Since the charity’s inception in 2001, the International Brigade Memorial Trust has organised an annual lecture in memory of Dr. Len Crome, a Blackburn GP who went to serve as a medic in Republican Spain in December 1936, and whose inspirational leadership led him to become Chief of Medical Services for the 35th Division of the Spanish Army during the civil war of 1936-1939.

The Len Crome memorial lectures have featured renowned scholars from around the world including, among many others, Peter Carroll, Helen Graham, Paul Preston and Angel Viñas. In 2010, the first nine lectures were released in a volume, edited by Jim Jump, and published by Lawrence and Wishart: Looking Back at the Spanish Civil War. Two years ago, with London’s Imperial War Museum closed for renovation, the event moved to Manchester and took on a new format, with four speakers and a discussion, rather than one keynote speaker. Chaired by Professor Mary Vincent of the University of Sheffield, the first conference in 2013 looked at George Orwell and Spain, with last year’s examining the Spanish Civil War’s cultural and artistic legacy. This year, with Paul Preston back in the chair, the conference was centred on perhaps the most famous artwork of the twentieth Century, inspired by the Nationalists’ horrific destruction of a small Basque market town on 26 April 1937.

Over the course of the day, there were four lectures on the bombing of Guernica (Gernika) and its consequences.  In the opening talk, the author of Telegram from Guernica and former BBC producer Nick Rankin, outlined the key role of Times journalist George Steer in bringing news of the destruction of the Basque town to Britain. Steer’s account of the bombing remains one of the most powerful and important pieces of reporting in English to have come out of the war. But, as Rankin explained, Steer went beyond the usual dispassionate role of a journalist, by wiring his report direct to the Labour M.P. Philip Noel Baker. This meant that news of the horrific destruction of Guernica could be raised in the House of Commons before it had even appeared on Britain’s streets. Steer, a determined supporter of the Basques during the civil war, was later honoured with a plaque in Bilbao and a statue in Guernica itself.

Gijs van Hensbergen, art historian and best-selling author, is a world expert on Gaudi and Picasso’s Guernica. His deconstruction of Picasso’s painting and his account of the artist’s life were fascinating and I suspect many of the audience will have been spurred to go on and read his book, Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon. Gijs outlined how the iconic painting became a powerful weapon in the propaganda battle against Fascism.

Basque historian Xabier Irujo brought the event back to the actual bombing itself. In a forensic examination of the events of 26 April 1937, he demonstrated how the Germans – and Italians – systematically destroyed the town with high explosive and incendiary bombs, while planes circled around it machine-gunning any poor victims who attempted to escape. As he showed, the destruction and high number of casualties was no accident; a foretaste of the Nazi’s deliberately murderous approach to war.

The final talk was by Manual Moreno, who introduced a personal account of the consequences of the bombing. The son of one of the 4000 Basque children who were evacuated to Britain in June 1937, Manuel outlined the efforts made by the people of Britain on behalf of the Basque refugees and the Spanish Republic itself. Nearly eighty years have passed since the war, yet it was clear from Manuel’s emotional speech, that while he remains grateful to the British people for their efforts in support of the Spanish Republic, he continues to feel incensed with the British Government for their refusal to do likewise.

A video of the event will be released by the IBMT in the coming weeks.