by Jimmy Burns
In May 1939, news had reached Burns from Madrid of two public displays of ceremony that convinced him that he might be well qualified, because of his knowledge of Spanish politics, range of contacts, and Catholicism, to monitor Franco’s New Spain. The first was Franco’s triumphant state entry into Madrid, and a sixteen-mile parade along the capital’s main avenue by 200,000 troops that followed it. Near the front of the parade was a battalion of Italian black-shirted Arditi, their daggers raised in a Roman salute. The rear was brought up by General Wolfram von Richthofen and his Condor Legion. In between marched Moorish mercenaries, the Spanish Foreign Legion, members of the neo-fascist Falange party, Navarese carrying huge crucifixes, and regular Spanish troops, goose-stepping. Above, in the clear blue mountain sky, aircraft circled and drew Franco’s name in smoke. The second took place next day when there was a solemn Te Deum ceremony of thanksgiving at the main military basilica of Santa Bárbara, where Franco led prayers in thanks for his victory and presented the Primate of all Spain, Cardinal Goma, with a silver and gold sword specially crafted in Toledo for the occasion.
Through the prism of the secular left, the two ceremonies confirmed Franco as Europe’s new dictator, a relic of Spain’s repressive and unenlightened imperial past transformed into an ally of the new fascism, threatening what peace there was left in the world. But as he sat reading the reverential Catholic media reports in his publishing office near St Paul’s, Burns was not alone in seeing the ceremonies instead as symbolic of an opportunity unfolding.
Burns was aware of the debt Franco owed Germany and Italy for the help given during the Spanish Civil War, but he saw Franco as an authoritarian ruler imbued with an almost mystical sense of national identity whose Catholic faith and pride in Spain’s past imperialist history would resist full submission to the pagan ideologues of the Third Reich, just as it had effectively blocked the plans of the Russian Comintern to extend its influence south of the Pyrenees. Burns believed that the more Catholicism influenced British diplomacy, propaganda and secret intelligence the greater the likelihood that Franco would stay neutral.
In Spain few English institutions lent themselves more willingly to the concept that there was no inherent contradiction in supporting the New Spain and being a patriotic supporter of the Allied cause than the Catholic seminary of St Alban’s in Valladolid. The establishment was a curious remnant of a time when English Catholics were regarded as potential traitors to the English Crown and forced either underground or into exile. It was founded in 1589 by the Jesuit Robert Persons, under the patronage of Philip II, as a seminary for exiled Catholic clergy. The majority of priests executed in England during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I – the Catholic ‘martyrs’ – had studied at St Alban’s.
And yet, soon after war was declared in 1939, the rector, the Rt Rev Mgr Canon Edwin Henson, received a letter from the MoI asking him to become involved in the propaganda war against Germany. It was signed by Lord Perth, the Catholic peer who had overseen the recruitment of several members of his faith to the MoI. The peer, otherwise known as Sir Eric Drummond, was considered one of the great and the good in British diplomatic and political circles. During the First World War he had served as private secretary to one prime minister (Asquith) and two foreign secretaries (Grey and Balfour), before being appointed Secretary General to the League of Nations, and subsequently British ambassador to Rome.
His letter as diplomatic adviser to the MoI, drafted with Burns’s help, defined the role expected to be played by trusted friends at home and abroad. ‘It is clear that if friendship and understanding are to be established between England and Spain it must be largely through the Catholic Church … In this question of the approach to the Spanish episcopate Cardinal Hinsley feels there is no one else who possesses your special opportunities,’ Lord Perth wrote.
Hinsley, the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, was himself to play an increasingly influential role politically, becoming the first leading Catholic bishop since the Reformation to be trusted by the government in wartime as a true patriot capable of ensuring that the minority faith remained united behind the Allied cause. As for Henson, he became a trusted agent in tune with the main thrust of British government policy towards Spain. Thus, while he was happy to help out in Britain’s efforts to counter Nazi influence in Spain, he remained doggedly anti-socialist and anti-communist, and constantly denounced any attempts by the left to influence British policy against Franco.
Henson initially responded to the MoI by suggesting that Burns’s department ensure that Pope Pius XI’s letter against Nazism, Mit Brennender Sorge (With Deep Anxiety), be distributed in a good Spanish translation. Given its broader attack on fascism generally, the encyclical had been deliberately suppressed by the pro-Franco forces during the civil war when it was first published in 1937. However, the MoI had resurrected it, believing that it was more relevant to its Second World War propaganda aims than Pius XII’s first ‘encyclical’, published in 1939, Summi Pontificatus (The Function of the State in the Modern World), which, much to the disappointment of Burns and other Catholics, lacked a firm public condemnation of the Nazi onslaught.
In addition to circulating Mit Brennender Sorge, Henson also suggested the posting of an English Catholic chaplain to Madrid to counter the influence of two German Catholic priests who were suspected of working for the Abwehr. The appointment of such a priest had become an important point of principle for Henson since the last chaplain, his former vice-rector at St Alban’s, Fr A. V. Philips, had left the priesthood during the Spanish Civil War to support the Republican cause as a journalist with the News Chronicle, before being arrested by Franco’s forces. Thanks to Henson’s recommendation, the Madrid chaplaincy was handed to Fr Joseph Mulrean, a Gibraltar-based priest who had served as field chaplain of the requetés, the right-wing Carlist militias, during the civil war. His first job was to intercede on Philips’s behalf and save him from being shot by a firing squad as an alleged communist.
Henson’s links with British intelligence and propaganda grew increasingly close after Chamberlain’s declaration of war. The relationship was prompted initially by the posting to the British embassy in Madrid of a kindred spirit. This was Bernard Malley, a politically conservative Anglo-Irishman who had lived in Spain for some twenty years as a teacher and university lecturer specialising in ecclesiastical affairs. When the civil war began, Malley was based near the monastery of El Escorial, built as a retreat by Philip II in the mountains outside Madrid. He took refuge in the British embassy when the capital resisted Franco’s forces, before making his way into the Nationalist zone and joining the staff of the British agent Sir Robert Hodgson in Burgos. As soon as the British embassy was established Malley volunteered his services as an informant, adviser and general fixer, making himself an indispensable member of the team thanks to the contacts he had built up over the years.
Correspondence between Henson and Malley began in December 1939, within weeks of Burns’s appointment to the MoI. In one letter, Henson complained about the bulletins the press department at the British embassy was publishing, and which he thought chimed with the socialist idea of an international anti-fascist alliance. ‘Until England breaks definitely with the USSR, and until England definitely states what her reasons are, I am afraid the “boletines” will not do much good.’
The issue of what kind of propaganda should be encouraged in Spain and how it should be delivered became an increasingly hot topic of debate in a series of exchanges between the embassy in Madrid and Whitehall early in 1940 as Britain and the rest of Europe moved inexorably towards world war. Burns was called to a crisis meeting by his immediate superior, Denis Cowan, to be told to make ready for a joint trip to Madrid to try and sort things out.
Cowan was a former member of the Foreign Office’s consular section, who had last visited Madrid in the thick of the civil war when the capital was still in Republican hands. He had formed part of a commission led by Field Marshal Sir Philip Chetwode, a hero o
f the First World War, which Spanish officials on both sides of the divide had agreed to in order to facilitate a general exchange of prisoners. Cowan was later implicated in a plot by Colonel Segismundo Casado, a Republican officer, to wrench control of Madrid from the communists and negotiate with Franco. Just over a year later, in February 1940, Cowan’s role in helping secure safe haven in Britain for Casado and others who had fought for the Republic embroiled him in controversy as he set off by car on his journey to Madrid with Burns.
News of Cowan’s trip and of the declared nature of his mission – the reorganisation of British propaganda emanating from the Iberian Peninsula – had reached the Spanish embassy in London and prompted a string of protest letters to the Foreign Office. The Spanish ambassador, the Duke of Alba, accused Cowan of having ‘pro-Republican sympathies’. Mention was made of his involvement with Casado and with other Republican elements exiled in London, including members of the exiled Basque government.
Alba’s press attaché was Pablo Merry del Val, a contemporary of Burns’s at Stonyhurst when his father had served as ambassador in London. With a reputation as an aristocratic playboy and a member of the Falange, he had subsequently worked as one of the chief liaison officers for the foreign press during the Spanish Civil War. Del Val wrote to the Foreign Office accusing Cowan of encouraging the former priest Philips to write a series of anti-Franco articles in the News Chronicle and a pamphlet following his release from a Franco prison. Cowan was aware of the protests, but went ahead with the trip hoping that the furore would die down by the time he reached Madrid.
Burns accompanied Cowan reluctantly – the thought of separation from Ann Bowes-Lyon pained him – but he also felt politically uncomfortable with the diplomatic divide that threatened to open up between the Spanish embassy and the MoI. Burns left it to another more senior Catholic in the ministry, Alec Randall, an experienced civil servant on secondment from the Foreign Office, to try and resolve the issue. In exchanges with the Foreign Office, Randall initially defended Cowan’s reputation: ‘The Spanish ambassador is apt to consider anybody “Red” who was not out and out pro-Franco, but otherwise I believe Cowan’s relations with the Spanish embassy, particularly with the press attaché, quite friendly.’
By contrast the British ambassador in Madrid at the time, the prickly Sir Maurice Peterson, was furious that the first he heard about Cowan’s trip was when he was sent a copy of Alba’s protest. Peterson had been in post for less than a year, and knew how delicately poised Spanish neutrality was. He believed Cowan was a diplomatic liability and would ‘upset the apple cart’ and told the Foreign Office that he had formed this opinion independent of Alba’s protest. ‘The trouble is that the Spaniards, and particularly those young Spaniards who now control the press, are profoundly suspicious of him,’ the ambassador wrote.
Burns and Cowan were oblivious to the brewing diplomatic row as they crossed the Channel and motored south, through France, to Spain. As they drew further away from England, both men appeared to set aside whatever hidden suspicions they might have had of each other, and shared in a spirit of adventure, the open spaces, timelessness and the unpredictability of what lay ahead, a welcome relief from the bureaucratic drudgery and cramped conditions of work at the Ministry. ‘He was excellent company as we bowled along in a big grey Humber through unoccupied France. I had told my friends that I would be back in no time. But things happened differently,’ Burns later recalled.
By the time they reached the border, an internal Whitehall enquiry had concluded that Cowan’s visit to Spain made no diplomatic sense. ‘It is fantastic to say the least,’ said an internal Foreign Office report, ‘that the man in charge of propaganda in Spain should be persona non grata to the Spanish propaganda authorities, the Spanish embassy in London, and our own ambassador in Madrid …’
Before entering Spain, Cowan and Burns called on the British consulate in Hendaye, in south-west France, to report to London on their progress. The consul handed Cowan a sealed On His Majesty’s Service envelope marked ‘urgent’. It contained orders from the Foreign Office for Cowan to return to London and for Burns to drive on to Madrid on his own. ‘It seemed that Cowan was persona non grata with the Spanish government on account of his having served as one of the neutral observers controlling non-intervention during the Civil War,’ Burns wrote in his memoirs. ‘The non-intervention policy had been suspect with the Spanish Nationalists who were convinced that it was a one-sided affair, favouring the Republicans. I am sure that Cowan himself was innocent of duplicity but that was irrelevant. We parted with sorrow. It was sad to hear much later that he had been killed in an air raid.’
Burns picked up the Humber and drove south. The curling road through the great passes of the mountain border brought back memories of himself as a young schoolboy trekking in Belloc’s footsteps. This remained God’s landscape, beautiful and majestic to behold, the highest peaks still covered in snow, the lower valleys sprouting fresh green. Yes, Burns mused, Belloc was surely right about Spain, that on entering it through this border pass one finds a strong emotion rising in one, and most strongly does one feel ‘the contrast and the change – the interest of exploration, the appetite for the discovery of new things, and the weight of the past’. And most strongly does one feel all these things when one passes into that ‘proud, separate and reserved world’ that is Spain, ‘not by any entry commonly used, but alone, through some chance high notch of the ridge, where, not without difficulty but without peril, the mountains may be crossed and an approach made to Aragon …’
The landscape, of hills and valleys, on the way to Burgos also brought back memories, for it was along here that Burns, lovesick for Ann Bowes-Lyon, had felt the stirrings too of an unsuspected political passion and religious fervour when sharing the ambulance with Gabriel Herbert, the bright young thing turned Joan of Arc, and the general who was a Franco spy. And yet the town itself was transformed. ‘Whereas uniforms had been everywhere and much bustle and movement of men and machines, and a sense of urgency, Burgos was now, bereft – like a woman with nothing to do but confront the chores and the tedium of a solitary life …’
Beyond lay what for Burns was the new frontier, the undiscovered plains of Castile, trod by countless travellers before him but for ever reinvented with quixotic imagination. As he travelled south from the hills of the Basque country and Asturias, Burns may have well have thought of how the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset had described the stark landscape that lay ahead … ‘the yellow land, the red land, the land of silver, pure clod, naked soil … the plain undulating as if in torment … sometimes turning in on itself forming ravines and gullies, small hills and unsuspected towns … always inhospitable, always in ruins, always the church in the centre, with its fine alert tower, which looks tired, but which rests like a good warrior, on its feet, saddle sunk into the earth, elbow resting on the cross …’
The civil war had since grafted a new devastation on to the stark landscape where Quixote had mistaken windmills for giants. The long road from Burgos to Madrid that Burns took was pockmarked with bomb craters, its fields disfigured with trenches, the villages torn and broken as if an earthquake had shaken the heart of Spain. As he drove down through the mountain passes he glimpsed the clear outline of Madrid on the horizon ahead of him. In 1940, it was not so much a European capital as a provincial town, more contained and much smaller than London, and yet dwarfing every village between it and the border. Its outskirts – where the International Brigades had put up their last failed rearguard action in defence of the Republican-held city – were in disarray and partly crumbling; all the major university faculties, a major hospital, the home of the painter Velásquez, a statue of King Philip IV, churches, bridges and barracks had been wrecked by gunfire and explosives during a three-year battle of attrition.
In the third weekend of February 1940, Burns drove into Madrid, through the Paseo de la Castellana (it was then called Avenida del Generalísimo). The city centre was undergoing reco
nstruction and reform, but the signs of enduring poverty and hunger were still visible – the gaunt faces of the women in black, the skeletal street urchins, the scarce traffic, the empty or boarded-up shops, the mutilated trees and unkempt gardens.
It was evening by the time Burns reached the British embassy, a Parisian-style fin-de-siècle remnant of Spain’s imperial past. It stood in a narrow street off the Castellana, protected by an iron gate and a high fence. The building was dimly lit and lifeless. A porter advised him that it was closed and passed him a message that he had a room reserved at the nearby Palace Hotel and was to report for duty on the following Monday.
‘A group of journalists were predictably to be found at the bar but I had no inclination to mix with them, as I had no identity at this time, no reason for being there that I cared to reveal,’ recalled Burns. A new sort of loneliness had been thrust upon him, that of a government agent in a foreign land, probing the untested and the unknown, even if he already had an inner sense of belonging to the scene.
4
Reconnaissance
When Burns arrived on his first visit to Madrid in the spring of 1940, one half of Spain was paying the price for being on the wrong side in the civil war, while the other was enjoying the fruits of victory.
The new regime had moved quickly to stamp out all remnants of the Spanish Republic. Political party and trade union activity, except that linked to the pro-Franco Falange, was banned, newspapers were censored, street names changed to honour the victors. Catholicism was established as the official religion of the new regime, with the Church recovering the privileges it had lost when the Republic had separated it from the State in the early 1930s. Masses and pilgrimages were once again an integral part of Spanish culture, and priests and nuns walked the streets in their habits for the first time in years, a symbol as much of rediscovered confidence as of religious orthodoxy. Army officers who had fought for Franco and the Falange formed part of the new social elite, rivalling the returning aristocracy, while the paramilitary civil guard and secret police purged society of lingering ‘subversives’.