Lon Elliott
Born in 1911, Elliott married Kathleen and they both managed the McLaren’s Books in Cambridge, as a Communist-run bookshop for the wider left.
Lon went to Spain to serve with the International Brigade. Whilst there he wrote the poem `Jarama’. Like most at the time, as he said in 1939, he felt that it was an “absolute paramount question” to support the only socialist state.
Lon served in the army in the war. Afterwards a teacher, in 1945 he wrote a 28-page pamphlet for the International Brigade Association (IBA) and a similar account of opposition in Spain for Labour Monthly in 1948.
On the 25th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish war, in August 1961, Marxism Today carried a major piece by him.
He died on July 11th 1983 in Basingstoke.
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