Mark Derby is an Aotearoa–New Zealand historian and writer whose work has also been published in Britain, Spain, and the United States. His books include Kiwi Compañeros: New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War; Petals and Bullets: Dorothy Morris—New Zealand Nurse in the Spanish Civil War; and Rock College: An Unofficial History of Mount Eden Prison. He lives on Wellington’s south coast with three generations of his family. His latest book Frontline Surgeon: New Zealand Medical Pioneer Douglas Jolly was published by Nebraska this month.

I live in Aotearoa / New Zealand yet write about Spain, the country located diametrically opposite mine on the surface of the globe. That makes research in the field expensive, and under the COVID-19 pandemic, impossible. The only way I’ve been able to write books on New Zealanders in the Spanish Civil War is through the goodwill of a worldwide network of researchers, both professional and amateur, who have chased down leads in their own countries and typically refused any payment, or even reimbursement of their expenses.

I’ve never met the Hungarian translator Éva Cserháti, but she’s become a good friend over the course of many email exchanges. She has an untiring interest in the lives of the Hungarian women who volunteered to work, mainly as nurses, in Spain’s ruthless and asymmetric internal conflict. One of those in particular, Anna-Mária Basch, was especially dedicated and impressive. Both a trained nurse and anti-fascist activist, she arrived in Spain along with her husband and their sixteen-year-old son. Soon both males were fighting on the front lines, while Anna-Mária worked as theatre nurse for the New Zealand surgeon Doug Jolly who is the subject of my new book.

Although their only common language was halting French, Jolly and Basch soon became lovers, a common outcome during a relentless war in which married couples might be separated by military order or sudden death at any time. In the Hungarian National Museum, Éva located a wealth of photos of this handsome pair – riding a mule, sunning themselves in the Mediterranean resort of Benicassìm, and at work over a Madrid operating table together with the renowned Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune. Anna-Mária survived the civil war, underground work with the anti-Nazi resistance in Brussels, a year in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp (“A normal mind would not believe what the Nazis thought to invent to make us suffer, physically and morally”), and the Russian occupation of her country in 1956, where she was eventually honored as a veteran leftwing activist. I learned of these experiences both from her own published accounts, translated from Hungarian, and from her forthright letters to Jolly, in French.  

In his days as a young medical student at Otago University in Dunedin, Doug Jolly was greatly influenced by the university chaplain, Reverend Donald Grant, and his wife Irene. They became his surrogate parents, lifetime friends, and ethical guardians, and when they reconnected ten years later in London, it was the Grants who encouraged Jolly to enlist as an international volunteer in Spain. On his return from the battlefront, both in Spain and later in World War Two, Jolly recovered at the Grants’ home, and they supported his career and his personal life with great generosity.

Both the Grants had died by the time I came to write this book, but I discovered that Núala Grant, the widow of their eldest son, was working as a psychotherapist in the beautiful southern English town of Bath. After some months of emailing, a large carton arrived at my house containing all the Jolly letters and other memorabilia Núala had been storing for decades in her attic. The pick of the lot was the unpublished manuscript of a book Jolly had evidently written in the 1950s, titled “Surgical Curiosities in Two Wars.” Here I found the elderly Catalan peasant Esteban Gómez, who had somehow ingested a rabbit bone that was playing hell with his bladder. A Canadian soldier, shot by a machine gun in Sicily, was treated with the brand-new miracle drug penicillin in one of its earliest clinical trials. Most striking of all was the case of Major Miguel Moreno, who had been running a Republican behind-the-lines sabotage unit in the Zaragossa region. He was leading a donkey laden with dynamite towards a railway bridge vital to enemy supply lines when a sentry’s stray bullet hit one of the animal’s wicker panniers and ignited the explosives. Fragments of wicker were buried deep in the major’s shattered body, along with bits of harness, cloth, and other debris. He was brought to the hospital, “barely recognizable as anything human except in vague outline.”

Jolly saved them all, along with thousands of other injured troops and civilians from both sides of the war. His manuscript, along with hundreds of other personal documents and photographs, has now been deposited in the Hocken Library at Otago University, Jolly’s alma mater. I hope that collection will provide the raw material for further evidence of his remarkable gifts as a surgeon, his courage and compassion, and his lasting contributions to the organization of trauma surgery.

In fact, my fundamental reason for writing this book was to restore the reputation, locally and internationally, of this exemplary humanitarian and medical pioneer who has so strangely dropped out of the historical record. He is remembered vividly and with admiration by former patients, colleagues, and relatives, yet his name does not appear in the official war histories of the UK, the US, or his own country. I’m therefore very grateful to UNP for agreeing to publish his life story in this handsome, well-illustrated format. Doug Jolly was himself a fluent writer who several times considered abandoning his medical career in favor of literature. I like to think that he would look with favor on this account of his exceptionally dedicated, wide-ranging, and notable life.