Lou Kenton

Lou Kenton (1 September 1908 – 17 September 2012) was an English proofreader who served as a medical courier and ambulance driver with the International Brigade and was its oldest surviving member at the time of his death.

Early life

Kenton was born in Stepney, east London to a Jewish Ukrainian family who had escaped from Tsarist pogroms. His father died from tuberculosis when he was young.

Kenton left school aged 14 and started work in a paper factory. There he first encountered anti-semitism, which led him to join the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1929. He took part in the CPGB's disruption of the British Union of Fascists' rally at Olympia in June 1934 and resistance to the BUF in the Battle of Cable Street in October 1936.

Spain Early in 1937 Kenton left Stepney and rode his Douglas motorcycle to Albacete, where he join the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. His first wife Lillian, an Austrian nurse who fled Nazi Germany in 1933, shortly followed him. When he arrived at the International Brigades headquarters in Albacete, he applied to join the International Brigade's Medical Unit. It was from there that he spent nearly two years in action as medical courier on his motorcycle distributing medical supplies to hospitals across the country, and as an ambulance driver on the front lines. He returned to Britain late in 1938 on an 'Aid for Spain' mission to raise money for a new ambulance. By the time he had completed his tour, the International Brigades had been disbanded.

Later life After the International Brigades were withdrawn from Spain, Kenton was hugely depressed. One of his missions was to repatriate to the Spanish authorities the Basque refugees given asylum in the United Kingdom. It was "the first time I saw the fascist police in their three-cornered hats. All the children were in tears and all of them were hanging on to me as we checked each one and handed them over." that seven British pensioners were to be awarded Spanish passports at the Spanish Embassy in London on 9 June 2009. Kenton, then aged 101, was the eldest of them.