About a rather special bloke, his crew and their little ship

In Alicante, on the quayside near the hotel, going down to the Casino there's a little bust of Archibald Dickson and a plaque to commemorate him and the crew of the SS Stanbrook. Archie Dickson was of the same stuff as the men and women of the boats patrolling the seas and oceans looking to save the lives of desperate people fleeing for their lives today. Archie knew what was right.

The Stanbrook is small coal fired ship just 70 metres long, 1400 tons and 11 knots top speed. Archibald Dickson is from Cardiff, 47, British Merchant Navy. His ship owners have told him to leave Marseilles and pick up a cargo in Alicante. A Spanish Navy destroyer, controlled by the rebellious forces, which are just about to crush the remnants of the legitimate government, tell Archie not to enter Alicante. He hoists the Red Ensign just a bit higher, grits his teeth, crosses his fingers and takes his ship into Alicante. He doesn't like being told what he can and can't do.

The quayside is heaving with people. They are the routed, the losing side, hoping, desperately hoping, to escape Spain before the fascists come and wreak vengeance. Archibald is supposed to pick up a cargo. Just as he ignored the destroyer's commands he now ignores his fleet operator too. He knows his ship can save lives. At first the loading of the people from the quayside is reasonably ordered; passports are shown, letters of recommendation are checked, International Brigade stragglers are welcomed then it becomes the people at the head of the queue until they can simply squeeze no more people aboard. Alicante is in total blackout. Madrid has fallen to Franco's rebels this morning. The stretch of coast from Alicante to Cartagena and Almería is all that's left of Republican Spain. 

About 10.30 in the late evening of 28 March 1939 the Stanbrook casts off. There are 2,638 people on board bound for Oran in French controlled Algeria. The intended cargo of oranges and saffron left on the quayside in Alicante. As they sail away the Italian air force lays into Alicante with a will. Archie wrote in the ship's log that in his 33 years at sea he had never seen anything like it. People were everywhere on his ship: in the holds, on the deck, on the mess table, in the stairways. Low in the water, terribly overloaded the ship took some steering. The overcrowding kept the doctor busy as people fainted and puked. People crowded around the warmth of the funnel. They got to Oran the evening of the 30th but it took several weeks before the French authorities let everyone off the Stanbrook. Lots of the men were sent to Concentration camps in and ended up working on the Trans-Saharan Railway as forced labour. Many later joined the Free French Forces fighting in Africa and some of them, La Nueve, were the first allied troops to liberate Paris alongside General Leclerc.

Seven months later and there's another war. This time the SS Stanbrook, as part of the British Merchant Navy, is not a neutral vessel. Klaus Korth in command of the submarine U-57, built by the Krupp factory, has ordered the firing of a torpedo packed with 300 kilos of explosive at a small, British ship. The ship has parted in half and all the crew have gone to the bottom. Not a single survivor. The crew will never hear the minute of silence held for them in the camps in Oran.

Out for the day

I went on a bit of a trip yesterday. The title of the event translates as something like From the Vinalopó to Exile. Vinalopó is the name of our mighty local river which trickles into the sea at Santa Pola and which gives its name to the area. The theme was the end of the Spanish Civil War.

We were shown things in Petrer and Elda but the bit I liked best, apart from eating, was going down the air raid shelters in Hondón. Hondón is a very small village just 9 km from Culebrón. Not the most obvious place for an air raid shelter dug 40 metres into the ground and with space for 250 people.

So it's March 1939, right at the end of the Spanish Civil War (The result of an army rebellion in 1936 against the elected Leftist Republican Government) the Republic is in tatters. The President, Azaña, reckons the only chance is to hang on long enough for the Nazis to start the Second World War so that the French and British may stop looking the other way and come to his aid. Then Republican Barcelona falls to the Francoist troops and Azaña runs away, resigns, and never comes back.

With Azaña gone the ex Prime Minister, Negrín, takes over as President. The Republican Government has moved its headquarters to Elda which just 25kms from Culebrón. The main reason is that Elda isn't being bombed non stop though there are other reasons like decent communications and a strong manufacturing base. Meanwhile Madrid is, miraculously, still in Republican hands. It won't fall to the rebellious Francoist troops till right at the end of the war but in Madrid a Republican Army Colonel, Casado, mounts a coup. He and his pals reckon that all is lost and waiting for the French and British is a stupid plan. They want to cut a deal and save their skins. Franco doesn't talk to them. They have nothing to offer.

So it's all gone pear shaped, the elected President has run off, half your army is caught up in some Communist rebellion and it's pretty obvious that you've lost. Negrín decides the jig is up. He's in Elda. The nearest aerodrome (think of a mowed and level grassy area rather than tarmac runways) is in Hondon, or as we now seem to call it el Fondó using its Valenciano name. The big cars drive in from Elda with a famous writer and poet in one, a fiery Communist Party woman orator in another and Negrin himself in a third. They clear off in a couple of aeroplanes along with some pals. Later that night the remnants of the loyal Republican Army command meet with the left over political big wigs and the next days more planes leave taking them away - generally to Oran. Though it may not seem geographically obvious Algeria is less distance than any other safe country especially for a flimsy 1930s plane loaded to capacity.

That's where our tour ended and about three weeks after those planes left the last few Republican cities - Alicante, Cartagena and Almeria - fell.

________

If you look at the comments below someone wrote to say that there were a couple of incorrect facts in this piece. One was that Negrín was never President and the other was that Azaña wasn't holding out for an Anglo French "rescue". Have a look  at the comments section if you're interested.

A stroll around Pinoso

I've always liked cinema so, when I began to take an interest in Spain, I made an effort to see Spanish films. For years and years it seemed that every Spanish film ever made was about the Spanish Civil War. They were almost all dull and drear. I also read Hugh Thomas's book about the war and I found it hard going. Paul Preston's more recent history of the same event persuaded me that he was one of the most boring writers that has ever put pen to paper. Years later, I thought I should give him a second chance, he seemed to be well regarded by everyone else, so I read his book about Franco. I have never been tempted to try him again.

The Spanish Civil War ran from 1936 to 1939. That's a long time ago. As I mentioned in a post a few days ago there are two schools of thought amongst Spaniards about the war and more particularly about the dictatorship that resulted from it. That it should be forgotten or that it should be given a thorough airing so that it can be finally laid to rest. Unlike Britons, a little older than me, who talk incessantly about "The War", the Second World War that is, I don't think that I've ever heard a Spaniard start a conversation about the Civil War. The majority of young people know about the Civil War from their school syllabus in exactly the same way as young Britons do topics on The Blitz. Our Town Hall had obviously decided which side it was on with the second in a series of annual week long events around a Civil War theme.

The war started because a group of army officers didn't much care for the result of the 1936 General Election. They organised a coup and botched the job so that it turned into a bloody civil war. The area where we live was the last redoubt of the Republican Government and, indeed, the last tatters of the defeated Government flew out of Spain to exile from an airfield about 5 km down the road from Culebrón.

Last Sunday we went for a walk around Pinoso led by the town archivist and a chap from Alicante University. The idea was to show us sites that had been important in the Spanish Civil War. I enjoyed standing on a street corner having to imagine the scene but, to be honest, the visit could equally well have been a lecture because there was very little to see in situ. The Archivist told us that the idea came from one of the local councillors. That's the same team that brought us a journey through the town archives and a tour of the local cemetery both of which have been among my favourite events here in Pinoso.

Anyway. so we're strolling around in the bitingly cold wind. We get told about the checkpoints to control traffic in and out of the town, we hear about the Pioneers, the socialist equivalent of a movement like the Hitler Youth, we hear about a lynching (and the dispute from the participants about whether that was a true story or not), we hear about paseos and about sacking the local church and the burning of all the religious statues. Paseo by the way is usually best translated as a stroll. Here though it's the euphemistic term used to describe the last walk to the firing squad during the Civil War years. At one point Maggie checked with me, as we walked from the site of an air raid shelter towards the clock tower used as a look-out post, that Pinoso had been in the area controlled by the Republic. I think that she was having some difficulty in squaring summary firing squads with the idea of the "good guys".

Just one little snippet from the talk that struck home with me amongst all the detail of colony schools and union activity. There has been a bit of a fuss in Spain recently about removing reminders of the dictatorship enshrined in street names. Lots of the ostentatiously named streets, like Avenida del Generalissimo, changed soon after Franco's death in 1975 but, in towns and cities the length and breadth of Spain less obvious Francoist street names and symbols live on. In Pinoso there were 12 of these streets with names like Capitán Haya, a Nationalist air ace, Sánchez Mazas, a writer, responsible for the "Arriba España" slogan and others of a similar ilk. Fair enough, I thought, change the names and there you go. What was pointed out though, by the guide, was that this was part of a systematic method of obliterating older social and cultural aspects from Spanish streets and replacing them with a "Francoist" history.  It reminded me of George Orwell's 1984 hero Winston Smith writing a piece for The Times about an air ace. In reality the pilot never existed but, in a fake news sort of way, he would become important as soon as his story was in print.

How do you say Historical Memory in English?

Spain came up with a novel way to move from the dictatorship of the 40s,50s, 60s and 70s of the last century to the democracy of today. No Truth and Reconciliation Commission here. The people who make the decisions about how things are going to work just decided to forget all about it - the Pacto de olvido - the pact of forgetting. Then, in 2007, the Socialist Government came up with the Historical Memory Law - Ley de Memoria Histórica - which recognised that there were victims on both sides of the Spanish Civil War, gave rights to the victims and the descendants of victims of the war, and the subsequent Franco dictatorship, and formally condemned the Franco Regime. Now neither Pact of Forgetting nor the Historical Memory sound like good English to me but I hope that you get the idea. The first idea, the pact, is to sweep the mess under the carpet and the second, historical memory, is to get it all out in the open so you can have a fresh start.

The Spanish Partido Popular, the Conservative type party, was against the Historical Memory law. Their argument was that it wasn't good to stir it all up again. The PP was in power between 2011 and 2018 so, in a very Spanish way, the law stayed in place but nobody did very much about it. Mass graves were not opened up so no remains could be handed over to families for reburial, at least not in any systematic or wholesale manner, and simple things like renaming streets dedicated to Francoist heroes or the removal of Francoist symbols was equally half hearted. And Franco himself, or at least his mortal remains, continued at rest in the place of honour inside the gigantic monument that is the Valley of the Fallen - el Valle de los Caídos.

Last night, in Pinoso, I went to one of the events that are "remembering" the Spanish Civil War this week. The events have the snappy title of Jornadas de Memoria Histórica y Democratica de Pinoso - Days of Historical Memory and Democracy of Pinoso - which, once again, you will have to interpret in your own way as I can't think of a decent English language translation. The problem, for me, is that the words represent concepts I don't share so I don't have good language for them.

The event was the showing of a documentary about Miguel Hernández; a poet from Orihuela in Alicante. The documentary is called Las tres heridas de Miguel Hernández and it's on YouTube with subs if you want to have a look. I knew a little about the poet having been to his house a couple of times, listened to radio programmes about him and even read some of his poetry. He stuck with the legitimate government and never renounced his socialist beliefs even when he was captured and locked up after his side had lost the war. He was condemned to death but his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and he finally died of tuberculosis in a prison in Alicante aged 32.

I enjoyed the documentary. Nicely put together and easy to understand. The people who presented it talked about some of the opposition that there had been to producing the documentary and the passions that Hernández still arouses in his home town of Orihuela. The question and answer session afterwards was really interesting. There were a variety of opinions but there were two obvious strands. The same themes represented in the idea for and against the Historical Memory Law. Sleeping dogs as against washing your dirty laundry in public.

Fighting for a parking spot

Saturday morning in Pinoso – parking at a premium; nothing in Calle Lepanto, Trafalgar or Bailén. Hmm? Now there's a theme. The streets are named for battles. I did a bit of checking. Nearly 400 battles were listed as important in Spanish history with sixteen as absolutely key. With the limited space available my choice has been a little arbitrary.

Skipping chronologically over Guadalete, Covadonga, Navas de Tolosa and Ceriñola we arrive at the Battle of Otumba in 1520. This was the one where Hernán Cortés crushed the Aztec Empire and opened the way to the conquest of what is now Mexico. He did it with the help of lots of locals but let's pretend, as Spaniards often do, that Hernán, his horses and a few lads from Extremadura did it alone.

So we ignore Pavia and San Quintín and move on to Lepanto in 1571. This was a naval battle between the Turkish Ottoman Empire and an alliance of Christian powers sponsored by the Spanish King. Cervantes, the writer of Don Quixote, was there and he was wounded – fortunately in his left hand, not the one he wrote with. Lepanto was fought off the coast of Greece. The Ottomans lost which halted Turkish expansion and established Spain as a naval power.

No space for the Battles of Rocroi or Villaviviciosa but I can't miss out Almansa. After all Almansa is only fifty minutes from home. This was a battle fought in 1707 as part of the Spanish War of Succession between the French backed Bourbons and the Austrian backed Hapsburgs with Spaniards on both sides. In the battle the Duke of Berwick, the illegitimate son of James II of England serving in the French Army, beat the French Henri de Massue, leading British troops. In fact we Britons backed the losing side, the Hapsburgs, but it was a good war for us. The treaty of Utrecht, signed at the end of the war, gave us Gibraltar.

Next up is Trafalgar and unless you were asleep when they did this at school you know about Nelson taking apart a combined fleet of French and Spanish ships but dying in the process. It was fought off the coast of Cádiz in1805 and basically after Nelson's first onslaught the French ran away leaving the Spanish fleet to be smashed to smithereens. It was the end of Spanish naval power and the battle was hugely influential in the future of Europe and Spain's American possessions.

By the time that the Battle of Bailén was fought in 1809 the Spanish had joined the British against Napoleon's French in what we call the Peninsular War. This was the start of Wellington's campaigns all the way to Waterloo. Completely against the grain a Spanish Army, commanded by General Castaños, beat a French Army in direct battle. It was the first time that Napoleon's Grande Armée had been beaten. By the way it was at this time that the Spaniards invented Guerrilla warfare, attack and run. Guerrilla means little war.

No space for the battle of Ayacucho in Peru in 1824 when the Spanish lost control of mainland America or for the 1898 naval battle of Santiago de Cuba when the Spanish fleet was pulverized by the U.S Navy. The Spanish lost Cuba (and the Philippines) their last American possessions as a result.

The last battle on my list, the 1938 Battle of the Ebro was the bloodiest and longest battle of the Spanish Civil war. The Nationalist victory put paid to the Republic and paved the way for the next 37 years of dictatorial government in Spain.

When it was time to go

Just down the road from us, about 5kms away, is a small village called Hondon. In May 1938 a group of Republican soldiers turned up in the village, requisitioned the house next door to the pine tree that gave the best shade and set about building a munitions dump, a couple of machine gun nests, a lookout tower and an aerodrome. Nearly a year later the reasons became clear.

First a bit more background. On July 18th 1936 the Army rebelled against the elected Republican Government of Spain and so the Spanish Civil War began. At first it was a pretty equal contest but slowly but surely the rebels gained territory. On 30th March 1939 Alicante City fell to the rebels and a day later rebel troops entered Murcia, Cartagena and Almeria. The war was officially won, or lost, on 1st April 1939. So the area where we live was the last bit of Spain to fall to, what were by then, Franco's troops. Franco ruled, as a dictator, in Spain until November 1975.

Alicante province was loyal, right to the end, and for that reason the last headquarters of the legitimate government of the day, given the codename Posición Yuste, was in Elda/Petrer which is only about 20km from Culebrón. That must have been one possible contingency plan from the time those troops were sent to Hondon.

Elda/Petrer fell on the 29th March. At the very end there was infighting within the Republican Government as the situation became hopeless. The recently promoted Colonel Casado raised a revolt with the intention of doing a deal with Franco to end the war. In the event the Official Government fled Spain in the early morning of 5th March. Doctor Negrín the President, Dolores Ibarruri or La Pasionaria a Communist Party leader, Rafael Alberti a famous writer of the time, Enrique Lister one of the Republic's top military commanders and several others were among the group that left in two twin engined Douglas planes heading for Oran in Algeria from the aerodrome at Hondon.

I knew most of this before today. I knew about the house that had been used by Republican big wigs near the turn down towards Salinas off the Monóvar road. I knew about the flight from the aerodrome. However, it wasn't until the 85th anniversary of the birth of the Republic the other day that I realised that there were air raid shelters in Hondon. So today I went looking for them.

Whilst I was searching for information on the Internet I came across a walker's itinerary. The particular group had been to Hondon to see the shelter and then walked on to a place called Las Casas de Collado Azorín where the, one time famous, writer Azorín used to spend his summers. Azorín was born in Monóvar, another local town, and was one of several Spanish writers known as the Generation of '98 - the year in which Spain lost the last remnants of its once mighty empire. That turned out to be an interesting little spot too. I can't find out whether the hamlet takes its name from the writer or if the writer, José Augusto Trinidad Martínez Ruiz, took his pen name from the place. The latter seems more likely.

Good to know that there are still new things to be discovered so close to home.

The future of the Valley of the Fallen

This isn't about Culebrón or our life here.  I wrote it for the TIM magazine and it was published earlier this month. I just thought I'd save it here too. It's long.

El Valle de los Caídos is a huge mausoleum and basilica church carved into solid granite and topped off with an enormous cross in the Cuelgamuros Valley in the Sierra de Guadarrama, near Madrid. It was built, on the orders of Franco, between 1940 and 1959 with money from the National Lottery. The work was done by as many as 200,000 Republican prisoners of war according to some sources and as few as 2,470 according to others. The prisoners were able to gain remission on their sentences by working on the construction. Some sources suggest the workers were reasonably paid whilst others charge slave labour. The supposed number who died during the building of the the complex varies from 14 to 27,000, depending on whether the source is pro Franco or pro Republican. The monument was consecrated by Pope John XXIII in 1960 with care being taken to build a curtain wall within the basilica to ensure that not all of the space was consecrated. By this device the church was kept smaller than Saint Peter's in Rome. Over the main entrance an inscription reads "Fallen for God and Spain!"

The altar of the basilica is directly beneath the tallest cross in the World, all 150 metres of it. On one side of the altar, under a one and a half ton granite slab, lies Franco, el Caudillo, whilst on the other side is José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange, the Spanish fascist party. More than 33,832 other victims of the Spanish Civil War keep them company. At least 491 bodies were transferred there illegally, to fill up spare tomb space, from some of the more than 2,000 mass graves dotted the length and breadth of Spain. The monument is easily the largest mass grave in the country. Most of the others are much less grand - roadside ditches and shallow graves usually dug and filled in the dead of night.

When Franco finally died in 1975, after nearly 40 years in power, there was a tacit agreement amongst politicians and society in general to forget the past. No settling of old scores, no mass trials, no national blood-letting. Then in October 2007 the Zapatero Government introduced the Historical Memory Law which recognised and extended the rights of those who suffered persecution or violence because of the Civil War and the dictatorship that followed.

The law directly condemns the Francoist regime, recognises certain rights for victims on either side during and after the war, prohibits political events in the Valley of the Fallen, legislates for the removal of all Francoist symbols from public areas, provides state aid in tracing, identifying and possibly exhuming victims buried in mass graves, annuls laws and some trial court rulings carried out during the dictatorship, grants Spanish nationality to anyone who fought in the International Brigades and gives the right of return to exiles and their descendants.

This law is a bit of a problem for the Valley of the Fallen. How can this monument, built as a symbol of the victory of National Catholicism, be turned into something that doesn't glorify Franco's reign? It's a particularly thorny problem for the Benedictines who live in the Santa Cruz Abbey within the valley and who are technically responsible for the monument. Under the new law they are supposed to ensure that the monument restores the balance between victors and vanquished though they don't seem to have knuckled down to the job so far. Another difficult question is to decide what happens to Franco's body, the only person in the whole complex who isn't a casualty of war. Everyone else, down to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who was executed by firing squad in Alicante during November 1936, died a victim.

The Government's answer has been to appoint a commission to work it all out. There were similar failed attempts under the Governments of Adolfo Suárez and Felipe González. The Commission's job is to decide how to tackle the problem of the status of the monument in relation to the new law. They have already had to disappoint Republican family members, who wanted to exhume and re-bury their forebears in places far away from their executioner. Government forensic scientists found that it was impossible to determine who was who in the jumbled and deteriorated piles of bodies.

Views vary as to what the commission will finally decide but the clever money seems to be on Franco's remains being removed from the Valley maybe to rest alongside his wife. Other options include moving Primo de Rivera as well, turning the place into a non religious museum or even converting it into a monument to the victims. There was even talk of dynamiting the giant cross which some have compared to an enormous swastika.

In true Spanish style the monument was suddenly closed in November 2009 for "urgent safety work." A pragmatic if short term solution. The commission is due to report late in 2011 and it looks likely that the safety work will be completed shortly afterwards.

Sent to sleep

There was a time when every Spanish film was about the Spanish Civil War, usually about the aftermath and the rough handling of the losers by the nasty winners. Fortunately that has changed nowadays and we get a good spread plots and genres.

Most Spanish films are made with TV money and with subsidies from film funds. This means that they look a bit like those BBC funded films, quite modest in scale, with production values that betray their small screen destinations. If they have a historical theme (and lots do) they are nearly always shot in a sort of muddy brown colour and use the Spanish equivalent of thou to prove their authenticity. Obviously they are voiced in Spanish or, to be more accurate, Castilian. Actually, unless you're in one of the big cities it's nearly impossible to find a film in its original language - everything gets dubbed into Castilian. Colin Firth, King George VI or el Rey Jorge VI has a nice Madrid accent.

The Goyas are the Spanish equivalent of the Oscars. There were plenty of decent nominations this year in genre as diverse as horror, social drama, black comedy and historical. They were presented the same night as the BAFTAs and, as in the UK, one film swept the board. It was a Catalan film called Pa Negre - Black Bread. The theme was the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. One of the interesting things about it was that it was voiced in Catalan with Castilian subtitles.

We had our doubts; the Civil War- hmm? But nine Goyas; it just had to be good and with the bonus that Castilian subtitles would make it dead easy to understand. It wasn't in Catalan by the time we saw it this afternoon, dubbed just like all the rest of the foreign films. And tedious. Tedious as they come. Obviously the theme had to be grim, the film colouring sombre and everyone had to live in filthy unheated hovels. There had to be Guardia Civil with capes and tricorn hats and if there wasn't a gay character then how could it be true to life? Film making by cliché. Actually I could be wrong, I had great difficulty understanding the dialogue and I couldn't tell one raggedy haired person from the next so I slept through a good part of it. Maybe it was a cinematic milestone after all.

More on street names

Over on Life in Cartagena I published a short piece about street names. About how they are small clues to the history of the country and the people it honours.

Now that we only come here for weekends I'm not really keeping up with the local news so, just now, I was sifting through the Pinoso websites trying to catch up. On one of them there was a lot of political toing and froing reliving some of the old Francoist/Republican arguments. After a bit of digging around it seems that the reason is that the local Socialist party suggested at the last full council meeting that several street names should be changed. The street names celebrate Francoist victories and heroes of the last Spanish Civil War.

There's a recentish national law that says that all the stuff that glorifies the old dictatorship should be removed from public places - statues, street names, commemorative plaques etc. The Socialist suggestions were for names of Socialist heroes and, not surprisingly, the right of centre parties were't too taken with that idea. It now remains to be seen whether, at the next council meeting, the majority right wingers maintain their opposition to name changes or if they compromise on safe anodyne names.

The photo is of Rafael Sánchez Mazas. As well as having a street named after him in Pinoso he was a writer and thinker associated with the formation of the Falange party in 1933 along with José Antonio Primo de Rivera. He was a minister in Franco's Government in 1939 and 1940 and he wrote some of the lyrics for the Fascist anthem of the time.

New for old

In June 2008 I mentioned this house as being an important HQ for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War.

Someone has been doing some work on it. With its new yellow finish it is quite difficult to tell that the house has any history at all - it looks nearly new.

I've just read that the last Republican Prime Minister, Negrin, fled Spain as the Republican forces admitted defeat in March 1939. Negrin left on 6 March and the last Republican cities, amongst them Cartagena, fell on 30 March. His departure airfield was the one next to this house.