Archibald Dickson, who rescued 2,638 refugees from the Spanish civil war, is admired on the Costa Blanca but scarcely known in his home city of Cardiff.
But on Sunday 12 April a memorial service is planned in the Welsh capital, 76 years after his courageous rescue.
In the final days of the civil war, March 1939, some 30,000 Republican families fled the approaching nationalist military. Reaching Alicante port, they found Italian destroyers blockading the arrival of rescue vessels.
Guided by money over politics, Dickinson’s boat, the SS Stanbrook on a mission to pick up an expensive cargo of saffron as well as tobacco and oranges, made it through. The port authorities begged him to take as many people as he could to Algeria. He agreed and left the saffron behind.
The cargo ship was just 230 feet long, but he managed to get 2,638 refugees on board in the midst of panic, including rumours of an imminent attack by the Italian or German air forces.
The attack came ten minutes into the journey. Two bombs fell into the water behind the ship, which listed dangerously as passengers rushed to one side. Everyone could hear the explosions in the port.
Dickson, 47, wrote that all classes of people were on board. Some, appearing very poor and half starved, wore clothes “ranging from boiler suits to old and ragged pieces of uniform and even blankets”. Others appeared better off. A large number of women, young girls and infants were present.
After 22 hours they arrived near Oran in Algeria where French colonial officials refused permission to land. Dickson managed to negotiate for the women, children, elderly and injured. The men stayed on the ship for another month, after which many were interned in concentration camps.
In November 1939, six months after returning from Algeria, the Stanbrook was hit by a torpedo from a German U-boat and everyone onboard, including Dickson, perished.
Dickson’s children, Arnold, now 80, and Dorothy, visited Alicante in 2009 for a commemmoration ceremony for their father. They were taken by surprise by the 3,000 people who attended, some of whom had eventually returned to Spain from Algeria. Arnold said they were “lionised”.
Finally, Archibald Dickson will be lionised in Wales with a plaque in the Mansion House in Cardiff.
It has been organised by the International Brigade Memorial Trust, which works to preserve the memory of the men and women from Britain, Ireland and elsewhere who volunteered to defend democracy and fight fascism in Spain from 1936 to 1939.
In Spain, the first plaque commemorating the refugees and Alicante's role as the last place to fall to Franco was erected in the port just last year by the Civic Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory.
