We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  Kitty was not a member of the American Communist Party, but she belonged to the League Against War and Fascism. She threw herself into the work of propagating the Republican cause. She worked on a volunteer basis for the improvised propaganda department of the Catalan Generalitat. Aware that the relatively small amount of news about Catalonia that reached the United States was heavily weighted to give an impression of anarchist-inspired chaos and disorder, she persuaded the recently created Catalan Commissariat for Propaganda to send photographs regularly to American left-wing organs such as Fight, the New Masses and the official Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. Set up on 3 October 1936 under the direction of Jaume Miravitlles, a close friend of the President Lluís Companys, the Commissariat was the first state organism in the Republican zone to exercise some centralized control over the media. What she wrote to Joe North, when he was still in New York as the editor of the Daily Worker, informing him of this and asking for copies of the paper to be sent to the Generalitat, to herself and to the PSUC, is revealing of both of her efforts and her anxiety for recognition: ‘A copy regularly to the CP headquarters here would be much appreciated. They were very pleased when we arranged for them to receive the English Worker regularly.’ Rather coyly, she added: ‘It would do me no harm if you mentioned the fact that I suggested that you send it.’ She went on to explain that, ‘I am working very closely here with Al Edwards and Tom Wintringham. They are both working very hard at other things so that I am doing most of the dirty work of getting out propaganda and also articles for the bourgeois press.’37

  Thus, without the slightest doubt of her political reliability, Tom was delighted to let her act as a kind of secretary and messenger, something that would soon get both of them into serious trouble. Indeed, their relationship and her activities on his behalf would lead to her being one of the few correspondents ever arrested in, and then expelled from, the Republican zone. Kitty was soon writing on a regular basis, sending the articles to a friend in New York, the playwright Leslie Reade, in the hope that he could place them for her. When he could not find somewhere that would pay a fee, he was empowered to give them to left-wing papers such as Fight, the New Masses or the Daily Worker. She also wrote articles with Tom’s help, publishing them under her own name in the British press and under his name in the British Daily Worker.38 With his help, she got permission to tour the Aragón front in October and to visit the International Brigade hospital at Grañén in Huesca, where she worked briefly as a nurse. Equally, she was also writing her own lively and colourful articles for the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Herald, which drew on her own good relations with various left-wing groups in Catalonia – something that would later be held against her.39 Indeed, it was an indication of how the relationship would be politically damaging to him that, shortly after he met Kitty, Tom was the object of a hostile report by two erstwhile friends, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland. They wrote to CPGB headquarters: ‘He is largely occupied with personal affairs and side issues of journalism.’40

  This impression was confirmed in early November 1936. Kitty had gone to London in the hope of picking up some commissions for newspaper articles. She was successful in that the Manchester Guardian agreed for her to stand in for the more usual correspondent from Barcelona, her friend, Elizabeth Deeble. However, Tom had taken advantage of her journey to send various messages to London. These included one that involved her going to CPGB headquarters in King Street to try to persuade the Secretary General, Harry Pollitt, to raise more volunteers for Spain. Kitty was a less than prudent choice as an emissary given that, not only was Wintringham married to a respectably Marxist wife, Elizabeth, but he also had a lover in London with whom he had had a child. She, Millie, was another (married) party functionary who happened to have worked at King Street and to be a friend of Harry Pollitt. Matters were confused by the fact that, although they never married, Millie had changed her name to Wintringham by deed poll.

  In this context, the arrival of the fragrant, uninhibited and voluble Kitty at the party offices in King Street could only have been shocking. Dr Kenneth Sinclair Loutit, who led the British Medical Unit, recalled later that: ‘It was before drip-dry cottons but Kitty, though often dusty, always looked pretty good and smelt nice.’ Kitty,

  who really wanted to do a job for Tom and who was at that time head over heels in love with her mystery man, rushed back to London and arrived at Victoria Station dirty and dusty. She went straight to Brown’s Hotel, had a bath, put on her last approximately clean dress, walked around the block to Elizabeth Arden, had her hair done, bought herself a practical reversible autumn suit at Wetheralls, went back to Browns to pick up her brief case, was in a cab at CPGB H/Q King Street by 1100 hours. She bounced in as fresh as the dawn, looking as bright as a new dollar and bringing an unaccustomed waft of Elizabeth Arden fragrance through the dusty entrance.

  Harry Pollitt was not there, but one of the other prudish comrades who saw her remarked later that she arrived ‘smelling like a whorehouse and dressed like for the races’. Enthusing about what she had seen in Barcelona and the Aragón front, where she had mixed with anarchists and the POUM, she was immediately suspected of being ‘a bourgeois tart’ with Trotskyist tendencies. When she hectored a clearly uninterested Pollitt about the need for more volunteers, he responded sharply by accusing Wintringham of cowardice and suggested that she tell him to set an example by ‘dying like Byron’.41

  Wintringham’s womanizing had already undermined his position within the CPGB. His sister Margaret wrote to Kitty pointing out that comrades in Spain had referred to ‘Tom and his affairs rather as a joke’ and were the occasion of sneers against him.42 The highly influential British Communist Ralph Bates himself wrote to Pollitt in December 1936 to complain that:

  everyone here was very disappointed with Comrade Wintringham. He showed levity in taking a non-Party woman, in whom neither the PSUC nor the CPGB comrades have any confidence, to the Aragon front. We understand this person was entrusted with verbal messages to the Party in London. We are asked to send messages to Wintringham through this person rather than the Party headquarters here. The Party has punished members for far less serious examples of levity than this.43

  Pollitt never relinquished his conviction that Kitty was a spy. When Wintringham asked him in 1937 why he thought that she was a spy, Pollitt replied: ‘I can smell ’em’ and recommended that Tom transfer his activities to ‘these Spanish dames’.44

  On her return from England in the second week of November, Kitty got a job broadcasting to the USA for the Catalan Communist Party’s (PSUC) English-language service in Barcelona.45 She also managed to become a member of the Socialist Union, the Unión General de Trabajadores, and made contact with the Socialist newspaper Verdad, which later became Adelante. As a result, she found it much easier to get information for her articles. She worked hard on behalf of Luis Rubio Hidalgo to get the Federated Press in New York to take news items from the Republican press service, even to the extent of trying to raise the money to pay for the exorbitantly expensive international cables. She wrote to Wintringham in December: ‘have just heard of a hot story, have I been getting them lately, whoops, and I’m the darling of the censorship department’. Her connections with Tom Wintringham and Hugh Slater saw her get to Madrid in December 1936 in a car provided by the Socialist newspaper Claridad. She used the trip to get material for a story on how the International Brigades passed Christmas and New Year. It was so cold that her fingers stuck to her typewriter keys.46

  After she returned to Valencia, there took place an incident on 21 January 1937 which provided the ammunition for those in the party who were outraged by Tom’s relationship with Kitty. The Colt machine-guns used by the British battalion continually jammed and Tom asked Kitty to talk to two gunnery experts in Valencia about how to resolve the problem. Having got the information requested, she was unable to speak to Tom because the telephones were not functioning. Accordingly, the party authorities in Vale
ncia suggested that she deliver it in person to the British battalion headquarters at Madrigueras, north of Albacete. She set off somewhat mischievously, knowing that journalists who were not Communist Party members were not welcome. Nevertheless, amused to have this vivacious and pretty girl in his office, Wilfred McCartney, the British commander, ‘as a joke or as a compliment devised and signed a battalion order’ naming her ‘Colt machine-gun instructor’ to the battalion and inviting her to stay for a few days. On the day after her departure, her room-mate Kate Mangan was being questioned by members of the security services as to her whereabouts. Her room was searched and private papers taken away. A mysterious individual (a German communist, Rudolf Selke) informed Kate that Kitty was about to be expelled from Spain.47

  Unbeknownst to Kate, in the middle of her second night at Madrigueras, Kitty was awoken in the room of her pension by McCartney, who told her that two men had come to arrest her and take her to Albacete. He demanded that she return the paper with the battalion order. In her own later account, she referred to the two men who arrested her in Madrigueras as ‘Tweedledee and Tweedledum’:

  Two diminutive men, who looked exactly alike, in large overcoats and clumsy caps with visors and earflaps which buttoned back over the crown. The caps they removed occasionally but never the coats. One was Polish, the other Hungarian. Tweedledee spoke French and German and was friendly. Tweedledum also spoke some English and was convinced I was a dangerous siren.

  At Albacete, she was interrogated by the Comintern’s thuggish controller of the International Brigades, André Marty: ‘Behind a roll-top desk sat an old man with a first class walrus moustache. He had pulled a coat on hastily over his pajamas. No wonder he was sleepy and irritable. He reminded me of a petty French bureaucrat.’ Marty was more than irritable, he was a paranoid butcher. He threw all her Spanish papers back at her, including her UGT membership card.48 According to Tom’s later account to Victor Gollancz, this was because he ‘considered the Spaniards a backward race unable to judge a foreigner politically’. Marty ‘had the French belief that women travelling without their husbands (his own wife was with him) did so for no good purpose’. He charged her with going to Madrigueras without the necessary pass, entering a military establishment, being interested in the functioning of machine-guns and having visited Germany and Italy in 1933. All of this was incontrovertible proof for Marty that she was a Trotskyist spy. Despite the fact that she was an American and accredited as a correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, he was ready to have her shot right away.49

  She was questioned in French for three days and nights by relays of interrogators. One was a German crony of Marty called Bill Neumann. When her luggage had been searched, Neumann had discovered, tucked in the pages of a book, a poem that Wintringham had written her. This he assumed to be a code and proof that she was a spy, a view shared by Marty. Neumann had visited Madrigueras, and tried to get the camp cook to inform on Wintringham. He had also spoken to Wintringham himself and told him that he should ‘get rid of this young woman’ – ‘no way’, wrote an outraged Tom, in one of his ongoing efforts to clear her name, ‘to speak of a comrade who is sympathetic to the Party, who carries on our work as a journalist in the great liberal press’. When Kitty explained to one interrogator that she was in Madrigueras because of her relationship with Tom, he snapped that it was a lie and that she could not be in love with him because he had neither hair nor teeth. Her letters had been taken from him and scoured for incriminating material.50 In fact, according to Sam Russell, the brigader working in the propaganda services of the Republic, Kitty’s cheerful readiness to engage in conversation with everyone she met ensured that she was already being followed by the security services. A report, in Spanish, on the interrogation of Kitty and Neumann’s questioning of Tom, was sent to Harry Pollitt. When it was translated for him by Russell, Pollitt burst out laughing and said ‘the trouble with Tom is that he has gone through life with his cock standing straight in front of him’.51

  While she was still in custody, Tom was aware of what was happening, was not allowed to see her but did manage to write to her. His anxiety about her fate was tempered by his party discipline:

  The length and seriousness of the enquiry seems to be due to the circulation of a description of a woman spy, this description resembling yourself. I expect you’ll realise, when it’s through, that this sort of job has to be done. But oh my dear, I hate to think of you under strain at this time. You impressed Marty as ‘very, very strong, very clever, very intelligent’. Although this was said as a suspicious point against you – women journalists should be weak, stupid – I got a jump of pride from the words.52

  Kitty was released, somewhat traumatized, although with Wintringham’s help, she soon recovered her usual optimism.53

  When she reached Valencia, she joked about her experience to Kate, grinning as she said:

  Hush, I’ve been in the jug. I had great fun at first and I saw Tom quite a lot which is something. All the Internationals wear uniforms now and they wear berets. The more important they are the bigger and more overhanging the beret and they wear them in the most individual ways. I was quizzed by André Marty, the Commander-in-Chief, and his is like a pagoda.

  However, when she discovered that her room in Valencia had been searched and papers taken, she broke down and cried. Moreover, despite Tom’s letters and reports to Albacete on her behalf, she continued to be subject to police surveillance, the investigation continued and she was sentenced to be expelled from Spain. Oddly, either because of bureaucratic inefficiency or because of her status as a foreign correspondent, the order was not implemented until July 1937.54

  It was just as well that the order of expulsion did not reach Kitty. As a result of a shooting accident on 6 February 1937, McCartney was replaced as commander of the British battalion by Tom Wintringham. One week later, during the battle of Jarama, Tom was wounded in the leg. Kitty raced to Wintringham’s bedside. She found him delirious with a raging fever. When no one in the International Brigades showed any interest, she went to the office of Largo Caballero and, with the help of two journalist friends, the American Griffin Barry and the English dilettante Basil Murray, browbeat his secretary into calling a specialist, Negrín’s close friend, Dr Rafael Méndez, who diagnosed typhoid. Meanwhile, Tom’s family had mounted pressure for the Spanish Medical Aid Committee to send out a nurse, the redoubtable Patience Darton, who, together with Kitty, certainly saved his life. With the help of Dr Méndez, Kitty managed to get Tom transferred to a private room in the Hospital Militar Pasionaria in Valencia, where Patience realized that he was also suffering from septicaemia, which she resolved with some improvised surgery. Kitty also managed to arrange for Tom to be seen by Dr Norman Bethune, the distinguished Canadian doctor whom she had interviewed about his experiences during the retreat from Málaga. Thereafter, she nursed him until he was fit to return to his unit. Their mutual friends considered that she had ‘kept him here on earth by sheer force of will and work’.55 At some point in April, Hemingway, accompanied by Martha Gellhorn, visited Tom in hospital. Since Kitty rarely left Tom’s bedside, it may be supposed that she was present and was thus able to renew her acquaintanceship with Martha, her old classmate from Bryn Mawr, the New England women’s college.56

  In Valencia to be near the hospital, Kitty had strengthened her friendship with Kate Mangan, who had moved there in late 1936, although there was some slight tension between them over Tom’s treatment. Griffin Barry and Basil Murray had tried to arrange with the British Embassy for Tom to be repatriated on a naval hospital ship. Kitty opposed this because she knew that, if Tom were conscious, he would refuse to go, but also because she knew that the very request to the British authorities would cause him problems with the Communist Party leadership. In a report that she wrote to Peter Kerrigan, Kitty wrote that, as a result of her opposition to the idea, ‘Kate Mangan, member of the Spanish party, accused me of heartlessness, saying that if Comrade Wintringham was not put on the h
ospital ship he would surely die’. In the event, the British Embassy refused, but the incident caused such subsequent embarrassment for Tom that Kitty felt obliged to write the report.57 Having suspended her journalistic work while she was caring for Tom, Kitty was just getting herself re-established as a correspondent when she went on 2 July to the Valencia authorities to get a pass to go to Madrid. When her records were checked, it was discovered that there was an order, dated January 1937, for her expulsion from Spain. Devastated to have to leave the Spanish cause to which she was so devoted, and still shocked, she wrote to Tom that ‘it hasn’t spoiled either my love for you nor Spain – only a deep hatred of the stupidities, cruelties and bureaucracy in life’.58

  Kitty’s frustration never degenerated into bitterness. Had she been of a mind to take some sort of revenge or merely profit from her experience, she would have had no trouble selling her story to a press hungry for anti-Communist stories in both Britain and the United States. As Tom later explained to the publisher Victor Gollancz:

  Journalists when arrested or expelled from some country usually find the story of their experiences worth printing. Kitty did not wish to give any publicity to her experiences, thinking anti-Fascism more important than any personal grievance. And until the outbreak of the present war we both ignored the political and personal slander which occasionally came our way, spread by the comrades; there was still some hope of a Popular Front in this country and these comrades were an essential factor in the movement towards that.

  In retrospect, however, he concluded sadly that ‘the decision made by Harry Pollitt and others to treat Kitty as a Fascist spy, to refuse any enquiry into her work in America or Spain, and to exclude me from the C.P. because I would not obey the order to leave the woman I was going to marry – these things had political roots as well as personal’. What he meant was that the sectarianism of the British Communist leadership prevented them from seeing the Popular Front as anything more than a short-term tactic, their inability ‘to believe in the Popular Front as a real and human thing’.59