, James used to go to political meetings and report back on who was worth listening to. He heard Maxton, among others, at Glasgow Green. In 1926, during the General Strike, James was hospitalized with pneumonia and had part of his lung removed, leaving a scar on his back. James was considered to be at death’s door, so much so that a priest gave him the last rites, but he heard the sound of a band in the distance. Whether it was the priest or the pipes that did it James was soon back on his feet. That was his last stay in hospital up until his death, when, eighty years on down the line, bronchial-pneumonia came back to take the rest of him away.

Within a couple of years of this near-death experience, James had to bury his own father. In 1929-30, James left Glasgow for Cleveland, Ohio, where three of his Irish aunts had emigrated. There he worked in a car factory and got into an argument with some Italians who challenged him, but when a crowd of them came running down the metal stairs at the end of the shift to see James waiting for them alone and unafraid they let it drop. Once, he went to a ten cents a dance event, saw a woman who wasn’t being danced, walked over to her, gave her all his tickets and left. His aunts had married well and were enjoying life in the States, but when remarks were passed about the new generation of immigrants James took the humph and decided to go home to Glasgow. He returned tanned and smartly dressed, carrying a case, and his brother, thinking he was selling something, closed the door on him.

In 1932, aged twenty-four, James joined the Communist Party. He was a speaker and tutor for the Party. He took an avid interest in world affairs and watched events unfold in Spain with the miners in the Asturias and in Germany with the rise of Hitler. He joined the Territorials and learned how to use a rifle. He became a noted public speaker at Glasgow Green and Govan. When he walked along Argyle Street trams would toot their horns at him as the drivers recognised him as a firebrand socialist whom they admired. In 1936, James answered the call of the Spanish Republic. It was hearing La Pasionaria on the radio that inspired him. He left from Glasgow’s George Square in a bus. The people he travelled with all came from Glasgow. They were ill equipped and poorly led but as the story goes, they went because their open eyes could see no other way. After six weeks training in Albacete, James was in action at the Battle of Jarama in February 1937 as part of a heavy-machine gun company, covering the retreat for three days. James recalled literally jumping out of the back of a lorry into a battlefield. He described it later as like coming out of a close into a street fight. He was captured at Jarama, with his machine-gun company. One of his comrades was executed. He was sentenced to twenty years with the others, but eventually released as part of a prisoner swap for fascist POWs. After his release he came home and didn’t return to Spain at his mother’s request.

Home from Spain, James continued to speak on public platforms, often ones he carried under his own arm from Glasgow Green to Govan. Before the war he worked in Beardmore’s, Parkhead Forge, and helped bring two thousand men out on strike. He was a well-known agitator and activist. When war broke out in 1939, James, quick off the mark in Spain, waited till 1941, when the Russians went in, before enlisting. He was in the King’s Own Scottish Borderers, then the Highland Light Infantry, serving in Burma and India, where he got involved with communists newly released from prison, and took part in a public debate about the causes of the war with an army captain, at the end of which he was met by two military police. After the war, James didn't do any more public speaking. He recognised a change in the working class in Britain, and realised that the Labour Party – for which he never had any time – was here to stay. James worked in Maryhill Barracks as a telephone operator until 1947, never staying at the barracks but walking home each night to his mother’s house in Shettleston Road. In 1947, he left the army and went for a job at the Telecom Office in George Street.

He didn’t get the job and left with the impression that he had the right experience but the wrong name and the wrong religion. He half-wished he had stayed in the army long enough to have that interview since being in uniform might have offset any anti-Catholicism. This discrimination was something he experienced later workingon the railway and for Glasgow Corporation as a labourer. Around this time, James went to the Highlander’s Institute, a popular social venue, where he met his future bride. James was forty years old and had a rich life behind him. Anne Watt was twenty-six and had been on the Kintyre coast during the war as a Land Girl. At the Highlander’s Institute James asked Anne to dance and never let her dance with anyone else. He said she was too young to be there. They didn’t exchange addresses or telephone numbers but arranged to meet at Boots Corner in Argyle Street the following Saturday. James was late getting back from a Celtic match in Dundee. Anne waited at the notorious ‘Dizzy Corner’. She never had to wait for him again.

James was ready to settle down and had found the love of his life. He proposed within two weeks and a few months later, in March 1949, they were married. Friends had told her she would be a young widow since she was marrying an older man. He was a one-woman man, a one-party man, and one of a kind. He could be dogmatic, and his mother did recommend to Anne that she use a frying pan on his head if he got out of hand, but they were a pair of lovebirds. Within the next fourteen years they had nine children, five daughters - Barbara, Cathy, Marina, Anne and Patricia - followed by four sons - Jimmy, Willy, John and Eddy.

There were always nine pints of milk, and in the days before the fridge they would be in the bath in cold water. Although he never smoked or drank, never spent time in pubs or clubs, never socialized with friends outside of the house, James was the life and soul of his family, and a popular local presence in Possilpark, active in the Tenants Association, in the Communist Party, and in the scheme. Although James was raised a Catholic, his children were not, and once, when a priest came to the door asking after this big family with the Irish name, and saying the word ‘turncoat’, my father said he couldn’t be in heaven knowing there was one person in hell. James was an avid reader and educator who borrowed books from the Book Exchange at Gilmorehill and gave his children a week to read them before taking them back in exchange for others. The small bookshelf never expanded, but the reading list was long and rich and better than anything to be had at school. The collected works of Marx and Lenin sat alongside Dickens, Agatha Christie, and Harold Robbins. His other loves included walking and whistling, and in later years he swapped a bunnet for a baseball cap and seemed to have rediscovered his youth.

James was never one for harping on the past. He was a volunteer for liberty in 1936; one of what Pablo Neruda called that “thin and hard and mature and ardent brigade of stone”. He remained to the end a committed socialist and internationalist, but he was passionately interested in what was happening today. He watched Channel 4’s evening news religiously, but waited patiently till Anne had watched Emmerdale before switching channels. He always lived in the present, which is probably why he was still kicking at ninety-nine. His communism owed more to the Calton than the Kremlin, so he kept the faith when others lost theirs.

James Maley was one of the last of a generation, a working-class hero, but first and foremost a hero to his family, a loving husband, father, grandfather – to Clyde, Louisa, Sonny, Norma and Josephine - and great grandfather – to Connor, Tyler and Mason. He raged against the dying of the light till the very end, and when he found himself in hospital again after eighty years of blazing good health, he treated his oxygen mask like a muzzle, pawing at it and speaking incessantly, still in charge, still in control, still the boss. When my mother kissed him and said “Night- night” the warrior was at peace. He took his last breath in the Western Infirmary just after midnight on Easter Monday, surrounded by his family. A few days earlier, while his granddaughter Louisa was cutting his hair, before she left for a holiday in Spain, he remembered some phrases in Spanish from his time in captivity seventy years earlier. He knew more than ‘No Pasaran’, and in his passing he leaves an exit wound his family will struggle to close.


NB: After James died, his family discovered that he had had three other brothers who had died in infancy, two before James was born, Michael and John, and a second Edward who died aged seven months on 2nd December 1912, so James was actually one of nine as well as a father of nine who lived to ninety-nine.