In recent years there has been a growth of small museums in Spain dedicated to the Civil War. One of the earliest of these is in the Aragonese village of Robres. Charlie Nurse has visited the museum, along with Nick Lloyd, who runs Spanish Civil War tours in Barcelona. Here are some of his impressions
At first sight, Robres seems an unlikely place to find theCentro de Interpretación y Estudios de la Guerra Civil en Aragón – the provincial capitals of Zaragoza, Huesca or Teruel would appear more likely candidates. While it is more difficult to reach than these cities without a car, the museum is well worth the detour for visitors with a knowledge of Spanish. Though small, it provides a comprehensive account of the war in Aragón as well as detailing its immediate background and its consequences.
The war in Aragón is usually seen, understandably, as a side-show of little importance during the first year of the war. Yet, for example, the success of the coup of July 1936 in Zaragoza and the repression in the city which followed was of great strategic importance in the early weeks of the conflict, blocking loyalist forces in Catalonia from supporting their beleaguered allies in the Basque provinces.
The museum displays a range of items from the period including newspapers, military equipment and medical supplies. Introductory panels highlight some of the figures who played prominent wartime roles in the region such as General Miguel Cabanellas, who led the successful coup in Zaragoza and the Anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti. The background to the war is provided by a section on the Second Republic which focusses on the important social changes it brought to Aragón, particularly in the provision of schools and the changed status of women.
The coup is illustrated by contemporary newspaper accounts and there is detailed coverage of the violence which erupted in the region, both in the zone which came under military rule and in that which remained under the Republic. The centrepiece of this part of the museum is undoubtedly the large mural which integrates the names of those people killed in the region by the rebel forces during the war and in the early years of the Franco regime.
Mural with 8,913 names. Photo by Charlie Nurse.
This is the work of Victor PardoLancina, a local historian, who points out that, although the mural includes 8,913 names, recent research means that, if it were made today the total number of names would be over 10,000. Pardo is also the designer of the Ruta George Orwell, which provides guidance on Civil War locations in the region.
In the early days after the coup the region was divided between western Aragón, under rebel forces based in Zaragoza, and eastern Aragón, under the militia forces which advanced from Barcelona and Valencia. Despite the attempt of Republican armies to capture Zaragoza in the autumn of 1937, the front shifted little until the great Republican assault on Teruel in December 1937 and the major offensive launched by Franco’s forces and their Italian and German allies in the spring of 1938. An excellent detailed map illustrates the division of the region in 1936-37 and enables the visitor to identify the different sectors of the front held by the various Republican militias.
Subsequent sections include material on the arrival of the militias in rural eastern Aragón in 1936 and the extraordinary experiment which followed, with the collectivisation of agriculture and the establishment of the anarchist-led Council of Aragón. The stark contrasts between eastern and western Aragón are highlighted by sections which examine aspects of everyday life in the two zones, including schooling and the roles played by women. The final sections cover the post-war period: what is particularly notable is the difference between the triumphalist Francoist propaganda material exhibited and the picture provided of the reality of repression and exile.
Opened in 2006, at the same time as the inauguration of the Ruta George Orwell, the museum enjoys financial support from a local government consortium. Despite their relatively isolated location, both the museum and the Ruta are attracting increased attention. In the first six months of 2023, the museum received over 1,500 visitors, higher than for the whole of 2022. There has been a notable growth in visitors from France and especially of student groups. Nick Lloyd comments:
There must be more than 50 small museums, often called Centres of Information, across Spain, dedicated to different aspects of the Civil War. I certainly haven’t even visited half of them, but Robres, along with the Exile Museum in La Jonquera on the Catalan-French frontier, is my personal favourite. It’s a great little place.
The Centro de Interpretación y Estudios de la Guerra Civil en Aragón is open at weekends only: Saturdays 11.00-14.00 and 16:30-18.30; Sundays 11.00-14.00 all year round (hours may differ from July to September). Entry: 2 euros, reduced rates for unwaged and for group visits. Further details: turismo@monegros.net or their website For guided visits phone 34-974-570-090.
Note: Victor Pardo is also the author of the book Todos los nombres. Víctimas y victimarios (Huesca 1936-1945), together with Raúl Mateo Otal. It is a biographical dictionary listing all the casualties in the town of Huesca as a result of repression after the coup d’etat on 18 July 1936. The data is included in our database. Read the description here.
PHOTO: Museum room. Courtesy of Centro de Interpretación y Estudios de la Guerra Civil en Aragón.
In 1943, four years after the Francoist victory in the Spanish Civil War, a book was published in England on the origins of the conflict. The author Gerald Brenan, (1894-1987) had lived intermittently in Spain in the 1920s and 1930s; the book, The Spanish Labyrinth soon became a classic in the English-speaking world. [You may read it here]. To mark the 80th anniversary of its first publication we are publishing this account of the book and its influence.
In Spain, where independent historical research was severely restricted until after the death of Franco in 1975, a Spanish edition circulated illegally following its publication in 1962 by the emigré publishing house, Ruedo Ibérico. The Spanish Labyrinth, understandably, reflects the approaches to the study of history at the time and the limited sources available to the author. Not surprisingly, therefore, many of Brenan’s arguments have been challenged in recent years, particularly by Spanish historians working with new sources and adopting new approaches to historical research. However, The Spanish Labyrinth played an important role in the development of the study of the origins of the Civil War and influenced and inspired later generations of writers.
In the final years of his life, Gerald Brenan became famous in Spain. The legal publication of Spanish editions of The Spanish Labyrinth in 1978 and his other books, notably South From Granada(1974) made him a celebrity and his death in January 1987 was headline news in Spain. Brenan was, however, an unlikely figure to achieve such recognition in Spain. Although he had lived in Andalusia since 1953, he had no close Spanish friends and his social circle was centred on the English-speaking expatriate community of the area around Málaga as well as visiting friends, writers and artists.
The early reviews of The Spanish Labyrinth gave a misleading account of Brenan’s knowledge of Spain, usually stating that he had lived in the country throughout the 1920s and 1930s and one even claiming that he had gone to Spain to become a farmer. Reality was somewhat less romantic. He arrived in Spain after serving as an Observation Officer in the British army in France throughout the First World War, for which he was decorated by both British and French governments. He moved to Spain in 1920 to live cheaply on his army pension and settled in the small village of Yegen in the Alpujarras, in the province of Granada, taking with him a library of some 2,000 books through which he planned to make up for the education he felt he had missed by not attending university. Although he rented the house in Yegen until 1934, he only lived there continuously for three years (1920-24), thereafter living in London while returning intermittently for long periods.
After his marriage to the American poet and novelist Gamel Woolsey in 1934, they bought a house in Churriana, on the outskirts of Málaga (where the airport now stands). Although the marriage was childless, they brought up Brenan’s daughter from a relationship with a young village girl in Yegen and renamed her Miranda. After the July 1936 military coup, which failed in Málaga, they arranged for friends to take Miranda to England, while they stayed in Churriana. An account of their wartime experiences in Málaga was written by Woolsey (appearing under two different titles: Death’s Other Kingdom and Málaga Burning ) and deserves to be more widely read. The couple were not to return to Spain until their visit for two months in 1949, which Brenan used as the basis for his book The Face of Spain (1950).
Before they left for England in October 1936, Brenan was briefly a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. After returning, he campaigned for British support for the Spanish Republic, writing letters to The Times and other newspapers, speaking at public meetings and providing shelter for Spanish refugees. The Duchess of Atholl, a Conservative MP who was a prominent campaigner for the Republican cause, invited him to address a meeting of Conservative members of parliament. In 1938 he campaigned in support of the Duchess in the by-election which she fought – and lost – after resigning from parliament in protest at British foreign policy. He also started work on The Spanish Labyrinth which was finished in 1941.
On publication, The Spanish Labyrinth received glowing newspaper reviews in Britain and the United States as well as in some Latin American countries, notably Mexico. The academic reviews were also positive. Robert S. Smith, writing in the (American) Journal of Politics, described it as “a sober, factual and penetrating study of Spanish political and social life.” (Volume 6, 1944, page 114). Although the Second World War was at an important turning point, the Spanish Civil War was recent history and the book’s attraction to readers in these countries included those who had campaigned – and in some cases fought – for the Republican cause and who now wanted explanations for the war and defeat.
One reason for the book’s success was Brenan’s ability as a writer which made the book more readable and enjoyable for general readers than many works of history books written at the time. Some of his descriptions are particularly memorable such as his profile of Miguel Primo de Rivera :
His personal habits were as undisciplined and as bohemian as his mind. Though he worked long hours, these hours were very irregular. He sat up talking every night in clubs or cafes till three or four in the morning, slept till eight or nine and then took a siesta after lunch -putting on a cotton night dress and nightcap and going to bed in the old Spanish style till five. His only form of exercise was riding, but every now and then he would have a good juerga or drinking bout. He and a few friends (including women) would shut themselves up in a country house, disconnect the telephone and let themselves go for a couple of days. Then he would return to work with renewed energies.
An important feature of The Spanish Labyrinth is the footnotes and the notes at the end of chapters. The latter are sometimes short essays, such as that to Chapter 3, which discusses the low level of education in Spain in the eighteenth century or Note F to Chapter 6 in which he contrasts different forms of landholding in Christian and Moslem Spain in the 12th century. As these examples indicate Brenan’s scope extended well beyond the immediate origins of the Civil War and they provide an insight into the range of Brenan’s research.
It is important to see The Spanish Labyrinth in relation to the context in which it was written and the sources available. It was clearly impossible to carry out historical research of any sort inside Spain at this time. Brenan’s extensive annotated bibliography is a good indication of his sources. Much of his research was carried out in the British Museum Library, where he met Arthur Lehning, a Dutch anarchist who was the librarian at the International Institute for Social History in Amsterdam, which was based in Britain after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. Lehning was able to provide books and papers on anarchism and the agrarian problem which were unknown in Britain. Among the other people he consulted were the Austrian Sociologist Franz Borkenau, the Spanish socialist journalists Luis Araquistáin and Arturo Barea, the German anarchist historian Max Nettlau and the British journalist John Langdon-Davies. [More about Langdon-Davies in Memories of Spain in the 1930s]
The support which Franco received from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, which were essential to his victory, and the Republic’s dependence on the Soviet Union meant that the war was seen, with considerable justice, as part of the European great power and ideological struggle of the 1930s. Brenan, however, was clear that the origins of the war were to be found in Spanish socio-economic and political history. If this seems obvious to us now, it was not the case at the time.
In seeking to explain the tragedy of the Civil War Brenan focused on the period that begins with the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1874. The first five chapters are a chronological survey of the period up to 1931 while the last part of the book is an account of the Second Republic and the Civil War, but in between are five chapters (Chapters 6-10) which are, perhaps, the essential core of the whole book. In these five chapters he examines the agrarian question, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, Carlism and socialism.
Brenan’s survey of the agrarian question was central to many of his arguments and attracted a lot of praise. He stresses the importance of variations in Spanish geography, climate and rainfall in influencing social, economic and political conditions. Though he has been criticised for an apparent overemphasis on Andalusia and Estremadura, where vast estates (latifundia) co-existed with large numbers of seasonably employed landless labourers, this may be justified by the need to explain the failure of the 1932 Agrarian Reform Act and the importance played by the social and economic conditions of these regions in the politics of the Second Republic. Brenan was strongly influenced by the work of Juan Díaz del Moral, whose Historia de las Agitaciones Campesinas Andaluzas(1929) is a detailed account of agricultural conditions in the province of Córdoba and the major labour conflicts which erupted there in 1918-1920.
Díaz del Moral was also an important influence on his views of Anarchism. This, Brenan argued, was a specifically Spanish messianic movement based on the need among the peasantry for a spiritual substitute due to the Catholic Church’s association with the rich and powerful. This interpretation of anarchism has been rejected by later generations of historians, who argue that Brenan failed to distinguish between the revolutionary views of anarchist leaders and the everyday concerns of workers whose support was sporadic and instrumental. It is particularly difficult to accept Brenan’s claim that anarchism was only found among the “landless labourers and small peasants of Andalusia and the dry eastern regions” (page 185). This clearly does not account for the strength of the movement among urban workers in Catalonia: although Brenan argued that Catalan anarchism was a result of migration to Barcelona from the south, this is also now discounted. His romantic view of anarchism can be seen partly as a reflection of his own tastes and opinions: throughout his life Brenan preferred spartan living conditions and, when travelling, enjoyed taking local buses, staying in the cheapest accommodation and eating in the simplest restaurants.
In his preface to the second edition published in 1950, Brenan himself recognised that his attitude to the Catholic Church had been “too exclusively moral and political” adding that the “Spanish church has a vitality which its conduct does not suggest.” (page xiv). This is an important point: Brenan fails to understand the support which the coup received from peasant smallholders in provinces such as Navarra. Modern readers will find other flaws in this work, among them Brenan’s regular use of supposed – and questionable – generalisations about what he regards as the Spanish national character: we are told, for example, that the Spanish are “patient and fatalistic” (page 8), that “Spaniards as a race are neither just nor fair, but they are honest” (p. 15) and that “the deeper layers of Spanish political thought and feeling are Oriental” (p. xxiv). Moreover the colourful character-sketch of Primo de Rivera cited above obscures the complexity of the Dictatorship and distracts from the important changes occurring in Spain in the 1920s.
The importance of The Spanish Labyrinth however, needs to be seen in relation to the development of the study of Spanish history at a time when the Spanish archives were closed and when the Franco Regime used history as propaganda weapon to justify and celebrate the 1936 military coup and its repression during the Civil War and afterwards. At the time of its publication, there was no real academic study of modern Spanish history in Britain. Part of the reason for the book’s success was, without doubt, the lack of alternatives. It influenced and inspired later historians in Britain and the United States – and in Spain until after the death of Franco. Both Raymond Carr (Spain 1808-1939) and Hugh Thomas acknowledged their debts to Brenan. In the Preface to the first edition of his monumental The Spanish Civil War (1961) Thomas described The Spanish Labyrinth as “a book of genius which illuminates the whole of the Spanish twentieth century” (page xix).
Although The Spanish Labyrinth established Brenan as a historian of Spain, he never wrote another work of history and turned down several offers from important publishers to do so, usually arguing that he was too busy. During the Second World War he wrote a series of talks for La Voz de Londres, the BBC’s service to Spain, though his Andalusian accent was considered too strong and these were delivered by someone else. Among Brenan’s later works were The Literature of the Spanish People (1951) and two volumes of autobiography as well as several novels, none of which was successful. After Woolsey’s death in 1968 he moved to Alhaurín el Grande, 29 km inland from Málaga in the Sierra de Mijas. Towards the end of his life he began to receive honours: in 1982 a street was named after him in Alhaurín el Grande and in 1984 the Spanish Socialist government presented him with the Pablo Iglesias Award.
PHOTO: Gerald Brenan (Sliema, Malta, 1894 – Alhaurín el Grande, Spain, 1987). See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
We have for the first time included data relating to some of the many people who became exiles as a result of the Civil War and the subsequent repression. Thanks to an agreement with the Fundación Pablo Iglesias, which has in PDF format the passenger list of the British merchant vessel Stanbrook which left Alicante at the very end of the civil war, we have been able to include details of these passengers in our database which now has 1,423,082 records, all of which are referenced to archives. Here is our description of this dataset.
Late in the evening of 28 March 1939 the Stanbrook, a British registered cargo steamer (1,383 tons) left Alicante carrying 2,638 passengers to exile. She was the last vessel to leave before Italian forces entered the harbour. Thousands of terrified refugees remained in the port and were taken off into hastily-established camps.
Built in a shipyard on the River Tyne in 1909 and originally registered as the Lancer, the Stanbrook was a very old vessel with a maximum speed of twelve knots and accommodation for 24 crew. In 1937 she was bought by the Stanhope company of London which had been established in 1934 by Jack Billmeir. Before the outbreak of the Civil War, Billmeir’s fleet consisted of two vessels only, but he, like other British shipowners, spotted the opportunity presented of carrying goods to and from Republican Spain. Within a year the Stanhope company owned over twenty ships. Trading with the Spanish Republic was an increasingly hazardous business due to the activities of the rebel navy and airforce and those of its German and Italian allies. Shipping insurance for vessels trading with the Republic was expensive, especially for new vessels which were costly to replace. Along with other shipowners Billmeir bought up and re-registered old ships: almost all were given names which began with “Stan…” Patterns of trading were complex: vessels might, for example, transport goods to Spain, then sail to North Africa to pick up cargo for France, before sailing elsewhere or returning to Britain. Many of Billmeir’s ships made one voyage only to or from Spain and were then sold off, usually at a profit.
By March 1939 the Stanbrook had been carrying cargo to and from the Republic for about two years. This had not been without incident. In April 1937 the vessel was one of three ships to defy the rebel attempt to blockade Bilbao. The British journalist George Steer described their reception in Bilbao as they steamed up the Río Nervión accompanied by two armed Basque trawlers:
enormous crowds cheered as the procession of three red dusters [Red Ensigns flown by British merchant ships] passed slowly up river. They carried a cargo of 8,500 tons of food of which the most important element was 2,000 tons of wheat. Men in the patrol boat which preceded them up the Nervíon shouted ‘Pan! Pan!” and the women on the shore were mad with joy.
George Steer, The Tree of Guernica, 1938, pp. 207-8
In August 1938 the Stanbrook sank after being attacked twice by aircraft while lying at anchor at Vallcarca, south of Barcelona. The crew were safely evacuated but her cargo of cement was ruined. She was refloated a few days later and repaired. On February 9 1939 she was hit by shrapnel from an air raid while unloading foodstuffs in Valencia.
In March 1939 the Stanbrook’s captain, Archibald Dickson, was ordered to sail from Marseilles to Alicante to collect a cargo of oranges and saffron. Although she arrived in the harbour on 19 March, her cargo did not arrive until a week later. By then there were large numbers of refugees in the port, fleeing the advancing Francoist forces. The port authorities asked the captain to evacuate as many civilians as possible to Oran in the French colony of Algeria. In a letter written a few days later to the Sunday Dispatch, a popular British newspaper, Dickson described the refugees:
Amongst the refugees were a large number of women and young girls and children of all ages, even including some in arms. Owing to the large number of refugees, I was in a quandary as to my own position, as my instructions were not to take refugees unless they were in real need. However, after seeing the condition of the refugees, I decided from a humanitarian point of view to take them aboard as I anticipated that they would soon be landed at Oran.
Among the refugees were all classes of people, some of them appearing very poor indeed and looking half-starved and ill-clad and attired in a variety of clothing ranging from boiler-suits to old and ragged pieces of uniform.”
Dickson wrote that within ten minutes of leaving the port “a most terrific bombardment of the town and port was made and the flash of the explosions could be seen quite clearly from on board.” The voyage across the Mediterranean to Oran took 22 hours, sailing without lights to avoid attack from Francoist ships or aircraft. Since the British government had recognised the Franco regime on 27 February, the British navy was not prepared to intervene to protect the vessel. Dickson described conditions on the ship:
The number of refugees on board made it almost impossible to move on the vessel itself, as the hatches had been opened ready to load the cargo and consequently the refugees could only stand on deck.
On arrival in Oran the French authorities were reluctant to allow the refugees ashore: the women and children were allowed to disembark after a few days but the remainder were forced to wait several weeks. Most of the refugees were sent to Camp Morand near Boghari in the Sahara. The facilities at the camp were so poor that its closure was recommended at the International Conference for Assistance to Spanish Refugees, held in Paris on 15/16 July 1939, but this did not occur.
Spanish republicans disembarking Stanbrook in Oran, 30 March 1939. FOT-029271. Fundación Pablo Iglesias.
Three days after the departure of the Stanbrook Italian troops entered Alicante, followed by Franco’s forces. The fate of the thousands of people left behind in the porthas been described by Paul Preston:
Families were violently separated and those who protested were beaten or shot. The women and children were transferred to Alicante, where they were kept for a month packed into a cinema with little food and without facilities for washing or changing their babies. The men – including boys from the age of twelve – were either taken to the bullring in Alicante or to a large field outside the town, the Campo de los Almendros, so called because it was an orchard of almond trees.
Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust, 2012, p. 480
Later in 1939, after the outbreak of the Second World War, the Stanbrookwas sunk by a German submarine while sailing from Antwerp to Britain with a loss of all twenty members of her crew, including Archibald Dickson. In 2018 a plaque was unveiled to Dickson in his home city of Cardiff by Mark Drakeford, the First Minister of Wales and on 28 March 2019, the 80th anniversary of the Stanbrook’s evacuation, a bust of Dickson was unveiled in the port of Alicante. There is also a street in Alicante named after the vessel – “Calle Buque Stanbrook” .
More information about camp Morand here and about the Campo de los Almendroshere (both in Spanish).
PHOTO: The Stanbrook in 1909, then sailing as the Lancer. Clive Ketley, Public domain, vía Wikimedia Commons
Just before midnight on 12 September 1923 Gen. Miguel Primo de Rivera, Captain-General of Catalonia, declared martial law and announced his seizure of power. On 15 September, after dismissing the existing government, King Alfonso XIII appointed Primo as Prime Minister. To mark the centenary of the 1923 coup we are publishing this blog post which focuses on the role of social conflict in Barcelona between 1919 and 1923 in preparing the road to the coup.
The parliamentary regime established in 1876 is often seen as having brought Spain political stability. However, from 1917, the regime entered a period of continuous crisis. In some respects the regime itself and the challenges it faced after 1917 may be compared with those of other West European countries in the period, such as Italy, the United Kingdom and Germany. Despite the adoption of universal male suffrage in 1890, Spanish politics was dominated by the landed and business classes. Their influence was exercised through pressure on the voters, particularly in rural areas, as well as through the existence of a nominated upper parliamentary chamber to check the elected lower chamber and through the continued power of the monarchy.
The immediate post-war years witnessed social and political conflict across Europe, partly as a result of the effects of the war itself and partly due to the post-war demobilisation of troops and attempts to restore the political and social order of the pre-war world. Additional instability was caused by the effects of the Russian Revolution: despite the shortage of reliable information on events in Russia, news of the Bolshevik seizure of power inspired many leftist groups across Europe and terrified members of the propertied classes. By 1917 the two aristocratic parties (Liberals and Conservatives) on which the system was based, were badly fractured, making it difficult to form a government with a stable majority in the Cortes and providing the opportunity for King Alfonso XIII to exercise greater political influence. Against this background the short-lived Spanish governments of the post-war period faced a series of challenges which would have tested any regime, among them the attempt to control the territory in Morocco allocated to Spain in the international agreements of 1904 and 1912.
Though Spain had remained neutral, the effects of the First World War had been profound, disrupting the pre-war political structure, generating an economic boom which saw vast profits made from exporting goods to the British and French, accompanied by high inflation which exacerbated the struggles of the urban and rural populations in conditions of rapid industrialisation. While this affected all sectors of Spanish society, this process was particularly marked in Barcelona, as Francisco J. Romero Salvadó points out:
During the war years, no other Spanish city experienced such a disparity between the wealthy few and the labouring masses. The industrial boom brought extraordinary profits to the textile barons, financiers and businessmen of Barcelona….At the same time, the hard-pressed working class endured long shifts in factories and, with low wages, could hardly afford the rising prices of staple products and rents.
The Foundations of Civil War: Revolution, Social Conflict and Reaction in Liberal Spain, 1916–1923. Routledge, 2008, p. 126
While the years 1919-1921 are known as the “Trienio Bolchevique” largely for the strikes and rural revolts in Andalucía – which were put down with great violence and which involved the deployment of 20,000 troops under General Manuel Barrera – the crisis of the post war years was centred, perhaps not surprisingly, in Barcelona. In Romero Salvadó’s words:
The largest metropolis in the country, with an unequal background of labour mobilisation, the Catalan capital appeared as the paradigm of all the contradictions and tensions of this modernising process: massive immigration, a widening gap between an entrennched bourgeoisie and a pauperised proletariat, strong nationalist feelings, a restless local garrison, and a widespread mistrust of the distant and unrepresentative central administration.
The Foundations of Civil War: Revolution, Social Conflict and Reaction in Liberal Spain, 1916–1923. Routledge, 2008, p. 139
Of central importance in the city’s post-war experience was the great 44 day strike at the Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company Limited (known as La Canadiense or La Canadenca) between February and April 1919. Solidarity strikes by textile workers and utility workers plunged the city into darkness: trams stopped running and the shops closed. The strike demonstrated the power of the Confederación Nacional del Trabajo(CNT), the Anarcho-Syndicalist union federation which was able to enforce compliance with the stoppage. In conditions of little violence, the federation was able to rally support for the strike to the point where the printers union was able to block the publication of a decree from the Captain-General, Gen. Milans del Bosch, militarising the public services (the decree had the effect of conscripting workers who could then be prosecuted by courts martial).
Avinguda Paral·lel in Barcelona in 1913 looking east showing the chimneys of the power station La Canadiense. Photo by Frederic Ballell i Maymí. Arxiu Fotogràfic de Barcelona, AFB3-117, Núm 320245. Public domain via wikipedia
Milans pressed the government to declare martial law, but the Prime Minister, Count Romanones refused and sought a compromise solution, which included the promise to introduce a maximum eight-hour working day (the first anywhere in Europe). Resolution of the conflict was, however, undermined by the resistance of many business leaders and by army officers stationed in the city, led by Milans himself. Arguing that drastic measures were needed to break the power of the CNT, they viewed the response of the Romanones government as weak and leaving them defenceless against a threat of revolution. They denounced the introduction of the eight-hour day as rewarding trouble-makers. Although Romanones had replaced the Civil Governor and the Head of Police with more conciliatory figures, these soon came into conflict with Milans and with the Military Governor, General Severiano Martinez Anido and were forced to catch the train to Madrid, a move which led to the resignation of the Prime Minister. This, as Romero Salvado argues, was a “coup in all but name” (The Foundations of Civil War, p. 198) and it received the enthusiastic support of the major institutions of the Catalan business class, notably the Fomento del Trabajo Nacional (FTN) and the Federación Patronal de Cataluña.
The Canadiense strike set the pattern for conflict over the next four years and can be seen as paving the route to the 1923 coup. Terrified by the power of the CNT, many of the big industrialists felt that they had been held to ransom during the Canadiense strike by a gang of criminals and were determined to reassert control over the labour force. As Romero Salvadó points out “in an age of mass politics and popular mobilisation, the old governing classes were increasingly perceived as unable to contain the revolutionary avalanche and defend the social order” (The Foundations of Civil War, p.191).
Even before the Canadiensestrike the employers had begun to mobilise. Complaints of a lack of adequate policing were not new (with a population of 700,000 the city had only 1,000 officers) but in early 1919 business leaders and the army established a new parallel police force. This was given the old Catalan name of the Somatén, which referred to a medieval rural militia. Although the new force claimed to be an inter-class force of “patriotic citizens”, its leadership included figures such as Count Godó, the Marquis of Comillas and Francesc Cambó. Another, more shady force was also established with army support, by Manuel Bravo Portillo, a former police chief who had been dismissed for his role as a wartime German spy. This conducted a dirty war against CNT members, subjecting them to arrest, beatings and occasionally murder, often using information assembled in the so-called Fichero Lasarte, a card-index of members of the CNT which was assembled from underground sources. In October 1919, in an attempt to challenge the dominance of the CNT in the labour force, a new parallel union movement, known as the Sindicatos Libres was organised, again with army support.
In the period between the resignation of Romanones (April 1919) and September 1923 Spain was governed by eight different governments which attempted to grapple with the situation in the city. Some, such as those led by Antonio Maura (April-July 1919) backed the Barcelona elite and military leadership in their attempts to destroy the CNT. Maura’s successor, Joaquín Sánchez de Toca (July-December 1919) adopted a different approach, attempting to recognise the labour movement and bring it into the legal process, thus isolating the violent sections of the CNT. With 15,000 CNT members in prison, the new Civil Governor, Julio Amado, began negotiations with leading CNT figures and ended martial law. This was followed by a general amnesty, the implementation of the eight hour working-day and the introduction of a Comisión Mixta de Trabajo (a joint Employer-Labour Arbitration Committee).
After failing to persuade the government to support them in destroying the labour movement, the Catalan industrialists launched a partial lockout in November 1919. The Patronaldenounced what it saw as the complicity of the government with the unions and called for “men of order” to seize power. (The Foundations of Civil War, p. 206). After temporarily lifting their lockout in mid-November, the employers threatened a complete lockout from 1 December unless the government closed down all the workers’ centres and arrested the union leaders. Faced with this, the Sánchez de Toca government collapsed a few days later. Despite the appointment of a new government and the hard-line Count Salvatierra as the new Civil Governor, the Catalan business groups were not satisfied: when Milans del Bosch was forced to resign in February 1920, a symbolic one-day closure of all businesses in Barcelona was called in protest and there were calls for the intervention of the king.
The alliance between the army leadership and the business classes played a major role in fuelling the violence for which Barcelona became notorious. Although violence spread from Barcelona to other industrial cities in Spain, it was at a much lower level. One contemporary writer listed a total of 225 deaths and 733 people wounded in violence in Barcelona in the years 1917-1921 (B. Martin, The Agony of Modernisation, 1990, citing J. M. Farré Morego, Las atentados sociales en España, 1922). Among the targets of anarchist gangs were industrialists and managers: in one spectacular attack on 5 January 1920 the car carrying the president of the Catalan branch of the Patronal, Felix Grauperawas attacked, injuring Graupera and his driver and killing a police officer. The closure of all unions and the arrest of some 1,500 CNT members in early 1920, as well as the violent activities of police forces and the Somatén, increased the influence of the violent gangs within the anarchist movement and reduced that of syndicalist leaders such as Salvador Seguí and Angel Pestaña. Among the victims of anarchist violence were the prime minister (from May 1920) Eduardo Dato, assassinated by an anarchist hit-squad in Madrid in March 1921 and Count Salvatierra, the former Civil Governor of Barcelona, murdered in August 1920. Noticeably, the anti-labour squads did not restrict their targets to the violent parts of the anarchist movement: their victims included the charismatic and popular syndicalist leader Salvador Seguí (March 1923) and Angel Pestaña, who was wounded but survived assassination in August 1922.
After the resignation of Milans del Bosch, Catalan business leaders found a new hardline military champion in Gen. Martínez Anido, who became Civil Governor in November 1920, following pressure on the government. During the first three weeks of 1921 a total of twenty-one CNT members were killed under the application of the so-called Ley de fugas, the practice under which prisoners were shot and reported as having attempted to escape. To relieve congestion in the city prisons, manacled groups of prisoners were led out of Barcelona by mounted guards each week and forced to march to prisons across the country.
Although these policies weakened the labour movement, there was never unanimous support for these repressive policies among the parliamentary leaders in Madrid. The final two governments before the 1923 coup, led by José Sánchez Guerra (March-December 1922) and Manuel García Prieto who replaced him in December 1922, attempted a policy of “normalisation”, ending martial law, restoring civil liberties and attempting to introduce legislation on collective labour contracts. Meanwhile, Salvador Seguí and others attempted to rebuild the CNT and distance it from the violence of the anarchist gangs but his death led to a revival of terrorist activity by young gunmen such as Buenaventura Durruti. Their most spectacular attack was the murder of Cardinal Soldevilla of Zaragoza in June 1923. At the same time gunmen linked to the Sindicatos Libres and the police had resumed attacks on CNT members. Pestaña later noted that most of their targets were figures opposed to terrorism. As Romero Salvadó points out “Seguí, as the leader most capable of rebuilding the Anarcho-Syndicalist movement, was the person who had to be eliminated” (The Foundations of Civil War, p. 279).
The response of the FTN, the Patronal and the army leadership in Barcelona to the new approach of the Sánchez Guerra and García Prieto governments was predictable. In March 1923 the Catalan industrial leaders led a campaign to block the government’s attempt to introduce legislation on collective labour contracts (which would have provided a legal role for the labour movement). Following the dismissal of Martínez Anido as Civil Governor in November 1922, business groups began to look for a new defender, whom they found in the person of the newly-appointed Captain-General, Miguel Primo de Rivera.
Following a new transport strike in Barcelona in May 1923 which brought the city to a standstill, the FTN denounced the government for not only tolerating the situation but for protecting the CNT gangs and proclaimed Primo as their only possible saviour. On 12-13 September after Primo announced his coup in Barcelona he was accompanied and encouraged by many of the city’s key business leaders and his move was welcomed by the FTN and the Patronal. On his departure for Madrid to meet king Alfonso and be sworn in as Prime Minister, he was seen off by a reported 4,000 of the city’s prosperous citizens. Their support was not surprising: since 1919 they had, in alliance with military leaders such as Milans del Bosch and Martínez Anido, forced the resignation of two Spanish governments and resisted and undermined any government unwilling to pursue the repressive policies which they favoured. Along with their business allies in other parts of Spain, they had now abandoned the parliamentary regime established in 1876.
After the coup Milans del Bosch and Martinez Anido continued to play important roles in the politics of repression in Spain. Milans del Bosch served as Civil Governor of Barcelona between 1924 and the resignation of Primo de Rivera in January 1930. Martinez Anido was Minister of the Interior (Ministro de Gobernación) and Deputy Prime Minister (Vicepresidente del Consejo de Ministros) between 1924 and January 1930. Between January 1938 and his death in December 1938 he served as Minister of Public Order (Ministro de Orden Público) under Franco.
PHOTO: King Alfonso XIII (left) and Gen. Miguel Primo de Rivera, by unknown author. Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-09411 CC BY-SA 3.0 DE, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. The image has been edited to fit the space.
In 1935 a British couple Nancy and Archie Johnstone opened a hotel on the Catalan coast in Tossa de Mar. Unlike most foreign residents, the Johnstones stayed on after the Civil War broke out, finally leaving in early February 1939 as Republican resistance to Franco’s forces collapsed in Catalonia. Nancy recounted her experiences in two books published at the time in English: Hotel in Spain (July 1937) and Hotel in Flight (September 1939). Until recently these books were forgotten but in 2011 a Spanish edition of both volumes together was published under the title Un Hotel en la Costa Brava: Tossa de Mar 1934-1939. (Ed. Tusquets, translated by Jaime Salmerón, edited by Miquel Berga i Bagué).A Catalan translation,Un Hotel a la costa: Tossa de Mar 1934-1939 (Ed. Tusquets, translatedby Miquel Berga i Bagué) followed shortly after. In 2018 the Catalan director Isona Passola announced plans to make a film based on the Johnstones’ experiences in Tossa de Mar, although those plans did not seem to progress. We are publishing this review to mark the publication of a new English-language edition of Nancy Johnstone’s books, Hotel in Spain and Hotel in Flight , the first since they were originally published.
Nancy and Archie Johnstone first visited the Costa Brava in 1934 and their hotel – known as Casa Johnstone – opened the following summer. Before leaving London Archie worked as a sub-editor on the News Chronicle, a liberal British newspaper,and the couple used their wide connections in England to publicise their hotel among the British middle classes.
In the 1930s Tossa de Mar was very different from the popular tourist resort it became during the 1960s. The population was largely self-sufficient, relying heavily on fishing and growing fruit and vegetables. A number of artists lived in the village, notably the avant-garde German painter Oskar Zugell, who became a close friend of the Johnstones. There was also a small community of refugees from Nazi Germany, who Johnstone regarded as being ill-suited to country life and unable to make friends in the village.
Hotel in Spain is a humorous and gossipy account of the building of the hotel and of their first year as hoteliers. Much of the narrative focuses on the perceived eccentricities of their guests and she provides a sympathetic and affectionate account of the Catalan workers who built the hotel and of the staff who helped to run it. Most of the guests are not identified, apart from the numerous journalists who seem to have been enthusiastic and boisterous visitors. They included Frank Jellinek and his wife, Marguerite; later, when the Civil War broke out the Jellineks were living in Spain, though not in Tossa, and Frank would become the Manchester Guardian’s chief correspondent in Spain during the first months of the conflict. Most of the other journalists were from the News Chroniclewhich would provide some of the best-informed reporting on Republican Spain during the Civil War by any British newspaper.
Nancy and Archie Johnstone. Photo: The Clapton Press
According to Johnstone’s account, the political developments during 1935-36 had very little resonance in Tossa, although perhaps her view may be partly a result of the effort required to start the hotel and cater for their guests. In the early weeks of the war they seem to have continued to receive guests but foreign visitors soon stopped arriving, frightened off by the British press, most of which published exaggerated stories of “red violence” in the streets of Barcelona, often with the connivance of supporters of the military rebels. On three occasions a vessel from the British navy visited Tossa to evacuate British citizens, but the Johnstones refused to leave, arguing that they were in no danger from the local population who were their friends and neighbours. The German refugees in Tossa were understandably much more worried about developments, although Johnstone does not seem to have fully appreciated the difference in their situation: already exiles, their fate in the event of a Francoist victory could hardly be compared with those of the two British hoteliers who possessed British passports and who could return to Britain whenever they wanted. In the event most of the refugees in Tossa left the country, though some volunteered to help the Republican war effort.
Hotel in Spainends with the author describing life in Tossa in the early winter of 1936, by which time the Johnstones had adapted to life without hotel guests. She reports that the village had avoided violence and was being run by a committee of representatives of trade unions and political parties. Supplies of essential foodstuffs seem to have been adequate as most families could rely on their own produce and on exchange with friends and neighbours. This was in stark contrast with the situation in Barcelona and the other industrial areas of Catalonia where food-supply problems produced hyper-inflation, food-queues and social protest in early 1937. The winter of 1937-38 was, however, a different matter in the village: even here there was widespread hardship and, despite being able to barter with friends in the village, the Johnstones were forced to rely partly on food-parcels sent from France and Britain.
Hotel in Flight can be seen as consisting of two parts: the first, dealing with the author’s experiences from January 1937 to May 1938 when the couple returned to Britain for a short period, and the second from August 1938 to early 1939 when the Casa Johnstone was converted into a children’s home. During 1937 most visitors to the hotel were foreigners resting from their efforts in support of the Republican cause, particularly in Barcelona but also at the front. There were also visits from foreign writers and poets such as W. H. Auden. Relations with the Republican government and with the Catalan Generalitat were clearly very good and both governments used the hotel as a venue for lunches for delegations of visiting foreign dignitaries en route to the French frontier.
Although Johnstone spent most of the war in Tossa and seems to have only visited Barcelona on rare occasions, she managed to be in the city on three notable occasions: during the street-fighting in early May 1937 which was made famous in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia; during the sustained Italian bombing of Barcelona from 16th to 18th March 1938; and in the final days before the city fell to Franco’s rebel forces in January 1939.
During one of the Italian air-raids in March 1938 she was caught in a small restaurant near the Plaça Urquinaona with Leon, a young German who worked in the Casa Johnstone:
I found myself lying flat on my back somewhere up against the bar. Leon was coughing nearby. The air was thick with fine dust and a choking smell was making every one gasp. I was certain we were being gassed.
There was an odd silence except for the coughing of various people lying on the floor. People began getting up and walking about. Someone picked up a table and put it straight. Leon was busily talking to me, but I was not interested. He says he was only asking me if I was hurt, but it sounded as if he was reading extracts from Thomas Mann… Leon insisted on going out to see if the raid was over. He came back and reported with triumph that the house next door had disappeared. It looked as if a giant knife had cut a slice out of the row of buildings.
Hotel in Flight (pp. 138-9)
Shortly after this experience the Johnstones spent three months in London, trying, apparently in vain, to interest their English friends in the situation in Spain and attempting to counter their friends’ false assumptions: that the Republic was dominated by the Soviet Union, that their hotel had been expropriated by Communists and that they had been expelled. On their return to Tossa in August 1938 they converted the hotel into a children’s home (colonia) supported by the International Solidarity Fund, an organisation established by the international labour movement to support Spanish civilians. The home mainly housed children whose parents were living as refugees in Barcelona after leaving the war-zones of Aragon. By then there were three other colonias in Tossa. This part of her book illustrates the scale of the refugee problem faced by the Republic, especially in Barcelona: as early as January 1937 the Quakers had estimated that there were 25,000 children wandering the city’s streets and by the end of 1938, the city probably housed some 400,000 refugees who had fled Franco’s forces and the war-zones.
After the fall of Barcelona the Johnstones waited with the children in Tossa, unsure whether the International Solidarity Fund would provide transport to take them and the children to France or whether they would all be left in the path of the advancing Francoist forces. Finally escaping in a lorry to Figueras, they all sheltered for several days in the theatre, before Richard Rees, a prominent Quaker worker, arranged their escape to France where the children were initially housed in camps.
Photo: Ajuntament de Girona. CRDI (Author unknown. Internationaal Instituut Voor Sociale Geschiedenis – Amsterdam)
At this time – late January and the first two weeks of February 1939 – some 450,000 refugees are usually estimated to have fled from Catalonia into France. Johnstone describes their journey to the frontier as “unforgettable”: the road, which shortly before had been blocked by the broken-down and bombed vehicles of some of the refugees, had been cleared:
The scenes of utter desolation were like pictures of the ravages of a flood or earthquake. It looked as if a giant wave had flung up the broken suitcases, the littered clothes, the swirling heaps of paper. Exhausted refugees flung their possessions from them as they trudged to France. Mattresses, bursting obscenely open, spilled out their entrails, overturned lorries lay nakedly revealing their innermost machinery…Nearer the frontier humans were added to the litter. The fires were alight, warming groups of human jetsam. Smoke from thousands upon thousands of tiny fires wreathed the valleys and poured up from the mountain sides
Hotel in Flight (pp. 353-4)
Understandably Hotel in Flight is more serious in style as well as in content than Johnstone’s earlier volume. Nevertheless George Orwell, who reviewed it for the magazine The Adelphi in December 1939, complained that it was “chirpily facetious”. At the same time, however, he praised the account she gave of the final months of the Republic:
The book becomes increasingly a story of food-shortage and tobacco-shortage, air-raids, spy-mania and refugee children, and ends with the terrible retreat into France and the stench and misery of the concentration camps around Perpignan. Much of the atmosphere will be horribly familiar to anyone who was in Spain at any period of the war. The sense of never having quite enough to eat, the muddle, the inefficiency, the inability to understand what is happening, the feeling that everything is fading away into a sort of mist of fear, suspicion, red-tape and obscure political jealousies – it is all there with plenty of crude physical adventure into the bargain.
Peter Davison (ed), Orwell in Spain, 2001 (pp. 331-2)
After leaving Spain Nancy and Archie Johnstone worked for refugee organisations assisting Spanish refugees in France, before leaving for Mexico. The couple later separated and, after two visits to Tossa de Mar in 1947 and 1951, Nancy sold the Casa Johnstone and settled in Guatemala. The hotel-building still exists, though it is now part of the Hotel Don Juan.
In a previous article we reviewed The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and the Spanish Civil War, Giles Tremlett’s exhaustive and wide-ranging account of the 34,000 foreign volunteers who fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War. Hot on the heels of Tremlett’s book comes this latest volume, Voluntarios por la Revolución: La Milicia Internacional del POUM en la Guerra Civil Española, by Andy Durgan (Laertes, 2022),currently published in Spanish only, on the foreigners who fought in the militia of the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM). By comparison with the International Brigaders, the foreign volunteers who served in the militia of the POUM have received little attention. To mark the 87th anniversary of the founding of the POUM – 29 September 1935– we are publishing this review of a book which fills this gap in the literature on the Civil War. At the same time we are adding to our database a further 1,174 records which are drawn from Durgan’s extensive research.
The story of the POUM during the Civil War is usually seen through the eyes of Eric Blair, the English writer who wrote under the name George Orwell and whose experiences in the party militia were recounted in Homage to Catalonia. Orwell was a member of the only group of volunteers which has received much attention from historians, namely those from the British Independent Labour Party (ILP). Andy Durgan, a British academic long resident in Barcelona, is excellently suited to his subject-matter: his previous work has included a study of the origins of the POUM
Following the street-fighting in Barcelona in early May 1937, known in Catalan as els fets de maig, the POUM was accused of being a Nazi-front organisation. On 16 June 1937 it was declared illegal by the Republican government. One of its leaders, Andreu Nin, was arrested and later murdered by Soviet agents, though it was claimed, bizarrely, that he had been rescued from prison by Nazi agents disguised in International Brigade uniforms. Other party leaders were arrested, the Hotel Falcón in Barcelona – the headquarters of the party’s military committee – was turned into a Communist party prison and its other offices were closed. Numerous members of the POUM militia were arrested, in some cases after returning on leave to Barcelona after serving on the front line in Aragon.
At the time of the outlawing of the POUM, the accusations against the party of being agents of the Nazi state were repeated in foreign media and widely believed. Orwell, who returned to Barcelona from the Aragon front on 20 June, was forced to go into hiding until he escaped to France with his wife. Later, in Homage to Catalonia (1938) Orwell set out to expose the preposterous allegations against the POUM and its members. In 1938 seven prominent leaders of the party were finally put on trial: the charges of being Nazi agents collapsed and, instead, five of the accused were convicted of attempting a revolutionary seizure of power in Barcelona in May 1937. As Durgan points out, the Republican state and its legal system were not under the control of the Soviet Union or the Spanish Communist Party and the kind of show trial which occurred in Moscow in 1936-1938 was not possible in the Republic.
Despite the acquittal of the party leadership on charges of being Nazi agents, much of the mud thrown at members of the party and its militia has continued to stick. Among the common accusations which have been regularly levelled at the POUM militia, two stand out: that of playing football against the enemy in no-man’s land on the Aragon front and that of large-scale desertion of the same front during the fets de maig. Durgan provides evidence to refute both of these charges. With regard to the allegations that the POUM was a nest of foreign spies, Durgan accepts that there were probably spies in all military units, but dismisses the idea that they played an important role in the POUM by pointing to the extensive pre-war experience of many of the foreign volunteers as militant revolutionaries. This, effectively, is one of the fundamental points of Durgan’s volume: by detailing, as he does, the backgrounds of the foreign POUM volunteers, he challenges the reader to believe that such people could be Fascist spies or counter-revolutionaries.
The exact number of foreigners who served in POUM military units between the military coup of July 1936 and the outlawing of the party in June 1937 is unknown. Durgan puts the number at about 500, of whom he has managed to trace 367; these form the basis of much of the book. The brief biographical notes on each of these which are provided in an appendix give a picture of the extraordinary lives of many of these hitherto-overlooked revolutionaries and will be of use to researchers.
Not surprisingly the POUM volunteers shared many characteristics with members of the International Brigades: most were manual workers, only a minority had any previous military experience and a significant number were Jewish. There were, however, differences: Poumistas tended to be older than Brigaders. Whereas the latter included volunteers from around four-fifths of the total of independent states in the world, the POUM volunteers were drawn from a smaller range of countries and they were more likely to be anti-fascist refugees. Some 60 per cent of POUM volunteers came from countries with authoritarian governments, with the largest groups, not surprisingly, from Germany (about 30 per cent) and Italy (another 20 per cent). Most of these were already living outside their home countries when the Civil War began, often in France or Belgium. However, a significant number foreign Poumistas were already living in Spain before the outbreak of war: Durgan identifies 79 such foreign residents, 34 of them German, 25 Italian. Most of the Germans were living in Barcelona, where, even before the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, there was a large German community. By 1934 this was estimated by the police at 15,000-18,000, many of them illegal immigrants. One of the features of interwar Europe underlined both by Durgan and by Tremlett is the large number of displaced people.
The common background of German and Italian volunteers as refugees from dictatorship in their home countries led to one, possibly predictable, difference between the two groups. The earlier establishment of the Fascist regime in Italy meant that most Italian volunteers had left the country in the 1920s, making the average Italian poumista noticeably older than their German counterpart – and older than the overall average of POUM foreigners.
Predictably many of the POUM volunteers had been active in left-wing political circles in their own countries, either in dissident Communist groups and parties critical of Stalin or in left-wing Socialist parties, such as the German Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands (SAPD) and the British ILP. Durgan helpfully provides both background material on these parties in an early chapter as well as an alphabetical list which many readers will find particularly useful.
The focus of Durgan’s book is, however, not only on the foreign volunteers: he also sets out to examine the military policies of the POUM, an aspect which, he argues, has been badly neglected by historians. This involves detailed accounts of the establishment and development of the POUM militia units and their military activity during the first year of the war, above all on the Aragon Front.
Historians seem to have accepted too readily Orwell’s picture of Aragon as a stagnant front where little fighting occurred. This picture fitted easily into accounts of the war written by opponents of the POUM including supporters of the Communist party. The Aragon Front was clearly a backwater in comparison with the battles around Madrid in the winter of 1936-1937 and those in the Basque provinces and Asturias in the summer of 1937. However, Durgan shows that the POUM units were far from inactive, particularly in the attempts to seize the Francoist stronghold of Huesca. Indeed, on the very day that the POUM was declared an illegal organisation, 16 June 1937, troops from the 29th Division, the party’s militia unit which had until shortly before been known as the Lenin Division, captured the strategically important hill “Loma de las Mártires” on the northern outskirts of Huesca.
While most of the POUM forces were deployed in Aragon, Durgan also details the experiences of the party’s unit on the Madrid front, including the role of the Argentine Mika Etchebéhèhere, who, despite being a woman, commanded a company of the POUM militia and later served on the General Staff of the (Anarchist) 36th Brigade, before dedicating her remaining time in Spain to working with the Anarchist women’s organisation Mujeres Libres.
Mika Etchebéhère, who was born in Argentina in 1902 and died in France in 1992 . Here at the Guadalajara front in 1936. PHOTO: Wikipedia
The POUM is often seen as a marginal party which enjoyed an ephemeral existence between its founding in 1935 and its suppression. Durgan challenges this, citing a membership of 30,000 during the winter of 1936/7, mainly in the most revolutionary zones of Catalonia, Valencia and Aragon. While it is often assumed that the outlawing of the POUM in June 1937 spelt the end of the party, Durgan also shows that this was clearly not the case: it continued a shadowy existence in Valencia and Madrid until mid-1938: clandestine editions of La Batalla, the party’s newspaper, continued to appear and Durgan quotes the paper’s editor, Josep Rebull, who claimed that 8,000 to 10,000 members remained active in December 1937.
After the party was outlawed the fate of the POUM’s foreign volunteers varied. Durgan argues that most of the volunteers who came from countries with democratic regimes were able to leave Spain, though in many cases this was after periods of detention. The situation for the remainder was much more difficult as they could not return to their home countries. Durgan lists 104 volunteers who were arrested after the fets de maig, 31 of whom were expelled. Many of the others stayed on, whether to enlist in anarchist units, in the International Brigades, in regular units of the Republican army, or, in some cases to work in factories.
Readers of Homage to Cataloniamay recall that, prior to thefets de maig , the author, along with some of the other ILP volunteers, was attempting to transfer to the International Brigades. The events in Barcelona made this unthinkable and Orwell returned to the POUM militia on the Aragon Front until he was wounded. Transfers between military units seem, however, to have been relatively common: Durgan identifies 51 volunteers who served in both the International Brigades and in POUM militia units. In some cases former Poumistas had limited alternatives: the Italian Giuseppe Leban, for example, was expelled from Spain in August 1937, but was then expelled from France two months later and returned to Spain to join the Brigades.
The situation of many of the volunteers emerges from the biographical details in Durgan’s appendix. The German Hans Reiter, for example, a former member of the French Foreign Legion, served in the POUM militia and, after being detained in July 1937, became an officer in the Republican army. Detained in a camp in Algeria between 1939 and 1942, he joined General Philippe Leclerc’s famous 2nd Armoured Division which entered Paris at the head of allied liberation forces in August 1944. Otto Towe, also German, served in the POUM militia before transferring to the Anarchist Durruti Column in December 1936 and subsequently, in July 1937, enlisting in the International Brigades in which he served until the end of the war (despite being briefly arrested in August 1937). His experiences afterwards included being interned in France, returning to Germany where he was detained by the Gestapo, being sent to Greece as part of a German penal battalion, escaping and joining the Greek People’s Liberation Army (ELAS), the largest of the Greek forces fighting the German occupation.
Towe’s option of joining the International Brigades, however, does not seem to have been available to many of those volunteers who had been members of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Opposition), the dissident German communist party: Durgan notes the role of the KPD-Abwehr, the security organisation of the pro-Moscow German communist party, which accused all German POUM volunteers of being Gestapo agents and was able to prevent most of them from enlisting in the Brigades.
As the cases of Otto Towe and Hans Reiter indicate, the fate of those foreigners who served in the POUM was often very harsh after the victory of Franco. The relatively large numbers of German and Italian volunteers were, almost inevitably, destined for concentration camps, initially in France, where their prospects worsened after the Fall of France in 1940. Of the 52 POUM volunteers whom Durgan lists as having been interned in French camps, 28 were Italians and 18 Germans. Their situation can be compared with many of their compatriots from the International Brigades. Like the latter many were sent to the concentration camp at Gurs in South-west France. Here, according to Durgan the Poumistas suffered the additional hardship of being treated as Nazi spies and sympathisers by members of the Communist party.
How should we assess the contribution of the relatively small number of foreign volunteers who served in the military units of the POUM? Durgan argues that their importance should not be overlooked. He lists 36 volunteers who served as officers and/or political commissars in POUM units and argues that the units in which they served were the most effective assembled by the party. Their role, like that of the POUM itself, has been marginalised in many of the accounts of the Civil War. Few historians have believed the charges levelled at the party and its militia of being a Nazi front organisation, but, as Durgan indicates, many of the other frequently repeated accusations made against it were unwarranted and false. One of Durgan’s conclusions, indeed, is that:
the main difference between the foreign fighters of the POUM and the members of the International Brigades was the vilification and, in many cases, the repression to which they were subjected
As indicated earlier, this book’s focus on the foreign volunteers of the POUM fills a vacuum in our knowledge and understanding of aspects of the Civil War. While much of the material on the party itself may already be found in specialist literature in Spanish and Catalan, Voluntarios Por La Revolución makes this available to a wider readership and is to be recommended to readers interested in the internal politics of Republican Spain during the Civil War. Readers of the English edition of this blog must hope for the early publication of an English-language edition.
PHOTO: POUM’s militia members being instructed about shotguns. Lenin headquarters in Barcelona. Biblioteca Digital Hispánica. Imágenes procedentes de los fondos de la Biblioteca Nacional de España.
Between 1936 and 1947 almost half a million people were detained in 188 Francoist concentration camps, the last of which, at Miranda de Ebro, finally closed in 1947 (Javier Rodrigo, Cautivos, 2005, p. 308). One of the most important camps occupied parts of the ancient monastery at San Pedro de Cardeña, about 10 km south east of Burgos. San Pedro is best known as a camp for captured members of the International Brigades and other foreign prisoners in 1938-9. Before this, however, it played an important role in the development of the Francoist detention system during the rebel offensive of 1937 against the Republican-held northern coastal provinces of Vizcaya, Santander and Asturias. San Pedro also deserves to be remembered for the investigations of Antonio Vallejo Nágera to find the “red gene”; the findings of these studies on foreign prisoners were used to justify the Francoist system of repression during and after the war.
San Pedro and the War in the North
In December 1936, after the failure of their offensive on Madrid, the rebel authorities established concentration camps in several locations in northern Spain. These early camps were usually situated in castles, fortresses or monasteries. One of these was San Pedro: the monastery, which had been closed since 1922, was assessed as being suitable for 1,200 prisoners who would be confined in large rooms rather than in cells.
In early 1937 the camp began to fill up with men transferred from other camps in northern Spain. Prior to arrival in San Pedro these men had passed through the Francoist screening system which categorised prisoners on the basis of their loyalties: Aa afectos (supportive of the rebels); Ad dudosos (of doubtful loyalty); B reaprovechables (redeemable); criminales (criminals). Men sent to San Pedro were classified as either Ad or B.
The rebel campaign against Vizcaya which began on 31 March 1937 led to the capture of thousands of people, both civilians and members of the Republican forces, many of whom, after screening, were sent to San Pedro. The summary nature of the screening is clear: following the fall of Bilbao on 19 June a camp was established at Deusto where, in the last ten days of July, the classification committee processed 536 prisoners. Meanwhile at Murgia (near Vitoria), an average of 100 people were screened per ten hour day throughout July, a rate of one case every six minutes (Rodrigo, p. 54).
The occupation of Santander by Franco’s forces in August 1937 led to the capture of some 50,000 people, while the end of Republican resistance in Asturias, two months later, produced another 33,000 prisoners. In September and October 1937 5,699 of these men were transferred to San Pedro, which operated as a transit camp: prisoners spent about six weeks there until they were sent elsewhere in labour battalions (Batallones de Trabajadores) of 600 men. During 1937, according to Javier Rodrigo’s exhaustive study of the camp system, some 10,000 men left San Pedro in labour battalions; 3,000 of them were despatched to work in the giant iron ore mine at Gallarta near Bilbao (Rodrigo, pp. 73-4).
Prisoners building a road near San Pedro de Cardeña
Living conditions at San Pedro were very similar to those in most of the camps – in Rodrigo’s words “lice, cold, hunger, humiliation, culture-shock and punishment” – as well as illness, the major cause of death, caused by the overcrowding and poor conditions. Prisoners suffered from what Rodrigo calls Sanpedronitis, a “generalised ill-health: the loss of teeth, bleeding gums, as a result of the poor food and the lack of vitamins” (Rodrigo, pp. 161-2). Although the camp was, he argues, poorly guarded, there were few escape attempts because the prisoners were too physically weak. The exceptions were six German brigaders who escaped in an attempt to avoid the attention of the Gestapo and/or transfer to Germany: they were recaptured, returned to San Pedro and punished brutally. Although San Pedro, unlike most camps, benefited from a health centre, the only medicine available was aspirin. Research carried out in the 1980s by Carl Geiser, an International Brigader imprisoned at San Pedro, uncovered the deaths of 66 Spanish and 10 foreign prisoners at the camp. (Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, 1986, pp. 115-6.)
Geiser described his own first afternoon in San Pedro:
Several thousand Basque and Asturian prisoners in civilian clothes were herded into the area between us and the lawn…A tall, lean priest appeared on the raised lawn, a Franciscan, wearing a long brown robe with a white sash. In a twenty-minute homily he explained why fascism was preferable to democracy and communism. Then a short, elderly grey-haired major – the comandante of the camp – and several officers led the singing of the fascist anthem Cara al Sol (‘Face to the Sun’). The ceremony concluded with an officer crying out ‘España!’ to which the Spanish prisoners responded ‘Una!’ a second ‘España!’ and the response ‘Grande!’ a third ‘España!’ and a resounding ‘Libre!’ Then three weaker shouts of ‘Franco!’ synchronised with the raised and lowered arms.
Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, p. 104.
In early April 1938, when the first internacionales arrived, the camp held about 2,000 Spanish prisoners. By 10 June the total number of men in the camp had risen to 3,673 – three times the initial estimate of its capacity. The After this, however, San Pedro and many of the other northern camps became less important as centres for holding Spanish prisoners: the Republican defeats in Aragon in March-April 1938 and the insurgent offensive in Catalonia in December 1938 led to the opening of new camps in recently occupied territory.
San Pedro and International prisoners
The decision to concentrate captured foreigners including members of the International Brigades at San Pedro was influenced by several factors. Under pressure from its Italian and German allies, the Franco regime decided to exchange these prisoners for Italian and German soldiers and airmen in Republican prisons. Small numbers of foreign prisoners had previously been exchanged, although International Brigaders had frequently been shot when captured (Geiser lists the details of 172 brigaders from the United States shot after capture between April 1937 and September 1938). The decision to send captured foreigners to San Pedro came days after the capture of large numbers of brigaders in Aragon, including Geiser, the political commissar of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, whose book, Prisoners of the Good Fight is the best account of the experience of the internacionales in San Pedro.
By early May 1938 there were 625 internacionales in San Pedro. The largest groups were from Britain and Ireland (149), the United States (74), France (48), Germany and Austria (44), Poland (32); the remainder came from 33 other countries. Not all were International Brigaders: Geiser’s later research uncovered an official list of the 653 foreigners in San Pedro on 10 September 1938: 130 were men who had fought in Republican army units. Neither were they all military personnel: they included 41 civilians suspected of supporting the Republic, among them two French lorry-drivers who had visited Spain to buy oranges. (Geiser, Appendix 2).
For the rebel authorities the foreign prisoners in San Pedro were excellent propaganda material, providing evidence of foreign fighters in the Republican army and therefore support for their attempts to justify their own dependence on German and Italian military assistance. Claiming that Spain had been invaded by an army of Communists also helped in their attempts to justify the military coup of July 1936, which, it was falsely claimed, had prevented a planned Communist takeover of Spain. Several propaganda films were issued, including“Prisioneros de Guerra” (1938).
The film presents a picture of prison life which contrasts starkly with the brutal and dehumanising conditions described in the memoirs of those detained, whether in San Pedro or elsewhere in Franco’s Spain . Many of the prisoners portrayed are clearly not internacionales, despite the introductory commentary, which claims that the brigaders had been attracted to Spain by “Soviet gold” (oro Sovietico”) and were “human debris” (despojos humanos) who were being rehabilitated by the generosity of Franco’s Spain.
Foreign and Spanish prisoners were kept separately from each other, although the conditions they endured were very similar: poor food, lack of adequate clothing which was particularly acute in the cold Burgos winter, poor sanitary facilities, no beds (many slept on a concrete floor) and the constant attention of vermin. Since the internacionales were not allowed– – or required– – to work and were only allowed out of the camp intermittently, their days were usually spent inside the overcrowded and insanitary halls where they slept. Apart from occasional trips to the river to wash they rarely enjoyed fresh air or exercise. The length of their detention in San Pedro – much longer than the six weeks endured by Spanish prisoners – made these conditions particularly unhealthy. Some of the internacionales arrived with serious wounds, but, although their numbers included three doctors, there were no medicines or surgical instruments to treat them. One foreigner died from dysentery, another from pleurisy and a third from lung-cancer.
Food being served to International prisoners at the concentration camp in San Pedro de Cardeña
The internacionales were required to attend mass – and beaten if they failed to kneel at the appropriate moment. They were also forced to give the straight-armed fascist salute and to join in the Falangist chant: this was one of many contraventions of the 1929 Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. Those who refused were beaten although, according to Geiser, “the sergeants ignored sloppy salutes as long as the fist was not closed” (Geiser, p. 129). Sporadic attempts were made to spread propaganda among them by means of leaflets in several languages. They were subject to arbitrary beatings, whether for minor infractions of the rules or simply to satisfy the moods of the guards. Geiser notes that guards reacted brutally to news of the Republican offensive across the Ebro in July 1938.
A secret committee, known as the House Committee, was established with representatives from all the major national groups: the identity of its members was unknown to most prisoners. Since the internacionales were usually confined indoors except at meal-times, they developed ways of occupying their time including playing chess with chess-pieces moulded from dry bread. Some English-speaking prisoners wrote a newspaper called the Jaily News, which was posted on the wall but removed when guards arrived.A programme of classes was arranged under the title of the San Pedro Institute of Higher Learning: language classes were very popular but other subjects included Spanish history, mathematics, sociology, economics, philosophy and drama. Geiser describes a group of illiterate Portuguese prisoners being taught to read and write. He adds “no other activity we engaged in was as important as these classes in resisting the dehumanising and degrading atmosphere of the concentration camp” (Geiser p. 128). As Christmas approached a concert was organised, featuring singing and comedy sketches: this was attended by the camp guards and the comandante was so impressed that a repeat performance was held on New Year’s Eve at his request.
International prisoners playing chess at the concentration camp in San Pedro de Cardeña
The prisoners were interviewed by Gestapo officers who paid particular attention to Germans and Austrians. The House Committee advised prisoners to claim to be ordinary soldiers, to name only Republican army officers who were dead, to deny any Communist affiliation, to express anti-fascist convictions, and to make no derogatory statements about the Republic or the International Brigades. Although prisoners were eventually allowed to send occasional messages to their families, they were initially strictly instructed to write – in their own languages – “notifying you that I am well” and nothing else. Eventually the lucky ones were able to receive packages from their families as well as from solidarity groups in their own countries. The unlucky ones included German and East European prisoners whose governments were hostile to the Republic.
A steady stream of other foreigners visited San Pedro, including William P. Carney, the right-wing correspondent of the New York Times; Jacques Doriot, the French fascist leader; and Lady Austen Chamberlain, sister-in-law of the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.
During 1938 several groups of internacionales benefited from prisoner exchanges, usually being transferred to prisons near San Sebastian before crossing into France. Geiser, for example, was among a group who left San Pedro at the end of February 1939, but who were held in Zapatari prison in San Sebastián until 22 April before final release. Their fate, however, depended on the willingness of the Franco regime to agree exchanges and that of their own governments to accept their return. The end of the war complicated the situation further because there were no longer Republican-held prisoners with whom they could be exchanged. When the camp finally closed in November 1939, it still held 406 internacionales, among whom the largest groups were the Portuguese (88), Argentines (56), Germans and Austrians (55), Poles (41) and Cubans (39). These unfortunate men were enlisted in Batallón de Trabajadores No. 75, a labour battalion who worked on the rebuilding of Belchite, the Aragonese town destroyed in fighting in 1937.
The Investigations of Antonio Vallejo Nágera
Due to the length of their stay in San Pedro the internacionales were one of two groups selected for the studies into the “Marxist problem” directed by the military psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera (the other study was of female prisoners in the Caserón de la Goleta prison. What life was like in Franco’s women’s prison in Malaga). A total of 297 internacionales were studied, including Geiser who describes part of this process:
“Behind the table sat a Gestapo agent with a ledger. As each prisoner was identified, an assistant using the calipers called out the length, breadth and depth of his skull, the distance between his eyes, the length of his nose, and described skin colour, body type, wound scars, and any disability”
Geiser, Prisoners of the Good Fight, p. 146.
The study also involved a visit by two German sociologists who presented the prisoners with a two- hundred-item questionnaire: this attempted to judge the morality of each subject through questions about their family, sexual, political, religious and military backgrounds. Questions about the family focussed on drunkenness, criminality, social position, religious affiliation, level of education, pauperism, illegitimacy, emigration and mental illness.
Vallejo argued that support for revolution in Spain was best explained on the basis of biology and psychology and that support for the Republic was based on criminal rather than political factors. As Rodrigo has pointed out, Vallejo’s work was of great importance, serving to establish a pseudo-scientific justification for the use of forced labour as a means of seeking the “national redemption” of prisoners. He points to the irony that research which aimed to identify the cause of the “illness” supposedly afflicting Spain (Marxism) was based on studies of non-Spanish subjects (Rodrigo, p. 145).
After closure San Pedro was occupied by the Cistercian order. Although there is a small museum dedicated to religious art, most of the Monastery, including the areas occupied by the camp, is closed to the public. A small information panel outside is the only reference to its use as a concentration camp.
Note: The figure of 188 concentration camps is not the total of detention centres used by the Franco dictatorship. The real figure would be much higher if we included labour camps, prisons, etc.
PHOTOS: Biblioteca Digital Hispánica. Biblioteca Nacional. CC-BY
Sixty years ago, in April-May 1962, a strike in the coalfields of Asturias which spread to other sectors of the Spanish economy presented the biggest challenge to the Franco Dictatorship since the end of the Civil War. Often known as La Huelga del Silenciodue to its peaceful and non-violent character, the strike led to the imposition of a State of Emergency (estado de excepción) in the provinces of Asturias, Gipuzkoa and Bizkaia and challenged the regime’s ability to control the working class through the Organización Sindical Española (O.S.E.), the state-run organisation established at the end of the Civil War.
The Asturian miners’ strike of 1962 can be seen as the harbinger of the industrial action which would mark the final years of the Dictatorship. To mark 1st May, International Workers Day, we are publishing this post to highlight the importance of the struggle of the Asturian miners and their families as well as those workers in other parts of Spain who risked their livelihoods and their lives by confronting the repressive labour policies of the Franco Regime.
In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the Asturian miners –famous for their resistance in October 1934 – were not a major source of opposition to the dictatorship. Asturias had been the last of the northern coastal provinces to fall to the Francoist armies in 1937 and the miners were subjected to fierce repression. According to Ruben Vega, the leading historian of the Asturian labour movement, 410 miners were executed following Francoist consejos de guerra (courts martial) and at least 368 were murdered extra-judicially. (Ruben Vega García et al, El Movimiento Obrero en Asturias Durante el Franquismo, 1937-1977, p. 54.) [More information about consejos de guerra here]
Although mine-workers were exempted from military service after the war, mining was not an attractive occupation: it was both extremely dangerous and very unhealthy. According to Vega, an average of 85 workers per year were killed in mining accidents in Asturias in the 1940s and 1950s (the total mining labour force in the province was 30,000 in 1950 and 49,000 in 1958). Miners also suffered from a high incidence of silicosis and other occupational diseases (Vega p. 55).
By the 1960s Asturias produced about seventy per cent of Spanish coal. The industry, centred around Langreo and Mieres, the main towns respectively in the valleys of the Nalón and Caudal rivers, dominated the local economy and society. Although the mines were owned by 72 different companies, seventeen of these dominated the industry, employing 93 per cent of the workers and producing 90 per cent of Asturian coal. Until the late 1950s coal-mining was sheltered from foreign competition by the Francoist policy of autarchy, but the 1959 Stabilisation Plan, which opened the Spanish economy to imports, provoked a severe crisis in the industry, as Asturian coal was forced to compete with cheaper imports.
In Asturias, as elsewhere in Spain, the Stabilisation Plan provoked an economic recession and inflation which reduced workers’ real wages. The atmosphere in the mining communities was also influenced by the return of miners who had emigrated to Western Europe, especially to Belgium and Luxembourg. Working abroad they had experienced not only better working and living conditions, but had witnessed the freedom of workers to organise and to strike.
By contrast, in Spain strikes were illegal and until 1958 wage-rates had simply been imposed by government decree. Although the 1958 Law of Collective Agreements (Ley de Convenios Colectivos Sindicales) allowed collective bargaining at factory, local or national level, this had to be conducted within the structure of the O.S.E. and all agreements had to be approved by the Ministry of Labour. In 1960 a government decree ruled that strikes deemed to be politically-motivated or which were seen as representing a serious threat to public order constituted military rebellion and were subject to military jurisdiction.
Developments in the coalfields in the late 1950s should have alerted the Franco regime to increasing discontent. A strike at the La Camocha mine, near Gijón, in January 1957, in which the miners occupied the mine for nine days, resulted in improvements in conditions and wage rates. Another strike centred on the Nalón valley in March 1958 led to the declaration of a State of Emergency and the dismissal of 200 workers: miners of military age were conscripted and 32 workers accused of membership of the Spanish Communist Party (P.C.E.) received prison sentences of between two and twenty years (Vega p. 272).
The 1962 strikes began on 7 April at the Nicolasa mine in Mieres after a protest at harsh and brutal working conditions. Nicolasa was one of the larger mines employing 2,000 men and the strike spread quickly to other mines in the Caudal valley. By the third week of April miners in the Nalón valley had joined the action and the strikers demands now included freedom to organise and compensation for workers afflicted by silicosis. The government’s response was predictable: the arrest of mineworkers and, in some cases, their relatives, the torture of prisoners, the intimidating presence of the Policia Armada and the Guardia Civil in the streets of the mining towns and major cities. About 400 miners were detained and many others deported to other parts of the country. (Vega p. 282)
The struggle continued for two months and depended on the solidarity of the close-knit communities in the mining valleys. An important element of this was the role of women in smuggling leaflets to spread the strike and in encouraging solidarity with the miners cause. The company-run stores (economatos) were closed as soon as strikes broke out and families were forced to rely on small traders who provided credit and on Catholic church groups who organised communal kitchens (comedores).
Throughout April the repression was accompanied by a complete media silence. Despite this solidarity strikes spread to workers outside the mining valleys – to the mines of Leon, to the Río Tinto mines in Huelva, to the steel and engineering plants in Asturias and to the major engineering works in the valley of the Río Nervion around Bilbao. The declaration of a State of Emergency in the provinces of Asturias, Bizkaia and Gipuzkoa on 4th May to deal with what were described as anormalidades laborales (“labour abnormalities”) had little effect. By the second half of May about 300,000 workers were on strike across the country, affecting factories in a total of 28 provinces, including Barcelona where production had halted at most of the engineering and textile factories in the province.
Meanwhile, on 6th May, a manifesto signed by 171 leading Spanish intellectuals – including Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Josep Fontana, Juan & Luis Goytisolo, Jose Bergamín, Salvador Espriu and Alfonso Sastre – called for the establishment of freedom of information and the right of workers to strike. [Read the manifesto here, archived by the Fundación Juan Muñiz Zapico]
Extraordinarily, the regime was forced to negotiate with the miners’ leaders: on 15th May a government minister, Jose Solís Ruiz, who, as Secretary-General of the Movement, was responsible for the O.S.E., travelled to Gijón for talks with a hastily assembled committee of miners’ representatives. This marked the only occasion during the Franco regime when the government was forced to negotiate directly with workers’ leaders. The building workers of Gijón greeted Solís’s arrival by joining the strike.
Even after Solís had conceded an agreement on increased wages and improvement in working conditions which was published in the Boletín Oficial del Estado on 24th May, the strike continued until detained miners were released and deported workers were allowed to return to the province. By then other groups had joined the protests: in late May there were student protests in Madrid and Barcelona. Demonstrators chanted “Franco No! Asturias Si!” and sang songs such as Hay una luz en Asturias que ilumina todo España (“There is a light in Asturias which lights up the whole of Spain”) and Asturias patria querida (“Asturias my beloved homeland”). (Vega, pp 282-3)
The return to work of the miners between 4th and 7th June was followed by an end to the other strikes. However, there was, perhaps inevitably, a sequel to the Asturian strikes of April-May. In August a second round of strikes broke out over the victimisation of some miners and the failure to fully implement the agreements which ended the earlier dispute. Both the Caudal and Nalón valleys were quickly brought to a halt. This time, however, the police and employers had compiled a black-list of workers: 126 were deported to other provinces and many others were dismissed. The strikes soon collapsed, partly because many miners and their families did not have the resources to resist after the two-month stoppage earlier in the year. (Vega, pp. 282-90)
As was customary, the regime blamed the strikes on Communist activists particularly from other countries. On May 27th addressing the Hermandad deAlfereces Provisionales, an organisation of Falangist war veterans, at Mount Garabitas, a Civil War battlefield outside Madrid, Franco claimed that the Civil War was still being fought, dismissed the strikes as unimportant and attacked un-named enemies for exploiting the situation. A few months later he told the New York Times correspondent Benjamin Welles
Italian and other foreign agitators came into Spain equipped with funds, but they got away before our police could put their hands on them.
Benjamin Welles, Spain: The Gentle Anarchy, 1965 (p. 130)
While the initial dispute at La Nicolasa can be seen as improvised, members of various clandestine opposition groups played important roles in spreading the strike, both in Asturias and elsewhere. As well as the Spanish Communist Party (P.C.E.), these included activists from the Socialist U.G.T. (Union General de Trabajadores) and members of Church groups, especially from the Juventud Obrera Cristiana (J.O.C.) and the Hermandad Obrera de Acción Católica (H.O.A.C.). Police reports suggest that the government was particularly alarmed at the activities of Catholic activists. While the Bishop of Oviedo, Segundo García Sierra, was hostile to the strikes and transferred J.O.C. activists from the mining valleys to rural areas, police reports identified numerous priests, particularly in the Basque provinces, whose sermons indicated support for the strikers’ cause. (Vega, p. 285).
The events of April-May 1962 had, however, raised serious questions for the future of the Franco dictatorship. The regime had been humiliated: a government minister had been forced to travel to Gijón to negotiate directly with the miners’ leaders, even though, since strikes were illegal, the latter were – according to the laws of the regime itself – criminals. Publication of the agreement reached by Solís while the strikes continued was another humiliation. Clearly this indicated the failure of the Francoist system of manage labour relations through the usual methods of the state-controlled union and police repression. It also underlined the fact that, since strikes were illegal, any strike automatically became a political issue involving the government.
The spread of the strikes and protests during April despite the silence of the Spanish media and despite the heavily distorted coverage after the declaration of the State of Emergency raised questions about the effectiveness of the system of press censorship. This would be reformed in 1966 when Fraga Iribarne’s Press Law (Ley de Prensa e Imprenta) abolished censorship in advance but subjected the press to severe penalties for breaking the ill-defined rules on publication. The most important source of information about the strikes was Radio España Independiente, the Communist Party’s radio station based in Bucharest. Known by the public as “La Pirenaica”, its reports were listened to widely across the country. Analysis of police records by Ruben Vega indicates the accuracy of La Pirenaica’s reports, something which must have further alarmed the authorities (Vega, p 284).
The conflict in Asturias in particular and the strike wave in general severely damaged the Franco regime abroad at a time when it had been attempting to present an image of a conservative civilian administration governing a peaceful, modernising society. In February 1962 the Spanish government had officially requested the opening of negotiations for membership of the European Economic Community. The nature of the Franco regime meant this was probably never likely to succeed, but the events of April-May 1962 reminded governments and the public in Western Europe of the fascist origins of the Franco regime and the continuing repressive nature of the dictatorship. Demonstrations in solidarity with the miners erupted in Western European capitals and in the United States, while labour movements outside Spain drew attention to the lack of independent trade unions and the illegality of strike action.
These two documentaries will be of interest to readers who understand Spanish:
In a previous article [Memoirs of the War & Post-War by female writers] we discussed the memoirs of Constancia de la Mora, the grand-daughter of Antonio Maura (Spanish PM under Alfonso XIII) who became director of the Foreign Press Office during the Civil War. Her memoirs were first published in English in the United States in 1939 under the title In Place of Splendour. The English-language edition has been out of print since then but has now been republished by a London publisher, Clapton Press, as part of a new series of memoirs of Spain in the 1930s. To mark the launch of this series this post reviews a few of the books so far published.
In an interview Simon Deefholts, Managing Director of Clapton Press, argued that the 1930s was
a critical decade not only for Spain but across Europe as a whole. The fight to defend the Republic was seen by many outside Spain as their first opportunity to take a stand against increasingly aggressive right-wing ideologues. It attracted a whole range of people from different backgrounds who provided support in a variety of ways. Many of them wrote vivid accounts of their experiences that have now been out of print for more than eighty years and can only be accessed in specialist libraries or at vast expense for collectors’ copies.
The Clapton Press aims, he added, to
make these primary sources available at a reasonable cost. Nearly all of the people who volunteered to help defend and support the Republic – in a variety of ways – showed great courage and determination, so we feel that it is important to provide direct access to their first-hand accounts.
In Place of Splendour , which includes an introduction by her biographer, Soledad Fox Maura, provides an account of the author’s conservative elite upbringing and her subsequent radicalisation during the Second Republic. Along with her second husband, Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros (head of the Republican airforce), she became a key figure in the Republican war effort. Her knowledge of foreign languages made her an important figure in the Foreign Press Office in Valencia: although she censored their dispatches, correspondents appreciated her help in arranging accommodation, organising interviews and arranging transport to the battle-front. According to Paul Preston her ability to communicate with journalists was assisted, when necessary, by her knowledge of English obscenities. After the press office moved, along with the Republican government, to Barcelona in October 1937, she became its director.
In Place of Splendour was completed in the months after De la Mora’s arrival in the United States in January 1939. Soledad Fox and others have concluded that it was ghost-written by Ruth Mckenney with assistance from Jay Allen, the former Chicago Tribune correspondent. Noticeablythe book does not mention the fact that De la Mora and her husband were both members of the Spanish Communist Party and it generally plays down the party’s role in the Republic during the Civil War. Despite this, her memoirs provide insights into the working of the Republican war-effort at a high level. On publication in November 1939 it attracted favourable publicity in the United States and sold very well. Shortly afterwards De la Mora settled in Mexico where she translated the book into Spanish; the first Spanish edition was published in Mexico in 1944.
The outstanding new publication by the Clapton Press is Never More Alive: Inside the Spanish Republic,the memoirs of Kate Mangan. In his introduction Paul Preston writes:
ever since I first read the manuscript about fifteen years ago, I have longed to see it in print. I regarded it when I first read it, and ever more so with each subsequent reading, as one of the most valuable and, incidentally, purely enjoyable books about the war.
An English artist who had studied at the prestigious Slade School of Arts in London, Mangan visited Spain and Portugal in 1935-36 with her boyfriend, Jan Kurzke, a refugee from Nazi Germany. After their return to Britain in August 1936, Kurzke was an early volunteer for the International Brigades, arriving in Madrid at the beginning of November 1936. Mangan followed him soon afterwards and, unable to be near him, supported herself by translating, interpreting and writing. Her experiences, as a foreign woman, could not be described as typical of the population, but her account describes many aspects of life in Republican Spain in 1936-37, particularly the problems of food supply, the difficulties of transport and the conditions endured by the large number of refugees from war and Francoist repression. She describes vividly the hospital conditions – the lack of medicines and adequate hygiene, the poorly trained staff, the badly wounded soldiers. There are also descriptions of conditions in Barcelona, which she and Kurzke passed through on their journey out of Spain in July 1937.
Like Constancia de la Mora, Kate Mangan worked for a time in the Foreign Press Office in Valencia. Mangan’s motives for visiting Spain and her lack of a political background help make her account less partisan than many others. The book sparkles with details of journeys and places as well as with her incisive profiles of the journalists and writers she encountered.
Jan Kurzke’s memoirs have also been published for the first time in this series as The Good Comrade: Memoirs of An International Brigaderwith an introduction by Richard Baxell. Kurzke describes firstly, his pre-war experiences tramping around Spain and busking with a group of emigrés in 1934-1935 and then, following a break in Britain where he met Kate Mangan, his service with the International Brigades [see his record on Sidbrint here ]. This is an account of the soldier’s experience of war: he often writes in short sentences, which, as Baxell remarks, “read much like a series of diary entries, helping to create a real sense of immediacy”. Kurzke was seriously wounded in the leg at Boadilla del Monte in December 1936 and, after hospitalisation in Madrid, was moved to Murcia, where Mangan tracked him down and arranged medical help for his recovery.
Both Mangan’s and Kurzke’s memoirs end with their departure, but their later lives are covered in these volumes by other means, including letters and brief biographical notes by their daughter, Charlotte. Between 1940 and 1941 Kurzke was interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien by the British government. Kurzke and Mangan never married and, in 1945 Kurzke married a young actress. This perhaps, will not surprise readers of both volumes; Kurzke’s memoirs never even mention Mangan.
My House in Málaga by Sir Peter Chalmers-Mitchell has been out of print since first publication in February 1938. The author, an eminent Scottish zoologist and the founder of London Zoo, Chalmers-Mitchell, retired to live in Málaga in 1932 and stayed in the city after the July 1936 military rebellion. The main focus of his memoirs is an account of his life in the city during the six months before its occupation by rebel forces in February 1937. At the centre of this is his relationship with his neighbours, the Bolín family, whose cousin Luis Bolín was a prominent supporter of Franco. Fearing for their lives, the Bolíns sought refuge and help from Chalmers-Mitchell and their house was taken over by local anarchists for use as a hospital. Although Chalmers-Mitchell eventually helped the family escape to Gibraltar, he enjoyed good relations with the Republican authorities and local anarchist leaders. His memoirs detail the deterioration of conditions in the city and the effects of repeated rebel air attacks. In a letter to The Times in October 1936, he attempted to counter the exaggerated claims of violence and bloodshed in Málaga which had been made in the British press on the basis of the reports of refugees and rebel supporters in Gibraltar. This letter did not endear him to the rebel authorities.
Despite his role in assisting the Bolín family, Chalmers-Mitchell was arrested along with his guest, the journalist Arthur Koestler, by Luis Bolín after the Italian occupation of Málaga. While Koestler was imprisoned in solitary confinement in Seville for over three months and subsequently released in a prisoner-exchange, Chalmers-Mitchell was, in effect, expelled from rebel-held Spain. He returned to Britain where he used his extensive contacts to secure Koestler’s release and to assist the public campaign in support of the Republic.
My House in Málaga also includes an account of a meeting with the writer Ramón J. Sender and his family in Madrid weeks before the military coup. He had earlier translated Sender’s 1932 novel Siete Domingos Rojos into English (it was published as Seven Red Sundays in April 1936) and his translation of Sender’s account of the opening months of the war was published in 1937 as Counter-Attack in Spain.
Simon Deeffholts has ambitious plans for future publications, pointing out that “there are still many valuable resources which are currently unavailable outside specialist libraries, or only available at vast expense.” Among the publications planned for 2022 two will particularly attract readers interested in the Civil War: new editions of The Last Mile to Huesca by Agnes Hodgson and of Behind the Spanish Barricades by John Langdon-Davies.
The Last Mile to Huesca, with a revised introduction by Judith Keene, are the diaries of an Australian nurse who served in the Republican medical service in 1937. Arriving in Barcelona in December 1936 Hodgson, who had no political background and who had worked in Hungary and Fascist Italy, initially faced accusations of being a Fascist spy. Her diaries describe not only her experiences in the Republican medical service, but also her journey to Spain in November 1936 and her impressions on arrival in Barcelona, where she attended the funeral of the German international brigader Hans Beimler.
Behind the Spanish Barricades was written in a few weeks in the autumn of 1936 and is an account of the author’s two visits to Spain earlier that year as a correspondent for the London News Chronicle, the first in April-May and the second just after the July military rebellion. Unlike many of the journalists who flocked to Spain after the coup, Langdon-Davies knew Spain well from before the war, having lived in Catalonia in the 1920s (he was the author of a well-received book on the Catalan national dance, the sardana). His account describes his conversations with Spanish friends and his visits to several parts of Spain both before and after the coup . However, Behind the Spanish Barricades is particularly worth reading for his evocative impressions of Barcelona, both before the July 1936 military coup and in its immediate aftermath.
This is only a selection of the books published by the Clapton Press: a full list is available via their website
In 1961, 25 years after the military coup that sparked off the Civil War, two important books on the conflict appeared, one in English (The Spanish Civil Warby Hugh Thomas) and the other in French (La Révolution et la Guerre d’Espagne by Pierre Broué and Emile Témime). These were perhaps the first books written by a generation of historians uninvolved in the events themselves, all being children in the 1930s . To mark the sixtieth anniversary of their publication we publish this blog-post on these two books and their reception in the 1960s.
La Révolution et la Guerre d’Espagne is a remarkable work which is divided into two parts; the first, by Broué, examines the revolutionary process in 1936-37 while the second, by Témime, is an account of the international aspects of the war and the construction of the Francoist Dictatorship. In the introduction the authors explained this approach, admitting their differences of sympathy – Témime being more sympathetic to the “progressive Republicans and the moderate Socialists in his concern with organisation and efficiency and the world balance of power” while Broué felt that “those who fight revolutions half-heartedly are merely digging their own graves” (p 14). Their aim was, they added:
“in the face of ignorance, neglect, and falsification, to recreate this struggle in the most truthful possible way and to rid it of the legend which had prematurely buried it.” (p. 7)
It was the first part which received most attention. The attempted military coup of July 1936 which sparked off the Civil War also provoked a widespread social revolution in the areas of Spain which resisted the coup. Yet, in the years after the war this revolution had been largely ignored by historians or treated as insignificant.
Using the concept of “dual power”, evocative of events in the Russian capital Petrograd after the collapse of the Czarist regime in February 1917, Broué explores the complex situation produced by the collapse of the Republican state and its replacement by the local committees which sprang into life in 1936. He traces the stages by which, against the background of the defeat of Republican forces on the battlefield, the Republican state was rebuilt under the government of Largo Caballero (Sept 1936-May 1937). The tensions this produced and the rise of the Communist party as the party of counter-revolution formed the background to the crisis which erupted in Barcelona in May 1937, after which the revolutionary groups and parties were marginalised under the new government of Juan Negrin.
In the second part of the book Témime argues that the failure of Britain and France to support the Republic was crucial for the war’s outcome,turning almost inevitable defeat for the rebel generals into almost inevitable victory. This points to the tension in their accounts: Broué sees the defeat of the revolution as depriving the Republican war effort of the enthusiasm of peasants and workers, while Témime identifies fear of social revolution as a key motive for the hostility towards the Republic of the British and French upper-classes.
The book was enthusiastically reviewed by the U.S. historian Gabriel Jackson, whose own account, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War 1931-1939, was published in 1965. Writing in the Hispanic American Historical Review in 1962Jackson praised the work as “the best general interpretation available concerning both the revolution of 1936 and the war”, adding that:
“it is especially valuable for analysis of the C.N.T., the P.O.U.M. and the anarchists in both the industrial and rural areas of Catalonia.”
In France the reviews were more mixed, with Antoine Prost in the Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine (October-December 1962), pointing to the authors’ lack of an adequate analysis of the pre-war Republican period and of the agrarian problems of Spain. Prost, however, praised the work as an important advance in the study of the conflict, adding that further research was necessary and that the history of the war remained to be written. After the book was finally published in an English-language edition in 1972, the U.S. historian Temma Kaplan described it as the “best single volume” on the Civil War in a review in the Hispanic American Historical Review (1974).
Both authors went on to enjoy distinguished careers as historians in France but, sadly, La Révolution et la Guerre d’Espagne was never updated to take account of new sources and new interpretations.
Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War quickly became the standard work on the subject in English, bringing the author fame and wealth. Thomas had no background in Spanish history – and, indeed, had to start his task by studying Spanish. Like Broué and Témime he benefited from being able to interview many of the surviving key figures involved. Perhaps reflecting his brief previous career as a British diplomat, Thomas stressed the international and diplomatic aspects of the conflict. His approach is best described as “narrative”; at times this leads him to shift in the space of two or three pages between concurrent developments in several different locations (Salamanca, Barcelona, Bilbao, Washington, London etc). This narrative approach was, perhaps, the key to the book’s success: telling the story of the war to a generation of readers outside Spain who had no memory of the events as well as to an older generation whose memories were patchy.
The Spanish Civil War received enthusiastic reviews in the British press, including from journalists such as Claude Cockburn who had reported on the war, as well as from Peter Kemp, one of the few British volunteers who had fought in Franco’s rebel forces. In the United States, Vincent Sheean, who had covered the war for the New York Herald Tribune, praised it in the New York Times (9 July 1961) saying
“there is something quite wonderful about a book which is written on a thing which the author never saw and never could have seen. (…) (Thomas) has understood it incredibly well and has written it superbly”.
Some historians were, however, less impressed. In the review in the Hispanic American Hispanic Review cited above Jackson criticised the author for relying too heavily on accounts by Francoist historians such as Manuel Aznar. This, he argued, led Thomas to accept what Jackson describes as “an obviously forged document” alleging a Communist plot to overthrow the Republic (the claim of such a plot was the basis of the military rebels’ attempt to legitimise the coup and the Franco Dictatorship).
He also criticised Thomas’s acceptance of the Francoist figure for the number of people murdered in the Republican zone– which was taken from the Causa General, the Franco Regime’s mammoth general prosecution brought against people alleged to have committed crimes in the “red zone” during the war.
Jackson also criticised what he called “the tone of unpleasant scorn” adopted in discussing the repression “as though dealing with the melodramatic customs of a barbarian people”. He concluded that
“in a strict scholarly sense it can be recommended for its coverage of the international aspects, but as military and political history of Spain it spreads more confusion than light.”
Inside Spain The Spanish Civil War was reviewed in academic journals such as the Revista de Política Internacional (No 60, 1962) and the Revista de Estudios Políticos (No 161, 1961), but Thomas recognised that there was no prospect of it being published in the country.
Despite this, it would become an important work in Francoist Spain as a Spanish translation was published by Ruedo Iberico, which had been established in Paris to challenge the regime’s control over publishing inside Spain. The book was smuggled across the frontier and sold clandestinely. The first Spanish print-run of 5,000 copies sold out very quickly.
The book’s popularity in Spain forced Manuel Fraga Iribarne, Spanish Minister of Information & Tourism (1962-1969) to establish a centre of Civil War Studies under Ricardo de la Cierva, in an attempt to reassert the Franco regime’s version of the Civil War as a “crusade” against Marxism, liberalism and freemasonry.
A revised English-language edition of The Spanish Civil War was published as a paperback in 1965 and it was revised substantially for third and fourth editions which were published in 1977 and 2003. By this time the author’s political views had changed significantly, leading him to become a key advisor to Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s. The later editions are much longer than the original, carry much more extensive footnotes and respond to some of the criticisms of the first edition. In particular, Thomas expanded his discussion of the revolutionary process of 1936-37, which he, like so many other writers before Broué and Témime, had badly neglected in the first edition. His account of the Second Republic was also improved and extended with the assistance and advice of Paul Preston, who had been his doctoral student.
Sixty years after their publication, how are we to assess these two books? The authors had the advantage of being able to interview many of the survivors but, at the time, many of the archives were closed, particularly in Spain where the regime maintained a close watch on challenges to the official version of the country’s history. Both La Révolution et la Guerre d’Espagne and the early editions of The Spanish Civil War have long been superseded by the work of later historians, but the authors were pioneers in the field and had a lasting impact. Their books introduced new generations of readers – inside Spain as well as outside – to the history of the war and some of these readers themselves went on to research and write on the subject.
Pierre Broué and Emile Témime, La Révolution et la Guerre d’Espagne, Les Edicions de Minuit, 1961. Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1961.
