Blue Egg Radio Productions
TV Production
Radio Productions
Wales' Last Brigader - Parts One and Two . Blue Egg Productions for BBC Radio Wales
Two thirty minute documentaries chart the emotional return to the battlefields of Spain, of Wales' last surviving volunteer of the International Brigades that fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930's.
The award winning documentaries ( click Awards ) follow on from Return Journey. In them Alun Menai Williams talks movingly about how confronting his emotions and returning to the sites of so many horrors ,changed his life - lifting the nightmares that had been haunting him.
Alun Menai Williams was the last surviving of around 200 Welsh volunteers who in the 1930's secretly travelled to Spain to fight against fascist troops in the Spanish Civil War. Alun Menai Williams was a "sanitario" literally scrambling from one wounded soldier trying to patch them up - save their lives . In the film he says he spent the war " hugging the earth eating Spanish soil ".
The scenes he saw in Spain haunted him. For more than sixty years he didn't talk about the Spanish Civil War. After his wife died he did as she'd asked, and wrote down his story. That started a new emotional journey for Alun Menai Williams. After nearly seven decades Blue Egg Productions' Sarah Dickins accompanied him as he returned to the battlefields of Spain for the first time since 1938. Standing on the side of the River Ebro - the site of the fiercest battles - Alun Menai Williams confronted the ghosts that had haunted him for all that time.
In Wales' Last Brigader - back in his home in Barry in south Wales he talks also of how returning to Spain changed his life making him outgoing and talkative . He also talks of his disappointment that the achievements of the British volunteers in the International Brigades have still not been fully recognised by the UK government.