Alec Wainman

Alec Wainman (1913-1989) was a lecturer of modern languages and talented photographer who joined British medical volunteers in the Spanish Civil War where he took a huge collection of photos.

Alec Wainman was born on March 11, 1913 in North Yorkshire, U.K., as Alexander Wheeler Wainman. He was raised in Vernon, Canada, returned to Britain in 1928 and studied Russian and Italian at Oxford. In 1934 and 1935 he worked at the British Embassy in Moscow.

At the outset of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 he went to Spain volunteering in the non-combative Republican medical services as interpreter and ambulance driver. This enabled Wainman to indulge his passion for photography capturing behind-the-scenes photos of Republican everyday life. Suffering from hepatitis, he returned to Britain in 1938. At the close of the war he helped to take out Spanish refugees of the French concentration camps and bring them to Britain.

During World War II he served in the Special Operations Executive of the British Army. Wainman returned to civilian life as a lecturer on Slavic studies at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He died in 1989.

In 1975, a London-based publishing house got Wainman's photos with a view to publishing them. But the publisher went into liquidation and Wainman's collection was believed to be lost. Eventually, in 2013 his son John Alexander Wainman, known as the pseudonym Serge Alternês, salvaged his father's photo collection and published a selection, along with his memoir, in the book Live Souls.

• Museum of the History of Catalonia 1919-1920: Beyond the trenches (1936-1939). Shows more than 150 photographs of Wainman from the Spanish Civil War.

Film Without you I would not exist.