by Jimmy Burns
After his planned trip to Madrid had been cut short, Cowan had returned to London, conscious that his days in post were numbered, and considering whether he should resign, as the pressure on him mounted. On 8 March 1940 Cowan was working in his office at the MoI when his secretary handed him the latest issue of the Catholic Herald, a mass circulation weekly, that, together with the Tablet, had taken an uncompromising pro-Franco stand during the Spanish Civil War. It ran a lengthy article, based on information provided by the Spanish embassy, accusing the MoI of employing Spaniards who had gone into exile after the Republic had been defeated with the sole aim of mounting an international offensive to have Franco overthrown. Unknown to Cowan, the article was circulated in Whitehall and added to a dossier the Foreign Office was compiling on the tensions that were impacting negatively on Britain’s relations with Spain. The dossier included complaints, emanating from the Spanish embassy in London, that the BBC was using events of the Spanish Civil War for which Franco forces were held culpable, such as the bombing of Gernika, as examples of the cruelty of the modern warfare with which Nazi Germany was now threatening the whole of Europe.
A separate memo from Lord Lloyd at the Foreign Office expressed concern that anti-Franco propaganda filtering through Whitehall risked upsetting his plans to promote the activities of the British Council in Spain. Similar concerns were expressed by the outgoing British ambassador in Madrid, Maurice Peterson. He fired off a furious memo to the MoI, and to Foreign Office, questioning why it appeared that no pro-Franco Spaniards were employed by the department, and suggesting that if Spanish republicans were to be employed at all it should only be as translators.
In the spring of 1940, Cowan was transferred out of the Spanish department, while a short list was secretly drawn up of his possible replacement. At the top of the list featured Burns, who had become increasingly involved in Spanish affairs from his office down the corridor, the hitherto discreetly understated Catholic sector of the MoI’s Religious Affairs Department.
Within days Burns was offered a promotion, but not the one he thought he had been earmarked for. Instead of moving into Cowan’s chair, he was asked to return to Spain, this time to assume the title First Secretary and Press Attaché, with responsibility for Spain, Portugal and Tangier, a cover post for a whole range of diplomatic and covert duties.
The posting came at a critical juncture in the war. The importance of the embassy in Madrid in strategic and operational terms had increased following the German invasion of Belgium and Holland and the subsequent fall of France. It was crucial, as far as Churchill was concerned, to ensure that Franco did not throw in his lot with Hitler and Mussolini, for such a move risked the loss of Gibraltar and the Atlantic and Mediterranean ports to the Axis, with an ensuing dramatic shift in the military balance. The leadership of the project to ensure Spanish neutrality and effectively buy time for the Allies was entrusted to one of Britain’s most experienced and senior politicians, Sir Samuel Hoare, who replaced Sir Maurice Peterson as the new British ambassador in Madrid on 24 May 1940.
Hoare and Churchill’s paths had converged and periodically clashed since they had first met in 1919. As a Conservative MP, Hoare had supported Churchill’s military intervention in Russia against the Bolshevik revolution. Later in the 1920s Hoare served as Secretary of State for Air and Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer, the two men meeting at Chartwell, both as colleagues and friends, before forming part of the political alliance against the General Strike.
Hoare went on to serve as Secretary of State for India, disagreeing with Churchill over his opposition to self-government. There were further tensions when Hoare as foreign secretary during the late 1930s criticised Churchill’s warnings about Germany’s rearmament as excessively alarmist, alluding in Parliament to the ‘scare-mongers who … delight in increasing crises, if there be crises, in making the crises worse than they would otherwise be’. Hoare later resigned after signing an unpopular agreement with the French whereby Mussolini was allowed to retain his conquests in Abyssinia in return for halting the war. The infamous Hoare/Laval pact earned Hoare a reputation as an appeaser.
He later returned to Neville Chamberlain’s government as Home Secretary, believing along with his prime minister that the pact with Hitler at Munich would guarantee lasting peace. Hoare was among the MPs who most belittled Churchill’s judgement by doubting his claims that Britain was losing air parity with Germany. Five years later, as air minister, he argued that an offensive against Germany should be delayed because more time was needed to build up Britain’s air force capability.
Churchill made Hoare pay for his military miscalculation by excluding him from his first wartime cabinet. Many in the diplomatic corps hoped that would be the end of Hoare’s long involvement in public life. When Hoare was appointed as ambassador to Spain, the news was initially greeted with cruel cynicism by the government’s most senior diplomat. The head of the Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan, told Lady Halifax, the wife of the foreign secretary: ‘There is one bright spot – there are lots of Germans and Italians in Madrid and therefore a good chance of S.H. being murdered.’ Cadogan also described Sir Samuel and Lady Hoare’s apparent anxiety to get to Spain as indicating they were ‘rats deserting the ship’.
While the appointment may have implied that Hoare was being ‘exiled’ politically, it suited Churchill’s strategic objectives. Churchill hoped that Hoare’s Anglo-Catholic background, his First World War experience as an intelligence officer and his knowledge of Vatican diplomacy would help his ‘ambassador on special mission’ get to grips with the intricacies of Spanish internal politics. Hoare’s reputation as an appeaser and his proven negotiating skills were, Churchill believed, what made him eminently suitable for his new role. For if Hoare, as British ambassador, couldn’t keep Franco out of the war no one could.
How to energise the British presence not just in Madrid but throughout the Iberian Peninsula and keep Spain from siding with the Axis powers was the subject of a secret meeting Hoare attended with Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s indispensable henchman, at Stornoway House. The Regency building overlooking Green Park was used as a residence and office by Lord Beaverbrook, the newspaper baron whom Churchill put in charge of a new Ministry of Aircraft Production. Beaverbrook hosted the meeting, away from the intrigues of the Foreign Office and other service departments.
The Stornoway mini-summit confirmed that Churchill had no sympathy for those on the left who argued that British policy in the foreseeable future should have as its principal focus the restoration of Spanish democracy. He believed that Franco could be treated differently from Hitler and Mussolini, and was determined to keep Spain, guardian of the Mediterranean, free from military occupation by the Axis powers. Within this framework, those gathered at Stornoway laid out the main priorities for Hoare to follow in his first months in office. There was a consensus that the Madrid embassy would have to be upgraded and additional resources invested in the British diplomatic network across the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa if the British were to match the power and influence of the Nazi presence. Hoare believed this could not be achieved without a major reorganisation of the embassy itself, centralising under his control diplomacy, propaganda, special operations and intelligence.
It was undoubtedly fortunate for Hoare that at the time of his appointment as ambassador there was already in the embassy in Madrid the naval attaché, Captain Hillgarth, whom Churchill had befriended and whose expertise in intelligence matters was hugely valued. It was entirely in character that Churchill should now think of Hillgarth as a key element in his strategy for Spain. For when it came to key decisions at moments of crisis, Churchill cut through the bureaucracry of the civil service and, acting on instinct, drew on the counsel of individuals he trusted.
Soon after the Stornoway meeting, Hillgarth was summoned by Churchill and charged with helping keep Spain out of the war with a campaign of bribery and corruption of Spanish generals and officials. Initial funds
of $10 million were drawn from a special reserve contingency budget held by the Treasury for special operations and deposited in an account of the Swiss Bank Corporation in New York, arranged by the Treasury. The operation, which Stewart Menzies, the head of MI6, helped arrange, involved a crucial third party, the billionaire Mallorcan businessman Juan March, acting as agent and intermediary.
Since helping finance, with British help, Franco’s uprising in 1936, March had consolidated his power base and influence. He helped finance Franco’s campaign throughout the Spanish Civil War, establishing an office in Rome from where he negotiated Italian munitions and planes as well as fuel for the insurgent forces. With the perfect timing that had characterised his emerging years as an entrepreneur, March set up a shipping company called AUCONA in Burgos, the city chosen by Franco as his campaign headquarters, days before the end of the civil war. Monopolising the Spanish import-export business, AUCONA built up his foreign currency reserves in Swiss and British banks while paying Spanish importers and exporters in pesetas. March’s riches and the dubious methods used for achieving them bred resentment. However, he remained untouchable. Too many people in the Franco regime owed him favours, not least members of the Spanish armed forces.
When the Spanish Civil War ended and the Second World War began, March moved quickly to resurrect his links with the British through his old friend Hillgarth. A British intelligence report on March said that he was representing the Spanish government in a ‘quasi-official role’ and described the businessman as a ‘scoundrel’, well disposed to serving the interests of the Allied cause. On 23 September 1939, Hillgarth arranged a meeting in London between March and his chief, Admiral Godfrey, the head of Naval Intelligence.
March told Godfrey that his shipping interests and political contacts gave him unrivalled intelligence coverage of most Spanish ports and said he was committed to helping ensure that the future of Spain was bound up with that of Great Britain. The Spaniard offered not only to buy up German merchant vessels as a way of controlling German-Spanish trade, but also to act as Hillgarth’s ‘eyes and ears’ reporting on U-boats and other Axis naval movements.
As Godfrey later recalled: ‘In return March asked that the British refrain from sabotaging German ships or creating “fires and explosions in our ports” as they had done in World War I … He explained that the port authorities were under his control. He said that Franco would never let the German Army into Spain. He wished the relations of Spain and England to be friendly and tranquil and would do all he could do to achieve this end. We kept in touch and he passed me valuable information that was never incorrect.’
Other contacts March had subsequently with Hillgarth raised the possibility of the businessman acting as an arms broker for the Allies. At the meeting with Godfrey, March had mentioned that he was negotiating a sale of Spanish arms to Yugoslavia. Britain at the time had been asked by Turkey to supply it with arms, an offer it found difficult to meet without dangerously breaking into the reserve it was belatedly building up to deal with the Nazi threat.
As an alternative, March was asked by Hillgarth whether he would help arrange a deal whereby Britain and France would finance the diversion of Spanish arms destined for Yugoslavia to Turkey to bolster the defence of her Thracian border. In preparation for the deal, March’s London agent met with senior officials of the Bank of England to discuss it taking over a loan for £1.8 million to the Spanish government which a private English bank was threatening to call in.
The arms negotiations met resistance from the Foreign Office and the War Office and were eventually dropped. However, another deal was struck. The British loans were rescheduled, the agent got his visa and March was enlisted by the British as an agent of influence in the secret war against Germany. In the autumn of 1940, March was asked by Hillgarth, on Churchill’s behalf, to set up a secret system of money transfers whereby a small but influential group of senior military officers would receive secret payments in return for resisting any moves Franco might make to enter the war. The money was also intended to help fund the development of intelligence on the regime’s dealings with the Germans. ‘The fact that March made his money by devious means in no way affects his value to us at present,’ Sir Alexander Cadogan remarked.
Other matters arising out of the Stornoway meeting required following up on both sides of the Atlantic. Hoare was conscious that there was little sympathy for Franco in the US State Department or in the liberal press of the United States, which was still heavily influenced by the memory of the anti-Franco reporting of the civil war of such high-profile journalists and writers as Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. Hoare thought it important that Washington be persuaded to accede to a Spanish request for aid, as a way of influencing policy. Not to do so, he feared, would undermine Britain’s own efforts to stop Franco drifting into the arms of the Axis.
Hoare believed the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian, would be of help, while Beaverbrook was expected to pursue his good links with Joseph Kennedy, although his term as US Ambassador in London and political ambitions ended abruptly during the Battle of Britain with the publishing of his controversial remarks that ‘Democracy is finished here in England. It may be here (in the US).’ Separately, in May 1940, Menzies, the head of MI6, with Churchill’s support, sent William Stephenson to New York to help boost Anglo-American intelligence cooperation throughout the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world, from Buenos Aires to Madrid.
The other item in the pending tray was perhaps the most delicate to handle in administrative terms, for it involved the creation of a key job in the embassy in Madrid that could meet the requirements of the ambassador’s ‘special mission’. The job would involve responsibility throughout the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa for propaganda, developing secret sources and useful intelligence, and reporting directly to the ambassador. Hoare believed that such a job was essential to counter the dominance within the Franco regime of the pro-German sympathisers. Such was the enormity of the challenge he believed his embassy faced that he had begun to think of creating two new jobs instead of one.
‘You cannot imagine what a racket I have had here, alarms and excursion day and night and a depressing feeling of impending catastrophe. There can be no question of making ourselves popular in Spain. The most I can do is play upon the Spanish dislike of another war at a time when they are exhausted after the Civil War …’ Hoare wrote to Beaverbrook three weeks after his arrival in Madrid.
‘Send me a line when you can as to how things are going. Here I am entirely isolated and know little or nothing. Will you also help in two directions? First a talk with Winston about the plans I have for organising the anti-war movement. He and Halifax know about them and I am sending back Commander Furse of the NID [Naval Intelligence Division] to tell them in greater detail about what I am doing. Secondly, will you give me your advice about the press here? At present it is nothing more than a series of German propaganda sheets. The Press Department is in German hands and all the journalists are in German pay. It is impossible for us to get anything into the papers at all and there is a new decree even prohibiting the circulation of typed bulletins. Do you think that it would be possible for someone really big e.g. Roberts [Walter Roberts, a senior Foreign office official] to come out here and advise me as to whether it is practicable to do anything at all or whether I had better give up the job as hopeless? If you do think there is anything in this proposal, I should indeed be grateful if you could fix it with Duff Cooper and send someone out at once. He could do the whole of what I want in a fortnight. As I have no expert to advise me, I am groping in the dark and I terribly want really good advice …’
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Later that night in London, the person whose fate Hoare’s proposal was destined to seal sat and wrote a letter to his loved one. It was nearly midnight, hours after the end of a long day shift at the MoI in Bloomsbury, and minutes away from the night vigil at the Royal Herbert Hospital in Woolwich, where Ann Bowes-Lyon had b
een working as a volunteer nurse since the outbreak of war. From his blacked-out Chelsea home off the King’s Road, Burns used the light of a candle to write, so tired that he could hardly keep awake as he scribbled his lover’s talk. ‘Darling, don’t be miserable about this job of yours – what a chance it is: you can keep watch over so much more than your ward – everything is easier to communicate in the night, both good and bad: people all over the place are slumping into sleep or despair or loneliness or some sordid sort of luxury and yours is the chance to compensate in some way for all of this. And I shall think of you as awake and vigilant and watching over me as much as over the chaps in the old mortuary … I wish I could be working with you: just to be caring for stricken and miserable people. Darling, your faith will tell you of timelessness and I think sometimes that you can really be near to our Lord in his agony in the garden; you can be awake and alive to all that agony when the apostles slumbered and sleep and say, “Yes” when he asks, “Could you not watch over him with me?” Do you see, darling, how there is all this reality with you even though every securing misery is crowding in! …’
Faith was surely needed. The military hospital where Ann Bowes-Lyon had turned up one bright morning in the summer of 1939, to find long, half-empty wards, and an atmosphere resonant of a Women’s League fête, was now filling up with the wounded and the dying, and forcing new duties and longer hours on those who worked there. None of her letters to Burns from this period survive. But one can only speculate, on the basis of his letters to her, that their intimate correspondence not only reflected the stress of her job, but also served as a reminder that their own worlds were drawing apart, each touched by different experiences, the result of a different calling that seemed to come as much from others as from within.