A bust of the heroic Archibald Dickson is added to the memorial at the Alicante port

I'd been well pleased to hear that a beautifully sculpted bust of Archibald Dickson had been added to the Civil War memorial by the port side in Alicante and it looked fantastic in the sunshine when I stopped off on a gorgeous September day to take a look. Dickson was the skipper on the ship The Stanbrook which was the only vessel to break the nationalist blockade as up to 20,000 Republicans gathered to escape in the days and hours before Alicante finally fell to Franco and his Italian allies. At huge personal risk to both himself and his crew Dickson managed to cram over 2,600 evacuees onto his badly listing vessel. Due to some disastrous shenanigans in the final weeks of the Negrin Government, covered superbly in Paul Preston's book "The last days of the Spanish Republic", the Stanbrook was the last ship out of the port. Those left behind were herded to Los Almendros and then onto the San Isidro concentration camp to face torture, starvation and death. Dickson, a Welshman from Cardiff, has now been honored as the international hero he truly is.