7 July 1937 Handwritten
Dear Mr O’Shaughnessy,
Will you please transmit to your sister the enclosed copy of a letter I am sending to the Chief of Police and tell her that if I have not received a satisfactory reply to same within 48 hours I shall begin a hunger strike. The way myself and my friends are treated makes it a duty for me to volunteer in the only way of protest which is left to us. In the case I am reduced to this measure, I want my friends in England and the I.L.P. people to give this fact the publicity without which it would be useless. You will receive further news after the 48 hours have elapsed. In the case you have no news within a week, it means I am on strike but put in a place where unable to send messages from.
I have written two letters to Eileen which have been posted at5 your address and I hope you have been able to forward at least the first; the second, perhaps, never reached you, Ethel Macdonald,6 who took care of my mail, having been arrested without my knowing if this particular message has been posted before her detention.
I am sorry to have to trouble you with all this, but I agreed with your sister to communicate with her through you. Tell her I am intensely thinking of her and give her my love. Shake hands to Eric.
Sincerely yours
(Signed) George Kopp
5. at = to.
6. Ethel Macdonald (1909–60), leading social activist in Scotland. During the Spanish Civil War she was the English-speaking announcer for CNT (Confederación Nacional del Trabajo – the Anarcho-Syndicalist Trade Union) in Barcelona. She was arrested during the purge of the POUM and CNT in 1937 but escaped and helped others to escape, earning the nickname of ‘Spanish Pimpernel’. On her return to Scotland she made ‘outspoken claims’ about the death of Bob Smillie and was heavily critical of the ILP (especially David Murray: see note 9); see Tom Buchanan. ‘The Death of Bob Smillie, the Spanish Civil War, and the Eclipse of the Independent Labour Party’, Historical Journal, 40 (1997), 452–3, for an excellent account of the controversy over Smillie’s death and this period.