REMEMBERING SAM MASTERS
Sam Masters died fighting in the battle of Brunete in July 1937.
Sam wrote to his mother, “Frankly, I’ve never felt in my life such love of comrades as here. These boys are the finest, the grandest that I’ve ever seen in my whole experience of men.
When we sing the ‘Internationale’ together it sounds like Bedlam, but you can’t mistake the meaning and their faces are as hard and determined as granite…
I go forward, confident that I shall do my duty against the enemies of progress, and that whatever comes the strength of the workers will overcome all opposition in Spain and the rest of the world.”
Sam Masters, letter from Albecete, written June 1937 before he went forward to Brunete.
Quoted in Rust, ‘Britons In Spain’, 1939. Photo taken in Barcelona after he had been wounded in the lung fighting on the Aragon Front.
Harry Gross, like Sam, was from Stepney and a member of the Tailors and Garment Workers Union. He was wounded at Jarama in February. He died at Brunette in July 1936.
Photo taken in Spain shortly before he died. It is probably cropped from one of a series of photographs taken when Errol Flynn visited the Guadalajara front on 3rd April 1937.
SAM MASTERS and HARRY GROSS, both from Stepney, died defending democracy on Mosquito Ridge at Brunete in July 1937.