Torcuil Crichton on class and crime

Even though it is close to Easter, describing the discovery of missing Shannon Matthews alive, just one mile from her home, as "back from the dead" may not have been media hyperbole.

Some forensic psychologists I know number the survival chances of abducted children in hours, not the days and weeks of absence that Shannon Matthews emerged from, seemingly unscathed, on Friday afternoon.

There is, obviously, much more to emerge from the story of Shannon Matthews' abduction but one of the earliest lessons seems to be that, once again, it was not a dark and mysterious stranger that came out of the forest to sweep her away. Her alleged abductor was known to her, apparently a member of her extended family. It was also a lesson in not giving up, a triumph of hope over the odds, and so becomes the perfect recipe for a belated media feast.

Until the miracle of Dewsbury happened on live television, there had been too scant media attention paid to Shannon Matthews. Inevitably, we compare coverage to that afforded to Madeleine McCann, who, if column inches ever changed anything, would by now have been reunited with her parents too. Their grim limbo continues even though they went out of the way to maximise publicity, only to create an insatiable media monster that at one stage almost swallowed them up.

Conversely, in the case of Shannon Matthews the media, ourselves included, did not seem to care too much when she was missing.

The McCanns were, although it was almost taboo to point it out, protected by their middle-class status. Had they been part of the white underclass on holiday at a down-at-heel Spanish resort, their treatment by the media would have been far rougher and more intrusive had they been paid any attention at all.

As it was, they went through a pretty torrid time anyway when, in the absence of any real developments, they became the centre of the story.

That process was well under way in the case of Shannon's mother Karen Matthews and her partner, Craig Meehan. As well as tabloid headlines, there was an incredible clash of cultures on Radio 4's Today programme last Wednesday when presenter Sarah Montague began quizzing Karen Matthews about her "complicated family picture". Matthews has seven children by five different fathers, not six, as Montague assumed.

The tone, as much as getting the figure wrong, seemed to betray the double standard in the media, and the country. The amount of publicity and sympathy you get as a victim of crime in Britain depends on your social status.

The perception of a dysfunctional family, from a dilapidated housing estate, made it very difficult for the police to sell the Matthews story to the press and easy for journalists to start speculating on the causes behind the child's disappearance.

Fortunately, the police took the investigation very seriously. This was the biggest police investigation in West Yorkshire since the Ripper case, and eventually it was old-fashioned, routine police work - no miracle - that led to Friday's incredible breakthrough.

CATCHING up on domestic news after being away, I read the obituary of Steve Fullarton, the last of Scotland's Spanish Civil War veterans. These heroes of the International Brigade have been slowly leaving the stage for years, and Fullarton's death really does mark the end of an era.

Fullarton, from Shettleston in Glasgow, was one of more than 500 Scottish men and women who went to fight for the Spanish Republican government in 1936 when it found itself under attack from the fascist forces of Franco.

From our perspective theirs was the last great good cause and the opening chapter in the fight against Hitler. Their bravery was made all the more poignant by the fact that their own governments stood back when democracy was being trampled.

The Internationals were not trained soldiers, they were dockers, apprentices like Fullarton, schoolteachers or Cambridge graduates up against hardened Spanish army troops.

I suppose I would not know quite so much about Spain were it not for the crystal-clear writing of George Orwell's Homage To Catalonia, and that, in turn, led to contact with several veterans.

The first newspaper interview I ever arranged was with Roddy MacFarquhar, an International Brigade volunteer from the Highlands, on the 50th anniversary of the hostilities. I remember being so nervously ill-prepared that I cancelled the appointment at the last minute, which wasn't good enough for MacFarquhar. Determined the history should be told, he came to see me and delivered, as I recall, a gift of an interview.

Spain dealt with the memory of war very differently. In the 1990s I came across a story about a Spanish village which had just been by-passed by a new road that had uncovered an unmarked mass grave. Presumably the old men in the village knew about the event but were unable, or unwilling, to recall the atrocity. It was a dark passage of Spanish history which is still partially buried.

Here the veterans are lauded, though perhaps not widely enough. There is a statue at Glasgow's Custom House Quay, depicting the Republican heroine and radio propagandist Dolores Ibarruri, La Pasionaria. As the last of the International Brigade left Barcelona, she bade them farewell. She said: "You can go with pride. You are history. You are legend ... we will not forget you".