It is 80 years since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict which, according to George Orwell, provided “a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914-18”. Much has indeed been written on the war by historians, writers and poets, but there has been little, if any, mention of the part that the Royal English College at Valladolid played in the conflict.
In the early 1930s, with political instability and anti-clerical feeling rife in Spain, the college was in the thick of things. There were several attempts to burn it down. From the onset, Valladolid was under Nationalist control and it managed to escape many of the atrocities committed in areas controlled by the Republican government. It was reported, for example, that in Asturias, a Republican controlled area, clerics were crucified on church doors and hung up on hooks in butchers’ shops under signs reading “Aquí se vende carne de cura” (“Priest meat for sale”). It is estimated that more than 7,000 priests, monks and nuns died in the conflict.
The students who remained in Spain moved out of Valladolid to the college’s country house. In a letter to the rector back in Valladolid, students and staff reported seeing “one large bus of monarchists” passing close to the country house and then, later, the “bodies of six communists were found piled in a heap” further along the road. Some students fishing in the nearby River Duero saw a corpse floating by which was reported to be that of a local communist.
In spite of such incidents the rector reported that “there is complete calm here”. Later in the war the Nationalist forces took up the rector’s offer of using the country house as a hospital and renamed it the Hospital Generalissimo Franco.
Some students from the college left to join the Spanish Foreign Legion and fight for General Franco. There are several letters from them in the college archive which tell of their experiences. One student, Paddy Dalton, the first to join up, was killed on the Castellon front on July 17, 1938, aged 23.
In an essay looking back on the war, Orwell wrote that “the only propaganda open to the fascists was to represent themselves as Christian patriots saving Spain from a Russian dictatorship”. The English secular and Catholic press certainly played their part in this, and Orwell points his finger rather accusingly at two newspapers in particular, the Daily Mail and the Catholic Herald, accusing them of publishing scaremongering accounts of Republican soldiers raping nuns.
On many occasions people in England referred to the Royal English College for confirmation or denial of recent press reports. The rector at the time, Mgr Edwin Henson, a priest of the Diocese of Nottingham, played an important role by informing – some would say, shaping – English Catholic views of the conflict. He did this by means of the old boy network of past students who were now priests in the dioceses of England and Wales. Mgr Henson supplied first-hand accounts of what was happening in Spain for the editors of the Catholic press.
Mgr Henson was convinced that the Nationalist cause had justice and God on its side: “It is clear that the conflict here is between God and the Devil … the movement is going to succeed,” he wrote. “It is definitely a religious war. All the military and armed civilians wear religious emblems, crucifixes, scapulars, etc.”
In the years that followed Mgr Henson ensured that this view of the Francoist forces pitted against the Devil’s legions became the dominant view among English Catholics, whereas the prevailing view had been, among many of his compatriots, to support the Republican side. At a reunion of the old boys’ society in London in 1937, the priests were so moved by reports filtering through Mgr Henson about how beneficial it was now to Valladolid and to the college under Nationalist control that an effusive telegram was sent to general Franco. It read: “El Generalissimo Franco, Salamanca. 50 sacerdotes ingleses, antiguous alumnus de Valladolid reunidos en Londres, le saludan. ¡Arriba España!”
They received the following reply: “Gentlemen, in the name of His Excellency the Head of State and Generalissimo of the National Armies, I am very pleased to acknowledge receipt of the enthusiastic congratulations you have sent on the occasion of the magnificent event which the capture of Bilbao has been for the cause.”
Towards the end of the conflict Mgr Henson also made a contribution to the war effort as the English announcer for Radio Valladolid. During World War II he continued this voluntary work as a radio broadcaster. The British Embassy in Madrid was also keen to have him on board. He supplied information on the feelings of Spaniards in regard to the war. He also informed the BBC on the tone of their reports and corrected inaccuracies in the pronunciation of Spanish names and phrases.
His unstinting service to Spain was officially recognised in 1959 when Franco awarded him the Encomienda de la Orden de Isabel la Católica. After his death, a former parishioner from his days in the Diocese of Nottingham wrote: “He had more moral courage than any man I have ever met.”
Even after 80 years of relative peace and a so-called “pact of forgetting” about the terrible deeds committed by both sides, deep divisions inevitably resurface. I recall meeting an old Spanish woman in Granada some years ago still angry that Franco had “murdered” the poet Federico García Lorca. And the animosity of El Clásico – the match between Real Madrid, a team supported by Franco himself, and FC Barcelona, whose former president Josep Sunyol was executed without trial by Francoist supporters, still carries with it, in some minds, enmity and hatred harboured since those bitter and terrible days of the Spanish Civil War.
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