Pictured here with the two speakers at the IBMT's 2019 Len Crome conference in Oxford: to my right, the researcher and author Daniel Gray, to my left historian and The Guardian's football correspondent, Sid Lowe. There are more images on the IBMT's Flickr account.
Full report in the May 2019 issue of ¡No Pasarán!
For this year's Len Crome event, I discussed the difficulties involved in establishing the precise background and origins of the volunteers for Spain from Britain & Ireland and how the various national groups in the International Brigades got along while fighting in Spain.
The talk will be on the IBMT's Youtube channel and a precis appears in issue 45 of the IBMT magazine (2/2017).
On 9 August 2017, I introduced a number of readings relating to the International Brigades, movingly delivered by actors Christopher Ecclestone and Yolanda Vazquez and by Margot Heinemann’s daughter, Jane Bernal.
In the Sky News studio talking about the former International Brigader, Geoffrey Servante, who died on 22 April 2019, aged 99. He was almost certainly the last surviving British veteran of the Spanish Civil War.
On 12 June 2020 during Britain's Coronavirus lockdown, I was asked to contribute to Talk Radio's 'Home-Schooling' segment.
I was very happy to take part in a short six minute film produced by the Gill Parker Consultancy. The film was commissioned by the L.S.E. to showcase the expertise of LSE academics; in this instance Professor of Contemporary Spanish History, Paul Preston. In addition to myself, the film included interviews with former Basque child, Herminio Martínez; Professor of Spanish History, Helen Graham; and Spanish writer and journalist, Lala Isla.
On 31 May 2018 I joined the biographer and filmmaker, Jane Rogoyska, for a presentation at L.S.E.'s Cañada Blanch Centre, chaired by Professor Paul Preston. We were outlining our thoughts on the image that had recently appeared on social media: did it really show the celebrated photojournalist, Gerda Taro, on her death bed?
Set in the heart of London’s commercial art gallery district, Mayoral’s ‘Art Revolutionaries’ is a homage to the Spanish Republic’s Pavilion in the famous Paris Exposition of 1937. The Spanish contribution deliberately and consciously expressed both the modernity of the Republic and the life and death struggle in which it was embroiled. The centrepiece, of course, was Picasso’s powerful depiction of the bombing of Guernica, prominently displayed at one end of a spacious, open auditorium.
This lovingly-curated exhibition goes to great lengths to recreate the impression of the original pavilion. On the first floor works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, Alexander Calder and Julio González, many sourced from private collections, sit within a scale model of the original auditorium. Downstairs, interposed among detailed replicas of the original furniture, vivid Republican posters accompany a short film of the original 1937 exhibition, while helpful panels and displays of rich archival material recount the political and artistic context.
The exhibition has already been shown in Paris and Barcelona and when its time in London ends on 10 February 2017, there are no plans for it to go elsewhere. That, I think, is a shame. This (Mayoral’s wonderful catalogue aside) is the nearest most of us will get to experiencing the original Paris exposition. Based solely on what is on display here, it must surely have been a sight worth seeing.
This post first appeared in the March issue of The Volunteer.
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.
On Saturday 28 April, Richard joined Professor Paul Preston and Professor Helen Graham for Guernica 75. Organised by Mercedes Camino of Lancaster University, the event was a discussion of the International Brigades, Guernica and the Spanish Civil War.
Speaking to a full house, Richard drew upon his forthcoming book, Unlikely Warriors, to talk about Manchester volunteers and their roads to Spain while Paul and Helen followed with lectures using material from their critically acclaimed new books, The Spanish Holocaust and The War and Its Shadow.
There has been a spate of books published recently on The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain, to use the title of Tom Buchanan’s latest (2007) work. In addition to the IBMT’s Antifascistas (2010) written to accompany the exhibition on the British and Irish volunteers, we have had Brian Shelmerdine’s British Representations of the Spanish Civil War (2006), Lewis Mates’ The Spanish Civil War and the British Left (2007), David Deacon’s British News Media and the Spanish Civil War (2008) and now Hugo García has added The Truth About Spain!: Mobilizing British Public Opinion, 1936-1939. This is not to forget Chris Hall’s Not Just Orwell, Daniel Gray’s Homage to Caledonia, the two oral histories of British volunteers – Max Arthur’s The Real Band of Brothers and Peter Darman’s Heroic Voices of the Spanish Civil War – and two more general books that include much of interest to a British audience: Paul Preston’s study of the war correspondents, We Saw Spain Die, and Steve Hurst’s Famous Faces of the Spanish Civil War. Clearly, as we approach the seventy-fifth anniversary of the war, the conflict still has a powerful resonance in Britain, despite rarely making an appearance in the classroom.
Hugo García has made an important contribution to this rather crowded field; it is a rich, detailed study, impeccably researched. The title, however, is somewhat of a misnomer for García’s aim, as he admits, is not to judge the veracity of Republican and Nationalist propaganda, but rather to attempt to present an objective, dispassionate analysis of the forms and effectiveness of their propaganda campaigns, how they functioned and impacted on British opinion.
The book comprises four main sections. The first is a history of ‘modern’ forms of propaganda and censorship, from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War, focusing on the use of propaganda in the totalitarian countries and in Spain itself during the Second Republic.
Part two compares the differing approaches of the Nationalists and the Republicans and contains a wealth of detail on the development, manning and operation of both sides’ propaganda machines. As García shows, the view of foreign correspondents as spies and criminals by senior Nationalists, and their treatment by their rude and obstructive Press officer, Luis Bolín was often counter-productive. For example, the expulsion of The Times correspondent George Steer required him to move to the Republican zone, from where he later produced his devastating coverage of the bombing of Guernica.
García’s analysis of the Republicans’ approach – frequently drawing on Arturo Barea’s wonderful memoir, The Forging of a Rebel – recognises that the Republic’s initial problem was to overcome the chaos that followed the rising and which had shattered the state apparatus. As García describes, order was gradually re-established by the end of 1936, leading to increasingly sophisticated and professional dealings with the foreign press. In contrast to the repugnant Bolín, Republican faces such as Constancia de la Mora offered an efficient and charming front to the foreign correspondents, recognising their value, rather than treating them as irritants.
García then turns to the propaganda messages put out by both sides, particularly atrocities and foreign intervention. It was obviously vitally important for both sides to get across their version of events: the Rebels’ depiction of themselves as Nacionales with an anti-Communist crusade was countered by the Republicans’ portrayal of the war as ‘progress versus feudalism’, or the defence of democracy against international fascism. García argues that the techniques used by both sides were, in fact, very similar and that both sides knowingly and deliberately used falsehoods to sustain their portrayal of the conflict.
The final section discusses the impact of the propaganda on Britain. As he recognises, García faces the thorny problem of assessing exactly how the ‘messages’ put across by both sides were received in Britain; not easy to judge considering the unreliability of opinion polling, then still in its infancy. García claims that, in the main, there was a general indifference, ‘a plague on both your houses,’ as one contemporary newspaper put it. However, as he recognises, of those who took sides, many more sided with the Republicans than with the Rebels. And while the strongest support for both sides came from the political extremes in Britain, the Republicans had some success in extending their realm of support as the war progressed.
However, García believes that the reportage of the horrors of the Spanish war was most effective in convincing neutrals of the horror of war in general, rather than of one particular side, and thus consolidated support for non-intervention. In a depressing conclusion, he argues that even if the Republican propaganda had been more effective, it would probably still not have achieved enough to be able to save the Spanish Republic. Sadly, it is difficult to disagree with García’s view put forward at the very beginning of the book, that ‘this was, from very early in the war, a lost cause.’ Once Britain and France were determined to pursue a policy of non-intervention in the war, despite ample evidence of a huge German and Italian presence in Spain, the Spanish Republic was effectively doomed.
