We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  As the rebel columns moving from the south came ever nearer to Madrid, the problems of the censorship machinery were merely part of the difficulties faced by the Republican government. As retreating militia units streamed back towards the capital, it would have been impossible to keep a blanket on news of what seemed like an impending defeat. Correspondents would drive south towards Toledo and in the small towns and villages to the south of the capital see, and indeed talk with, the demoralized Republican militiamen. The horror stories of the advancing columns of fierce foreign legionaries and Moorish mercenaries and the German and Italian aircraft which covered them could hardly be kept out of the press. Nevertheless, Rubio did his best. Louis Fischer was appalled when at dinner on 10 October, Madrid’s longest-serving correspondent, Henry Buckley who reported for the Daily Telegraph and the Observer, told him that Rubio had commented blithely ‘Wait six days. The tide will turn.’ Fischer noted: ‘The same story – they expect outside aid. They should also help themselves by organizing, introducing some discipline and generating a little energy.’12 Rubio’s optimism rang all the more false in the light of cases of correspondents being captured, imprisoned and mistreated by the rebels, as had happened with Dennis Weaver and Hank Gorrell. Indeed, behind the mask of optimism, the Republican government was so sure that Madrid would fall that arrangements would be made for its evacuation to Valencia. This would not happen until 6 November, when the city was to find itself entrusted to a rapidly improvised Defence Junta, a move that, for a time at least, would leave the machinery of press censorship in chaos.

  In the weeks before the rebel forces had reached the outskirts of Madrid, some journalists stayed at the Hotel Florida, lower down the Gran Vía from the Telefónica. On the corner of the Plaza de Callao, the Florida was much nearer the front and would become a visible target. Before the siege, there had been some wild nights at the Florida. Frequented by prostitutes, the hotel housed young aviators, journalists and a bizarre mixture of arms dealers and spies. The pilots sported large knives and even larger revolvers. Once the prostitutes began to sidle in at siesta time after lunch, the noise and scandal would intensify until, in the early hours of the morning, there would be drunken rows and people running shouting into the corridors. The frenzied merrymaking did not survive the worst of the siege. Once the rebel columns arrived and the hotel became a prominent artillery target, correspondents began to drift away from the Florida and then avoided it altogether.13 During the worst days of the assault by Franco’s forces throughout November 1936, many of the British and American newspapermen slept at their respective embassies. Some journalists lived in the Hotel Gran Vía, which was on the other side of the street opposite the Telefónica. Later, when the heat of the siege had cooled and the rebel attack blunted, correspondents started to use the Florida again and the revels recommenced.

  In the Republican zone in general, but particularly in the besieged capital, the greatest hazards were bombing raids and material shortages. In the words of Lester Ziffren, ‘For the first time in newspaper history, journalists felt the insecurity and chills which come to residents of a besieged city, ruthlessly torn to pieces day and night by relentless cannonading and bombing.’14 Since coal from the Asturias mines could not reach Madrid, there was almost no heat or hot water in the hotels. The Madrileños took to eating dinner at 7.30 or 8 p.m., ‘since bed was about the only warm place in any home, most residents were there by 9’. The young English journalist Kate Mangan wrote: ‘The cold got into my bones. Nowhere was there any heating and, though I gave up washing and went to bed in most of my clothes, I was never warm and ached and shivered at night so that I could not sleep.’ When her friend, the American reporter Kitty Bowler, visited Madrid in December 1936, it was so cold that her fingers stuck to the keys on her typewriter.15

  Few restaurants were open for business and those that were had little to offer. Most foreign journalists ate in the grill in the basement of the Hotel Gran Vía. Run by the government, the restaurant was one of the few open in Madrid and its clientele was mainly policemen, soldiers, officials, journalists and prostitutes. Lester Ziffren recalled: ‘We ate in our overcoats because there was no heat, and the meals consisted almost daily of beans, lentils, cauliflower, pickled sardines of unknown age, potatoes, cakes and fruit.’16 As early as 28 September 1936, Louis Fischer, who had arrived to report for The Nation of New York, noted in his diary: ‘I tried to eat in the Hotel Gran Vía this evening. They had practically nothing I wanted. Finally, the waiter said sourly: “Look at this menu. No meat, no chicken, no fish, no butter.” That was true but much depends on the resourcefulness of the manager.’17 Increasingly, correspondents were expected to forage for their own supplies. When he arrived in Madrid in November, having been expelled from the Nationalist zone in September, the Daily Express correspondent, Sefton Delmer, brought in food from France. ‘Huge, burly, cosmopolitan, of Irish-Australian blood and born in Berlin’, Delmer was a man of enormous self-confidence and ingenuity. In the midst of the siege, he took up residence, along with many others, in the British Embassy.18

  Barely a week before the government and many journalists left Madrid, the new young correspondent of the News Chronicle, the Oxford-educated New Zealander Geoffrey Cox, arrived in Madrid. He was chosen because his paper did not want to risk losing a more celebrated reporter when the city fell. After discussing this immensely dangerous assignment with his wife, he decided that he had to go. The next day, 28 October, he flew to Paris, where he got the necessary authorization from the Spanish Embassy. While in the French capital, Cox also met one of the best-informed of all the correspondents who covered the Spanish war, Jay Allen of the Chicago Daily Tribune. Allen surprised him by predicting that Madrid would hold out. From Paris, Cox took the overnight train to Toulouse, where he took the next morning’s Air France flight over the Pyrenees to Barcelona airport. There militiamen taught him the essential skill of drinking wine from the spout of a glass porrón. The next stage of the journey took him to Alicante. The long wait at the airfield there preyed on his nerves and he began to think to himself: ‘It’s quite extraordinary, what the hell am I doing here…a New Zealander in the worst bloody place? I’m sorry to say, had someone come along and said “Look, this isn’t worth the bloody trouble. C’mon, you’d better board the helicopter and come back with me”, I’d have been sorely tempted to do it, but as it was there was no escape thank God.’ The sense of dread was livened only by the adrenalin flow on a flight to Madrid barely a few hundred feet above the hills. The only defence against possible attack by German or Italian aircraft came from a militiaman stationed by the open door with a light machine-gun.19

  Despite the hair-rising circumstances of the flight, Cox arrived safely in Madrid on the evening of 29 October. He headed for the Hotel Gran Vía. At this stage of the battle for the capital, few correspondents went to the Hotel Florida. As Cox was checking in, a small, kindly, sandy-haired Englishman shook his hand and introduced himself as Jan Yindrich, one of the Madrid correspondents of the United Press. Yindrich took him over to the censorship office in the Telefónica and showed him the ropes. Cox quickly got to know that area to the south of Madrid into which Franco’s troops were advancing. He was surprised by the freedom granted to correspondents: ‘We were free to go where we would – or we dared.’ Contrary to what happened in the rebel zone, there was no supervision by army officers obliging newspapermen to go only to approved areas. Once a correspondent was issued with a pass to visit the front and provided with a car and driver by the Ministry of War, he could go wherever he liked. What he wrote and tried to transmit was, however, subject to censorship. The consequence of such freedom of movement was that, like Gorrell and Weaver, correspondents ran the risk of mistakenly entering the other zone. This happened once to Cox when travelling with the Swedish correspondent, Barbro Alving, a stocky young blonde, who signed her articles ‘Bang’. At a village south of the capital, they narrowly escaped capture by a convoy of Moorish troops.20

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bsp; Cox always felt that his mentor in Madrid had been William Forrest, at the time working for the Daily Express, ‘a small open-faced Glaswegian, with a quiet, wry manner’. Cox admired Forrest’s ability to give colour to a story by the deft inclusion of a picturesque detail. He gave, as an example, the despatch that Willie began with the words: ‘I took a two-penny tramride to the front this afternoon.’ ‘Tom’ Delmer also admired Forrest, describing him as a ‘shrewd little Scotsman, who had won everyone’s respect for the cool-headedness with which, come airraids, come bombs, come murders, come Franco’s Moors, he could be counted on to get on the telephone every evening to dictate a graphic report on the ordeal of Madrid and its one and a half million citizens’. Forrest had previously been a sub-editor but had managed to persuade the editor of his newspaper that, as a member of the Communist Party, he would get access to places where other reporters would be excluded. This was the case, yet his reporting was notable for its objectivity. In any case, he would leave the Communist Party in 1939 in protest against the Soviet invasions of Poland and Finland.21

  Despite the presence of some of the world’s best newspapermen in Spain, many of whom later wrote memoirs, the most graphic record of the experience of correspondents during the siege of Madrid would come from the pen of a Spaniard, the Socialist Arturo Barea. In early September 1936, a few days after Largo Caballero had formed his government, Barea had been offered a job at the press office through a Communist named Velilla who worked at the ministry. Barea was a quietly modest man, deeply thoughtful and entirely committed to the cause of the Spanish Republic. At the press office, he had to work with Rubio Hidalgo, whom he quickly came to see as a self-regarding opportunist. Barea worked at night in the Telefónica censoring press dispatches. Censorship may have been relaxed somewhat under Rubio, but Barea still found it to be too strict and aimed largely at the elimination of the slightest suggestion of anything other than a Republican victory. Although Franco’s columns were coming inexorably nearer, newspaper reports were allowed only to talk of them being halted. Barea rightly regarded it as ‘clumsy and futile’.22 Indeed, the censorship was relatively easily circumvented by British, American and French journalists making creative use of slang. H. Edward Knoblaugh later boasted that ‘By telling London that “the big shots were getting ready to take a run-out powder”, I was able to scoop the other correspondents on the fact that the government was preparing to flee to Valencia.’ One supercilious French journalist of the Petit Parisien tried so many tricks that, utterly exasperated, the normally mild-mannered Barea threatened to have him arrested.23 Later on in the war, Herbert Matthews would evade the censorship by the even simpler device of having the Paris bureau of the New York Times telephone him at a time when the Spanish censor was having dinner. When Franco’s forces split Republican Spain in two in mid-April 1938, the government tried to delay the news getting out. The censorship cut out sections of Vincent Sheean’s report so, when he read it over the telephone to the Paris office of the New York Herald Tribune, he said ‘censored’ each time he reached a part that had been pencilled out. The story that appeared ‘bristled with that ominous word in italics, and consequently looked fully as disastrous for the Republic as the events had actually been’.24

  As the Francoist columns neared Madrid, its streets strewn with rubble and thronged with starving refugees, work in the Telefónica became more nightmarish. Bombing raids and artillery pounding were constant. When Barea appeared for work on the evening of 6 November, the crackle of rifle fire could be heard nearby. When he went to Rubio Hidalgo’s office, papers were burning in the fireplace. With an urbanity bordering on satisfaction, Rubio told him that the government was leaving for Valencia. Declaring that the fall of the capital was inevitable, a white-faced Rubio gave Barea two months’ wages and ordered him to close down the censorship apparatus, burn the remaining papers and save his own skin. Barea ignored Rubio’s instructions and saved some important photographs of children killed in rebel bombing raids. He then worked as normal that night, preventing an American journalist from cabling that Madrid had already fallen.25

  Certainly, virtually all of the foreign correspondents were entirely convinced that Madrid was about to fall. At a dinner at the beginning of November, nineteen of them had set up a sweepstake on the date that the rebels would enter the city. Eighteen of them chose dates within the following five weeks and only Jan Yindrich, just to be different, placed his bet on ‘never’.26 Rubio Hidalgo was only too happy to leave, offering William Forrest a seat in his escape car and telling him: ‘if you come with me you will be the only British correspondent to get out of Madrid with the story. Have no fear of missing anything. The others will be caught here by the Fascists and will have no means of transportation or communications. But in any case, there will be no telephone calls to London and Paris after the government leaves tonight.’ In fact, Forrest needed to get to Valencia because he wanted to return to England to campaign on behalf of the Republic. He was planning to resign from the Daily Express, so he accepted Rubio’s offer. He was soon replaced in Madrid by Sefton Delmer. On arrival in Valencia, according to Delmer, ‘Rubio, who had a talent for such things, quickly found himself a delightful old eighteenth-century palacio. And there, amid tapestries and brocades, he set himself up in a new and imposing Press and Public Relations Office.’27 In fact, the tapestries were faded and the palace dilapidated. When, much later, in early December, Barea was summoned to Valencia, he found the palace to be as shabby as it was sumptuous, a veritable warren of small rooms overflowing with typewriters, rubber stamps and stacks of paper.28

  Rubio also offered Geoffrey Cox a place in one of the cars leaving for Valencia, after ostentatiously showing him the flat automatic pistol that he carried in his elegant suit. Standing on the pavement outside the Hotel Gran Vía, the young New Zealander pondered his dilemma: ‘I could validly argue that my work could now be better done from Valencia, that even if I witnessed the fall of the city Franco’s censors would never allow me to send out the story, that I might find myself for several weeks in a Franco gaol. But I opted to stay. I did so less from a journalistic desire to cover the big story than from the feeling that history was about to be made, and I had the chance to witness it.’ It was to be a momentous decision, since he found himself one of only three British journalists in the capital to cover Franco’s attack. Out of his experiences would come some of the most important journalism on the siege of Madrid and one of the most enduring books on the Spanish Civil War. Later that afternoon, with the immensely knowledgeable Henry Buckley, an old hand who had been in Madrid since 1930, Cox walked down the Toledo road towards the rebel advance. They were surprised by the ferocity of the resistance that they witnessed and returned to the centre to sleep in the British Embassy, beginning to think the impossible, that maybe Madrid could hold out.29

  On 7 November, with no censorship in Madrid, some correspondents, trying to get a scoop, had transmitted ‘news’ of the fall of the capital. In the case of those who were accompanying the rebel troops, the articles were especially imaginative. The most inventive was that of Hubert Renfro Knickerbocker, the chief foreign correspondent of the Hearst newspaper chain. ‘Red’ Knickerbocker, as he was known because of his flaming hair, was famous all over Europe. It was said that when he entered the lobby of a great hotel in Vienna, the manager greeted him with the words ‘Mr Knickerbocker, welcome. Are things really so bad?’ Now, he presented the apocryphal news of the ‘fall of Madrid’ with some verisimilitude, describing the triumphal march of the rebels into the city, roared on by cheering crowds and followed by a joyfully yapping little dog.30 Somewhat more restrained was the equally famous English veteran, Harold Cardozo, who was accompanying the Francoist columns for the Daily Mail. His assistant, Frances Davis, recalled the great man writing a report on the fall of Madrid with blanks for the details to be filled in at a later date.31 Cardozo himself later confessed:

  There flashed through the world the news that the Gran Vía and the gr
eat Telephone skyscraper were in the hands of Varela’s troops who controlled the whole southern sector as far as the War Ministry. I must confess that I was confident of rapid victory and thought that the Nationalist advance had gone much farther than it really had. Later, when the disillusionment had somewhat faded, my colleague Paul Bewsher drew for our amusement a map of Madrid showing the points to which various over-sanguine correspondents had made the Nationalist troops advance. We were all to blame, though the lack of really reliable information and the feverish anxiety of the hour were valid excuses.32

  Certainly, the news desks in Britain and America were taking it for granted that Madrid would fall. On the evening of 7 November, Henry Buckley telephoned a London Sunday newspaper and reported that the centre of Madrid was quiet and that Franco’s troops were attacking the suburbs on the far side of the river Manzanares. The news editor at the other end of the line refused to believe him, because he had received so many other reports that the rebels were now inside Madrid. Buckley then received a call from a colleague in Paris who warned him that the Francoists were likely to shoot any journalists found in Madrid. A goodly number of correspondents had already left but, inspired by the sight of ordinary citizens going out to fight, Buckley and Cox had decided to stay on. As a result, Cox was able to secure the scoop of announcing to the world the arrival in Madrid of what he called ‘the International Column of Anti-Fascists’.33