Since yesterday, a black swastika has stained the plaque that illustrates the bust of Archibald Dickson, captain of the merchant ship Stanbrook, who in the throes of the Civil War risked his life to save those of thousands of people clustered in every corner of his ship, who were fleeing. of Franco’s troops besieging the port of Alicante.
What did Archibald Dickson do to deserve that tribute that Alicante – belatedly – pays him? In a letter to the editor of the ‘Sunday Dispatch’, published on April 4, 1939, he himself related what thousands of Alicante residents witnessed: “Due to the large number of refugees I found myself in a dilemma about my own position, since my instructions were that he should not take refugees unless they were really needy. However, after seeing the condition they were in, I decided from a humanitarian point of view to accept them on board, since I anticipated that they would soon disembark in Oran,” he wrote.
The testimony is eloquent: “Among the refugees there were all kinds of people, some appearing to be extremely poor and seemed consumed by hunger and poorly dressed, with a variety of attire ranging from overalls to old, worn-out pieces of uniforms and even blankets and other peculiar pieces of cloth.”
After a painful 20-hour journey to the Algerian port of Oran, Dickson had to negotiate for days so that all the refugees could disembark, on their way to an odyssey that had only just begun.
For 79 years, the Welsh sailor’s humanitarian action was not remembered in any way in the city. It was not until April 2018, when the bust, the work of Malaga sculptor Luis Gámez, was located very close to where the Stanbrook set sail.
Two of the surviving women of the around 2,800 passengers who boarded the ship on March 28, 1939, the sisters Helia and Alicia González, attended the opening ceremony.
From the Civic Commission for the Recovery of Historical Memory in Alicante, which promoted the placement of the monument, which was recently reopened with a new plaque, after the works that forced it to be relocated, they assured that “it is not the first time that something similar has happened nor will it be the last.” Once notified, the Alicante Port Authority, which manages the space on which it is located, has taken care of erasing the graffiti.
