No memorial for unlikely hero

Griffith MacLaurin. Photo / University of Auckland Library Special Collection

This is the Year of the Veteran and New Zealand has honoured those who served overseas. But Griffith Campbell MacLaurin, who was killed in action 70 years ago, has received no such recognition.

He and a comrade-in-arms, New Zealand-born Steve Yates, were killed in November 1936, the first of thousands of New Zealanders to die while fighting fascism.

Although MacLaurin was an outstanding student at Auckland Grammar School and Auckland University College and went on a scholarship to Cambridge University, his name is not on the rolls of honour of these institutions.

MacLaurin did not die for king and country, but fought as a volunteer with the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1939, defending republican Spain against General Franco's fascists.

The International Brigade was made up of volunteers from throughout the world who came to support the Spanish Republic's fight against a right-wing military coup. The volunteers saw Spain as the last chance to stop fascism without another world war.

By November 1936, Franco's troops, supported and armed by Hitler and Mussolini, were poised to take Madrid.

MacLaurin was with the International Brigade when they first marched down the Gran Via, the main street of the Spanish capital, on November 8 that year.

Their arrival was a turning point, boosting the morale of Madrid's people and playing an important role in halting the fascist advance.

MacLaurin, Mac to his friends, was an unlikely candidate to fight for a left-wing cause on the other side of the world.

The family lived in Remuera and his father, Kenneth, was headmaster of Westmere School.

From his early days Griff MacLaurin pursued the family interest in scholarship rather than politics. His father instilled in him a love of history and his mother, Gwladys, taught him French.

His uncle, James Scott MacLaurin, had been New Zealand's foremost analytical chemist.

Another uncle, Richard Cockburn MacLaurin, was an outstanding mathematician and legal scholar who won a scholarship to Cambridge and was foundation professor of mathematics at Victoria University College in Wellington.

He became president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1909 until his death in 1920. Under his presidency MIT was reformed into a world-class research and teaching institute.