The radicalisation of Spanish politics during the 1930s fuelled a growing alienation between some English Catholics and the secularist ascendancy in British literature represented by the Bloomsbury Group. ‘There’s something obscene in a living person sitting by the fire and believing in God,’ the Bloomsbury icon Virginia Woolf had commented in 1928 on learning of T.S. Eliot’s deepening involvement with the Christian faith. Seven years later Woolf was no less horrified on hearing that the South African-born poet Roy Campbell and his wife Mary had converted to Catholicism.
The Campbells had drifted into the Bloomsbury set during the late 1920s, she rather more wittingly than he. Campbell, who had studied at Oxford two years ahead of Evelyn Waugh, was taken on as a contributor to the New Statesman thanks in part to various leading Bloomsbury figures giving their seal of approval to his early poetry. But his deeply ingrained male chauvinism, political conservatism and religious devotion placed him at odds with the avowed socialism of Bloomsbury.
In 1928 Campbell left England for Provence after discovering his wife Mary’s lesbian affair with Virginia Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. For a while he lived among fishermen, and became a huge enthusiast of bullfighting, finding in the simplicity of the local people and the traditions of their culture a soothing contrast to the world of Bloomsbury.
After being reunited, the Campbells crossed into Spain in 1933, to avoid being sued by their neighbours. A goat they owned had escaped and gone on the rampage, destroying a number of young peach trees in the process. They stayed for a while in Barcelona where they witnessed an abortive revolution by a group of anarchists, one of several preludes to the civil war. They eventually settled in Toledo.
Surrounded by thick ancient walls, and perched on a hill overlooking the Tagus River, Toledo’s surviving battlements served as a reminder of Spain’s glorious past when the city had been the imperial capital and bastion of Christianity under the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. It was filled still with convents, churches and seminaries.
When the left-wing Popular Front won the Spanish elections in February 1936, an ugly campaign of anticlericalism shattered the Campbells’ cultural idyll. In Toledo, which Campbell described as the ‘whole embodiment of the crusade for Christianity against Communism’, churches were burnt and nuns and priests attacked in the streets. To Campbell such deeds were the acts of barbarians bent on destroying the social fabric and soul of Spain. He reacted by staging a somewhat eccentric act of ‘anti-Red defiance’, a month before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. It took place in the local bullring, for the passionate loyalty Campbell felt for the Catholic faith was surpassed only by his love of wine and bulls. Campbell got his wife to help him plait red and yellow, the colours of the old Monarchist flag, later usurped by Franco, (as opposed to the red, yellow, and purple of the Republican standard) into the manes and tails of a couple of horses and then got his young daughters, Teresa and Anna, to ride them across the ring before the start of the bullfight.
Four weeks later, Campbell was watering one of his horses when the peace of the day was shattered by the rattle of rifle fire, a signal that the civil war had begun. Within a month the Campbell family had fled Spain, having witnessed at first hand the horror of the looting and summary executions initially carried out in Toledo by the left-wing militias. It was at this point that Campbell began to see the conflict in Spain as something that transcended politics. In the words of his biographer Joseph Pearce, ‘It was deeper than the struggle for temporary power. It was not a fight between fascism and communism, but between Christ and the anti-Christ – a fight to the death between good and evil, God and the Devil.’
During his first days back in England, Campbell’s bullfighting exploits, as well as his seemingly miraculous escape from the anarchist firing squads, were all over the British newspapers, drawing sympathy from fellow Catholics, among them Burns, whose own interest in Spain was developing into his primary concern as a publisher. As Burns later recalled, the civil war placed a barrier between him and the left-wing poets Wystan Auden and Stephen Spender, to whom he had been introduced when they were undergraduates at Oxford and who mixed in similar intellectual circles in London. By contrast, Roy Campbell now spoke ‘more for my sympathies’.
The Catholic weekly the Tablet, which Burns now partly owned and managed, unhesitatingly took Franco’s side in the civil war. It offered Campbell as much support as Burns could muster, beginning with a letter of accreditation as a war correspondent. Campbell spent much of what was left of the Spanish Civil War wielding the propagandist’s cudgel, writing shrill poems, most of which were characterised by the kind of jingoistic triumphalism with which Franco personally stamped his military campaign.
Campbell later developed these into a five-thousand-word would-be epic, The Spanish Civil War, whose publication Burns oversaw at Longman, in 1939, the year after George Orwell published his Homage to Catalonia. While Orwell’s book was a courageously objective essay on the hopes and shattered dreams of those who fought for the Spanish Republic, Campbell’s poem, ‘The Flowering Rifle’, was an uncontrolled anti-communist and occasionally racist diatribe which even his sympathetic biographer found politically offensive and artistically flawed. ‘It plods along with leaden boots firing scorn-blinded blanks at “bolshies”, anarchists and Jews, offering only an occasional glimpse of the genius which its author possesses,’ comments Pearce.
While in Spain, Campbell followed Burns’s instructions and travelled by train to the Francoist-controlled university city of Salamanca. There he obtained a safe conduct from the chief of the Nationalist Press Office, Merry del Val, to the Madrid front, along with further letters of introduction to some of Franco’s commanders. Campbell offered to enlist as a soldier with the anti-Republican monarchist requetés rather than with the Franco regulars, but he was told that it was as a writer and poet that he could best serve the Franco cause.
The regiment had weeks earlier happily accepted into its ranks another English Catholic friend of Burns’s, the young Cambridge graduate Peter Kemp. Kemp’s views as a student had been so right-wing that he had formed a splinter union of his own as a rival to the Conservative Association. He later claimed that his reasons for going to Spain were not entirely political – he had no idea what career he wanted to pursue and thought that he would spend a few months getting to know a ‘strange country’ and learn something about modern warfare. However, his politics determined the side he chose.
‘Priests and nuns were shot simply because they were priests or nuns, ordinary people murdered just because they had a little money or property. It’s to fight against that sort of thing that I am going to Spain,’ Kemp told his friends.
Kemp’s enlistment on Franco’s side proved a rarity in contrast to the hundreds of his fellow countrymen who, with the encouragement of the Communist Party, joined the pro-Republic International Brigades. With the military assistance being offered by the Italians and the Germans, the Nationalist cause found it unnecessary to actively recruit further in Britain, particularly since to have done so would have further undermined the British government’s policy of non-intervention.
Instead, Franco set up an agency in London to boost his propaganda efforts, enlisting the support of sectors of the media, and lobbying politicians and government officials. The agency, operating out of a suite in the Dorchester Hotel, was headed up by two Spanish aristocrats, the Marqués del Moral and the Duke of Alba, both of whom had been educated at Jesuit public schools in England, and had strong ties at the highest levels of London society.
Of the two, Alba was the most pivotal in terms of Anglo-Spanish relations. Spain’s leading nobleman was descended from one of the oldest aristocratic lines in Europe. His full title was Jacobo María del Pilar Carlos Manuel Fitz-James Stuart y Falcó, the 17th Duke of Alba and 10th Duke of Berwick. As a descendant of an illegitimate son of King James II by Arabella Churchill, he was a cousin of Winston’s, a tie that would give ‘Jimmy’ Alba a key diplomatic role as Franco’s ambassador in London during the Second World War.
Nevertheless the challenge del Moral and Alba faced in winning over British intellectuals who felt ideologically stirred by the Spanish Civil War was underlined by a survey of British writers carried out in the spring of 1937. Of those questioned, 127 were in favour of the Republican government, while only five declared themselves against it. Campbell did not participate in the poll. He was already in Spain, feeling himself liberated from the Anglo-Saxon literary intrigues he found so claustrophobic and politically unconvincing.
Graham Greene could have participated but chose not to. Evelyn Waugh was the only Catholic to cast his vote, and he was one of the five who in effect voted in support of the military-led uprising. By now Burns had emerged as the common thread linking Campbell, Greene and Waugh – the three best-known Catholic authors at the time – for he had befriended each one of them separately, and managed to influence all of them in a way that benefited the Francoist cause.
Burns’s takeover of the Tablet allowed him to extend his influence in the wider literary world. Into its pages he drew Greene in 1936 in what was to become an enduring relationship between the author and the international Catholic weekly. Greene was taken on as a regular reviewer, with the freedom to choose whatever book he liked for criticism. His Tablet journalism scorned the communism he had flirted with at university while holding back from the overtly pro-Francoist stance adopted by other contributors, led by the editor Douglas Woodruff.
When the pamphlet Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War, based on the survey, was published in June 1937, Greene used the pages of the Spectator to mock the earnestness of those on the left, like Auden and Spender, who had engaged with the war in Spain initially with a self-consciously serious ideological intent. Greene contrasted the political rantings of the 1930s with the more easy-going attitudes of the Cambridge Apostles, among them Tennyson and his friend Henry Hallam, who in 1830 had undertaken secret missions in Spain in support of rebel activity, primarily for the thrill of it.
Years later, Greene told his official biographer Norman Sherry that one of the reasons he did not contribute to the Authors Take Sides survey was that, while he shared some sympathy for the Republican cause, he was horrified by the brutality sectors of the Spanish left had shown towards the religious orders and the clergy. The sympathy he felt for the Republic was principally focused on the Basque country, where a significant sector of the local population was both fervently Catholic and anti-Franco, fighting not for communism but for greater autonomy from the rest of Spain.
Greene’s interest in the Basque country intensified in the light of what occurred in the region in a town called Gernika, where in medieval times the Catholic Kings of Spain had sworn before a totemic oak tree forever to respect the rights of the local people. It was there that on the afternoon of 26 April 1937 a force of Luftwaffe bombers and fighter planes carried out an attack of terrible destruction and human carnage – a scene Picasso later immortalised in one of the most famous of war paintings. From a military perspective, the bombing of Gernika was a brilliant success for the pilots of the Condor Legion. Estimates of fatalities among the 7,000 then inhabitants of the town have varied widely over the years. The Republican government estimated that at least 1,600 had been killed while Franco put the number of dead, somewhat absurdly, at twelve. More recently Basque investigators have opted for a figure of between 120 and 250 after studying the town records, and on the grounds that many of the children had been previously evacuated while adults managed to protect themselves in bomb shelters.
However, the physical devastation of Gernika caused by the German bombers provoked panic as well as impotent outrage throughout much of the Basque region at the time. The razing to the ground of much of the town with incendiary bombs signalled a new and terrifying development in modern warfare, targeting the civilian population in order to smash its morale. Only the arrival on the scene of a group of independently minded journalists, led by Christopher Home of Reuters news agency and George Steer, of The Times, made it a public relations disaster for Franco’s side. Both men filed vivid reports of what they found, pointing the finger of blame for a callous act of inhumanity at the Germans and the Spanish general who had called on their assistance.
There then ensued a ferocious propaganda campaign, with claims and counter-claims about what exactly had gone on in Gernika. The first round began with a less than convincing denial from the Nationalists that the bombing had even taken place. On 28 April, the day Steer filed his report to The Times and the New York Times, another Times correspondent, James Holburn, filed from Salamanca, the Nationalist headquarters, reporting claims that Gernika had been set on fire by anti-Franco forces. Subsequently Nationalist press officers, under the management of Luis Bolín – the journalist who had helped organise the UK end of the Franco uprising – escorted visitors to Gernika on carefully controlled tours of the bombed town.
As part of a deliberate campaign of misinformation Bolín’s co-conspirator, Captain Hugh Pollard (the Englishman who had flown on the plane that picked up Franco in the Canaries), penned a letter to The Times suggesting that even if the Nationalists had, after all, been responsible for the bombing, it was justified. Pollard alleged anti-Franco forces were supplying small arms to terrorists fighting British colonial interests in India and Egypt. It was a curious argument with an allegation based on flimsy evidence. It was nevertheless a typical exercise in misinformation by an expert in the black arts.
The propaganda pendulum continued to swing from one side to the other, underlining the extent to which Gernika had become much more than just another war story. It had become a symbol of each side’s integrity, or lack of it. Basque Catholic priests were among those who remained at the forefront of denunciation of Nationalist brutality not just against Gernika but other towns bombed and then occupied by Franco forces. Twenty Basque priests, of whom one was an eyewitness of the bombing, and including the vicar-general of the diocese, wrote to Pope Pius XI telling him who had destroyed Gernika. Two of the priests acted as couriers and travelled to the Vatican, where their protests fell on deaf ears.
Meanwhile, Franco’s spin doctor, Bolín, did not remain idle. He flew back to London and with his friends the Marqués del Moral and the Duke of Alba enlisted Burns’s support in building up a body of influential opinion around a fundraising organisation called the Friends of Nationalist Spain. Among its keenest supporters was another of Bolin’s British co-conspirators, the Catholic publisher Douglas Jerrold, who wrote a long article for the Tablet challenging Steer’s version of events. A broader attack on the claims made by Basque Catholic priests and Steer, meanwhile, was contained in a letter that was circulated within the Jesuit community and the Vatican. It was written by Burns’s older brother, George, who as a Jesuit priest had spent time during the Spanish Civil War officiating to Nationalist troops.
By June 1937, the Basque capital, Bilbao, was resisting a major offensive by Franco’s army. The town had been supplied with additional ammunition, including new machine guns from Czechoslovakia, and its command reinforced with some of the best officers communist Russia could muster. But the ‘ring of steel’ – the elaborate system of defence positions which had been set up in the hills surrounding the town – had been undermined by the betrayal of a Basque officer, Major Goicoechea, who had defected to the Franco side, and the besieged town was suffering a pounding by sustained artillery fire supported by aerial bombing.
The dramatic events surrounding the civil war in the Basque country stirred the artistic imaginations of painters, poets and writers, among them Graham Greene. Ten years had passed since Greene had married Vivien, a committed Catholic, having himself converted a year earlier.
It was Franco’s attack on the Republican-held Basque country that moved Greene initially, as he put it, to ‘examine more closely the effect of faith on action’. But it was his continuing refusal to declare his political allegiance unequivocally and openly for one side or the other that probably saved him in literary terms even if it made him enemies on the left and the right. Divided loyalties and shifting political allegiances would come to provide the core tension in Greene’s novels.
Looking back on the 1930s, Greene reflected that it was then that he had begun to see Catholicism as no longer primarily symbolic, ‘a ceremony at an altar with the correct canonical number of candles, with the women in my Chelsea congregation wearing their best hats’. Nor was it a philosophical page in the Jesuit Fr D’Arcy’s Nature of Belief, however much it might have impacted on his friend Burns’s theological formation. It was, as Greene put it, ‘closer now to death in the afternoon’. He went on: ‘A restlessness set in which has never quite been allayed: a desire to be a spectator of history, history in which I found I was concerned myself.’
Beyond this, Greene’s real motivation for choosing to go to Bilbao remains unclear. In his autobiography, he claimed that he travelled to Bilbao with a letter of recommendation from the Basque Delegation in London. The extensive archive which the Basque government preserved from that period contains no evidence of such a letter having existed – no copies, no exchange of correspondence or minuted meetings linked to it. The Delegation was not shy when it came to exploiting propaganda opportunities and yet Basques linked with that period have excluded any mention of recruiting Graham Greene to their cause in their accounts or those compiled by sympathetic historians. Nor have the BBC archives thrown up anything which might substantiate the claim made by Greene’s official biographer Norman Sherry that the author’s intention was to make a BBC broadcast about the besieged Basques.
According to Greene’s account, ‘they … [Sherry presumes that ‘they’ was the BBC]’ sent him ‘hurtling down to Toulouse’, where the Frenchman who was supposed to take him across the border and into Bilbao in a two-seater plane got cold feet because Franco’s guns were proving too accurate. But Sherry, drawing from a letter Greene wrote to his mother, offers a more mundane explanation – which is that the novelist wanted to return to London for the launch of a new magazine, Night and Day, to which he had been appointed literary editor the previous December, rather than waiting for an alternative way of getting to Spain.
No one was more pleased to see Greene cut short his trip to Bilbao than his friend Burns. Now that any thought of writing an anti-Franco novel based in Bilbao had effectively been scuppered, there emerged an alternative project with which Burns planned to tap Greene’s literary talents in a less hesitant defence of the Catholic faith.
The idea had already been implanted in Greene’s mind in embryonic form months before his aborted trip to Bilbao. On Burn’s recommendation, Greene had read a book called Mexican Martyrdom which had been published in 1936. Written by an American Jesuit called Fr Parsons, the book was a graphic account of the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico following the Revolution. Here, far off on a distant continent, was a drama that appealed to Greene as an author and a Catholic, one that he could engage in without provoking the hostility of friends.
The original idea for a book by Greene on Mexico came from Frank Sheed, of the publishers Sheed & Ward, which Burns had joined in 1926. Initial negotiations through Greene’s agent, David Higham, had led to an offer of an advance of £500. But progress towards a final contract was stalled with Greene initially diverted by the Basque situation in Spain, and subsequently by his taking up the literary editorship at Night and Day. The project was eventually dropped by Sheed, leaving it open for his former protégé Burns to make an alternative offer.
Burns was by now an experienced publisher with ideas of his own, and with a developed sense of the market and how it should be played. In early 1936 he had left Sheed & Ward and joined Longman, Green and Co., a long-established publishing firm that was looking to refresh its declining specialist list of Catholic and Anglican writing and to expand further its general list of authors, among them rising stars who preferred to call themselves writers and who were also Catholics.
Within months of securing Evelyn Waugh’s travel book on Abyssinia, Burns had signed up Greene on Mexico, having convinced him that Longman was on its way to being, if it wasn’t already, more that just a Catholic publishing house, with the greater market opportunities that that implied.
Burns and Greene had a friendship that drew strength from a similarity of character but contrasting circumstances. Both men stood out in the company they kept. They carried within them a radical strain which questioned orthodox assumptions in matters of faith as much as politics. Burns was still a bachelor, on the lookout for a woman with whom he could form a permanent relationship. He saw in Vivien, Greene’s young wife, the ideal woman, constant and forgiving, an echo of his own (Burns’s) mother, whom Burns had lived with briefly following his father’s death in 1924.
Invited to dinner at the Greenes’ home on Clapham Common, Burns was struck by how the ‘gentle and beautiful’ Vivien had ‘it all arranged with such care’. This ‘serenity in order in every detail’ seemed to Burns to be so different from everything that he had been able to observe in Greene himself.
When Burns and Greene were alone together, Greene revealed another darker and more restless side to him, one that Burns sympathised with but struggled to suppress within himself thanks to his Jesuit upbringing. As Burns later recalled of that period, ‘We were both too busy to see much of each other but there would come the occasional telephone call: “Let’s go to Limehouse tonight – there’s a ballet of Chinese nudes at the local theatre.”’ Even during his early days of sexual experimentation in Paris, Burns had drawn the line at brothels. Yet the topics of sex and religion, discussed over a bottle of whisky, produced a creative bond between the two men that was to last, off and on, till their dying days.
After one of their regular drinking sessions together, Greene wrote to his agent David Higham saying that he personally would much rather be published by Longman than Sheed & Ward as this would run much less of a risk of having him ‘branded as a Catholic writer’.
The reality was that Burns could offer Greene as good if not better contacts and introductions to the world of Mexican Catholicism as Sheed had promised. Still Higham attempted to raise the stakes. He approached Greene’s regular publisher, Heinemann, and suggested to Greene that he was on target for securing a satisfactory offer. Greene was unconvinced. He wrote back to Higham strongly expressing his view that it wasn’t worth ‘jockeying Heinemanns into a book which doesn’t really interest them’.
Further haggling followed before Higham drew up Greene’s contract with Burns, while refusing to contemplate a buyout of the option that Heinemann had on the author’s entire fiction output. Nevertheless, it had become clear to Burns that neither Heinemann nor any other publisher shared his and Greene’s interests. ‘For them Mexico was far away and religion a hazy notion,’ Burns later remarked. ‘Graham and I saw it quite differently and were able to persuade my somewhat bovine board at Longman to accept my view and come up with £500 – quite a sum in those days for a writer untried in the field.’ In fact the £500 was no more and no less than Sheed had offered Higham originally. Burns had got himself a bargain.
It was during the 1930s that Burns also developed a growing friendship with Evelyn Waugh. They courted the two Herbert sisters, forged ever closer links with the Jesuits and participated in joint publishing ventures. After publishing, with Burns’s encouragement, a biography of Edmund Campion, the Jesuit martyr, Waugh followed in Greene’s footsteps to Mexico on a writing commission funded by Clive Pearson, a younger son of the 1st Lord Cowdray, representing his family’s powerful commercial interests in Central America.
The travel book that Waugh wrote on Mexico, Robbery Under Law, received lukewarm interest when it was published in 1939. It was the year of transition from the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War, when the dark implications of Hitler’s ambition were finally beginning to dawn on the British public, and people had little time to get worked up over affairs in distant Mexico. Many writers on the left, like the journalist Tom Driberg, had been professionally engaged in the fight against Fascism for some time, while there were others – English socialites, like Unity and Diana Mitford – who held Hitler in awe, and supported Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, as the party which could unite Britain and prevent the slide to world war. As late as September 1938, as part of his work for the Anglo-German Fellowship, Beverley Nichols entertained leaders of the Hitler Youth to lunch at the Garrick Club. Robbery Under Law includes a visceral attack on the world of left-wing British intellectuals as epitomised by Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, which in Waugh’s view had contributed only to romanticising the antics of revolutionaries in foreign lands, justifying actions that they could never have countered back in England.
Describing the different tourists he met in Mexico, Waugh raged against the ideologues: ‘First in Moscow, then in Barcelona, now in Mexico, these credulous pilgrims pursue their quest for the Promised Land; constantly disappointed, never disillusioned, ever thirsty for the phrases in which they find refreshment.’
Waugh’s friend and biographer Christopher Sykes considers Robbery Under Law, the novelist’s most political book, a product of its time, when the ideological character of the Spanish Civil War incited numerous writers to proclaim their deepest beliefs. Neither Waugh nor Greene followed the example of authors like Laurie Lee, André Malraux, Orwell or Hemingway who took up arms in Spain. They chose instead their own idiosyncratic witness to European events, finding in Mexico a situation that allowed them to reconcile their faith with their political convictions.
Before going to Mexico, Waugh spent the first months of the Spanish Civil War initially in Abyssinia and then continuing his courtship in London of Laura Herbert, whom he married on 17 April 1937.
Laura was not the first of the Herbert sisters to have entered Waugh’s circle. It was thanks to the encouragement and introduction of Fr D’Arcy that in the summer of 1933 Waugh had met Gabriel, Laura’s oldest sister, while taking a Hellenic cruise with his Oxford acquaintance Alfred Duggan, the step-son of Lord Curzon, and a group of formidable Catholics. They included members of the Asquith family, and the Infanta Beatriz, the daughter of the Spanish King Alfonso XIII and Queen Victoria Eugenia, or ‘Ena’ as she came to be more popularly known, his consort.
Gabriel was a handsome, amusing and athletic twenty-two-year-old who had inherited her father Aubrey’s half-brother Lord Carnavon’s adventurous spirit. Waugh seems to have warmed to her particularly one night when she got drunk on too many gins.
Waugh kept no diaries from the summer of 1934 to the summer of 1936, but it was in this period leading up to the Spanish Civil War that he fell in love with Laura, while introducing Gabriel to his friend Burns, an introduction almost as fateful as that which had led the novelist to his first meeting with his future wife. While Waugh’s courtship of Laura was complicated by the tortuously slow process of the annulment of his first marriage, Burns’s romantic dalliance with Gabriel flourished, uncluttered by thoughts of marriage, or, as she perceived it in orthodox Catholic terms, carnal sin.
In July 1936, Waugh wrote a letter to Lady Mary Lygon, soon after his annulment had been granted by Rome, announcing that one of the reasons the marriage would not take place for several months was because Gabriel had got involved in the politics of Spain, and because he had yet to overcome a certain air of moral disapproval with which she contemplated his attachment to her sister.
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War sharpened Gabriel’s fanatical Catholicism. It gave her a motive and a spur to action to defend her faith, drawing her into the network of English and Spanish Catholics that supported the Nationalists. She put her energies into helping channel funds to the nationalist side, and organising the transport of medical supplies from the UK, across France and over the Pyrenees, in a fleet of volunteer ambulances.
Overt Catholic fundraising was initiated within days of the military uprising with advertisements in two Catholic newspapers, the Universe and the Catholic Times. The fundraising then became coordinated by a committee presided over by the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Hinsley, and composed of a selection of the great and good in the Catholic laity. The chairman was Lord Howard of Penrith, a former ambassador to Washington and Madrid, and a relation of the Dukes of Norfolk, with a formidable array of social and political contacts on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the UK, Howard was active in Catholic intellectual circles. He was a close friend of Fr D’Arcy, and his son Francis – educated by the Benedictines at Downside – had joined the journalistic and publishing circles that revolved round Burns, with whom he had shared a flat in Chelsea after leaving Oxford. Other members of the committee included two other publishing associates of Burns, Christopher Dawson and Frank Sheed, as well as Waugh.
The officially declared mission of the Bishops’ Committee for the Relief of Spanish Distress was listed as ‘the relief of the sick, wounded, refugees, and destitute children of Spain’. In fact the Committee was overtly anti-communist and determined to counter the attempts by the Spanish left to monopolise public opinion in Britain. The Committee maintained close ties with the Friends of Nationalist Spain.
More than a year earlier, in late September 1936, Evelyn Waugh noted a lunch he had with his sister-in-law-to-be, Gabriel, who was ‘off to Spain to relieve insurgents’. That evening both of them went to another fundraising event, this time organised by the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster’s ‘Spanish Association’. Gabriel opened the event by reporting on a meeting she had had with one of the Duke of Alba’s aristocratic friends, the Duchess of Laguna, and urged the Association’s committee to meet her demands for medical and other supplies as soon as they could be arranged. Waugh made a recommendation to the committee that Gabriel should be sent to Spain without more ado to see, on the ground, what was needed, and to coordinate the delivery of supplies. It turned into the first of several trips Gabriel made to Nationalist-occupied Spanish territory with an ambulance unit, mainly staffed by Spaniards. Gabriel’s growing enthusiasm for the nationalist cause as she worked as a volunteer nurse and intermediary between the medical team in Spain and the fund-raisers in London was conveyed in a series of private letters she wrote to friends and family members. During an interlude in London in 1937 – the precise date remains unclear – between trips to Spain, Gabriel wrote a report to her mother, Mary Herbert, with instructions that it be distributed among members of the English Catholic Bishops’ fund-raising ‘Spanish Association’.
Gabriel glowingly depicted the far right requetés from Navarre as the main standard-bearers of a heroic Catholic crusade which she claimed had been misunderstood by large swathes of the British media.
She wrote: ‘To those men, who watched the creeping disorder spreading over Spain, threatening the Church … and bringing disaster into the balanced order of their farming lives, who witnessed the powerlessness of the government to restrain the growing unrest to prevent churches being burnt and priests murdered, it was not unnatural to go and fight in defence of their religion and their right to live in their own homes.’
Gabriel had developed strong personal bonds with the requetés because during her first year in Spain they were the great majority of soldiers she nursed in hospital on the northern front. But far from a romantic adventure, the experience intensified her ideological commitment to the Franco cause, and her blind acceptance of its propaganda for which she acted as an energetic conduit. ‘To a people tired of injustice and misrule, Franco appeared as their only hope – a hope which has been justified,’ she wrote in notes prepared for a book she planned to write but never did.
It was a project for which she earned the approval of her spiritual mentor Fr D’Arcy whenever she returned to London. It also gave a fresh frisson to her on-off courtship with Burns, who retained fond memories of his first dances with Gabriel when she was a debutante. Many years later Burns described the third and final prologue to his main Spanish performance, his reunion with Gabriel, thus: ‘A chance encounter with a friend in a London street led her to ask what I was doing for a summer holiday. I told her that I had no plans. She asked me if I could drive an ambulance, which had been donated by English Catholics, to Burgos, the Spanish Nationalist headquarters. I accepted at once and was delighted to know that my companions would be a family friend, General Pereira (retired but, I suspect, not restrained from observing the situation for military intelligence) and Gabriel Herbert, a friend of debutante dancing days who was a volunteer nurse with the Nationalists, later decorated for valour.’
Their destination in Spain was the old Castilian town of Burgos, a city disproportionately populated by soldiers and priests. The birthplace of El Cid, the legendary eleventh-century-conqueror of the Moors, Burgos had backed the military uprising with scarcely a shot being fired in opposition. ‘The very stones are nationalist here,’ the pro-Franco Condesa de Vallellano told Marcel Junot, a Red Cross doctor. In fact, what opposition there was found itself brutally repressed before it had had time to organise itself. Republican sympathisers who were identified in local police files were taken from their families and shot.
Within days Burgos was transformed into the effective capital of Franco’s Spain, a safe haven as well as a gathering place for some of the aristocrats and other anti-Republican civilians who had fled Madrid. By the time the ambulance, driven by Burns, and with Gabriel Herbert as his passenger, reached it, the town was also home to foreign journalists covering the Nationalist advance on the north of the country. Burns and Herbert, identifying themselves as two volunteer Catholic ‘aid workers’, were initially welcomed by a delegate of the Red Cross, the Duchess of Lecera. Of his meeting with the Anglophile Spanish aristocrat, Burns would later recall: ‘A diminutive but dynamic lady with cropped hair, in a peaked cap and khaki uniform. She spoke perfect English … Her somewhat bovine husband was rumoured to be at least the would-be lover of Queen Ena. I was to learn later that, unless they moved in a circumambient atmosphere of scandal, Spanish aristocrats would feel themselves unclothed.’
While Gabriel and her team of Spaniards oversaw the distribution of medical supplies, and drew up lists of further orders, Burns went out drinking with the press corps, a convivial group of semi-alcoholics. He discovered that one of their number, Kim Philby, was then out of town.
Philby had first arrived in Spain in February 1937, having secured accreditation as a freelance from the London Evening Standard and a German magazine called Geopolitics. As he later recalled, his immediate assignment was to get first-hand information of the Franco war effort and transmit this to his Soviet contacts, who in turn would pass it on to the Republican army. However, his main mission was to assist in an abortive Soviet attempt to assassinate Franco. For the purpose, Philby attached himself initially to the nationalist’s southern logistical command in Seville. The assassination plot was aborted after Philby nearly had his cover blown during a visit to Cordoba. He was in the Andalusian town with the aim of watching a bullfight but inadvertently strayed into a restricted military area. He was arrested by Civil Guards and questioned while his luggage and clothes were searched. When asked to turn his pockets out, Philby threw his wallet across the table – a move that distracted his interrogators and, so he later claimed, gave him time to put into his mouth a small ball of paper on which his secret codes were written, before swallowing it.
Philby was released without charge and went back to London where he was debriefed by his Soviet controllers and relieved of further involvement in the assassination plot. He was told to focus on securing further intelligence on Franco and his forces. Having obtained a further letter of accreditation from the London General Press, a news and syndication agency, Philby was subsequently hired by The Times and returned to Spain as its correspondent in June 1937.
He reported from Salamanca where Franco had established his first military headquarters in the local bishop’s palace. He also spent some time in Burgos where, by the autumn of 1937, foreign journalists accredited to Franco’s army were spending more of their time, using it as a base to report on the nationalist advance across the Basque country. Whereas his colleagues were genuine war correspondents, Philby continued to use his journalism as a cover for espionage. He had been recruited as an agent of the Soviet intelligence service in 1934, a year after leaving Cambridge a convinced communist.
In the run-up to the Spanish Civil War, Philby had been encouraged by his Soviet controller to join the Anglo-German Fellowship to cover up his communist background, including his post-Cambridge involvement with the socialist movement in Vienna where he had married a communist student, Litzi Friedman. It was not until January 1963 that Philby’s cover was officially blown after the Soviet Union announced it had granted him political asylum in Moscow. The full story of who among Philby’s acquaintances suspected his true identity in the preceding thirty years is unlikely ever to be fully revealed. Philby carried many of his secrets to the grave, knowing many people who had as much, if not more, to lose from the revelation of the truth as he did.
Nevertheless there is little doubt that during the 1930s Philby swam in similar waters to Catholic laymen during his stint at the Anglo-German Fellowship, and later when filing pro-Franco copy from behind Nationalist lines, and did so without revealing the true nature of his political sympathies or secret assignments. The fact that in Salamanca, and later in Burgos, Philby had an attractive, socially well-heeled and amusing mistress he could bed whenever he felt like relieving the stress of war was a source of envy for the bulk of his mainly womanless fellow hacks.
But for the visiting ‘aid volunteer’ Burns, the discovery that the mistress in question was in town while Philby was temporarily absent was a cause of some personal celebration. For Philby’s lover, the Canadian-born Lady Lindsay Hogg, was not unknown to Burns. In fact, she was an old friend from pre-war days in Chelsea and Bloomsbury.
Burns had met Lady Lindsay Hogg during the early 1930s when the then Frances ‘Bunny’ Noble was a young, effervescent star of the London stage. After her marriage to Sir Anthony Lindsay Hogg, Burns temporarily lost track of Bunny, only to rediscover her once she had extended her social network to Spanish aristocrats and other Francoist sympathisers, friendships she had sought to repay by sharing passionately in their cause. The Spanish Civil War lover of the man destined to be exposed as one of the most famous spies of the twentieth century was a thirty-five-year-old divorcee when Burns shared a flirtatiously nostalgic meal with her in Philby’s temporary absence, the food selected in the full mutual knowledge of its aphrodisiacal properties. ‘“Bunny” was good company,’ Burns recalled years later. ‘I can see her now laughing at my shock at the effect of lemon juice on fresh clams, wriggling and raising their periscopes in apparent surprise.’
It was in Burgos that Franco’s chief liaison officer with the foreign press, Merry del Val, offered Burns a tour of Gernika as part of the extended propaganda battle fought in print and on the wireless following the Basque town’s bombing. The two had been contemporaries at Stonyhurst, when Del Val’s father was Spanish ambassador in London. Del Val appears to have harboured few doubts that Burns, by now a director of the rabidly pro-Franco Tablet, would be receptive to whatever propaganda was laid before him.
‘Pablo (Merry del Val) took us to Gernika and patiently explained that the extensive destruction of the main streets had been the work of the retreating Reds. Dynamite, not bombs of the German Condor Legion, was responsible. It was not convincing propaganda and has since been abandoned,’ Burns admitted many years later. At the time, though, he chose to keep whatever doubts he had to himself, believing that breaking Catholic ranks on Gernika would threaten Britain’s and Franco’s best interests – that of maintaining the British policy of non-intervention, however breached it was in practice by its other European signatories, namely Germany and Italy. After Gernika, Burns spent a few more days wining and dining Bunny Noble while Kim Philby continued to be professionally occupied getting as near as he could to the battle front behind Nationalist lines, not without raising some suspicions among his own colleagues.
Some of Philby’s English-speaking colleagues, among them Sam Pope Brewer of the New York Times and Karl Robson of the Daily Telegraph, noticed Philby’s tendency to ask more probing questions than other journalists at press briefings, wanting details such as names, numbers and troops strengths. Whenever he returned to base, Philby was as hard-drinking as the rest of his colleagues, but when not with Bunny usually drank alone, maintaining a certain personal aloofness.
The Spanish minders had no problem with Philby. Convinced as they were of his pro-Nationalist credentials, they were happy to offer him any detail they thought might underline Franco’s tactical nous and his military superiority. Pope Brewer and Robson later claimed that they suspected Philby was not who he claimed to be, even if neither of them guessed that he was a Soviet spy. Robson, who shared a room with Philby at one point, used to listen to him painting a doomsday scenario of China and Russia dominating the world. Robson thought Philby’s anti-communism exaggerated but claimed to have been too preoccupied with the war to give it much thought. Robson was in a car in front of Philby’s when, on New Year’s Eve 1937, he and a group of journalists left Zaragoza by convoy to cover Franco’s bold counterattack to relieve a besieged garrison near the town of Teruel. Philby travelled in the back seat of a two-door saloon, accompanied by an Englishman, Dick Sheepshanks of Reuters, and two Americans, Ed Neil of Associated Press and Bradish Johnson, a freelance photographer who was on assignment for Newsweek.
On the way to Teruel the journalists stopped off at a small village called Caude. It was mid-morning with sub-zero temperatures. Soldiers huddled round improvised fires. Robson walked a few yards and sought shelter with a group huddled by the side of the barn to protect themselves from the wind. Suddenly there was a violent explosion, knocking two nearby Spanish press officers to the ground. Through a thick pale of smoke, Robson could see that the car Philby had been travelling in was on fire. He then saw Philby staggering across the road towards him, blood dripping down his face and on to his clothes, screaming as he pointed to the car, ‘They’re in there!’
Robson described what he saw next: ‘Sickeningly I saw three figures, with grotesquely blackened faces, lolling motionless in their seats … When the door was opened, Johnson tumbled out dead. Sheepshanks, who had been sitting next to Johnson, was breathing in quick, deep snores, his temple torn open, and consciousness gone for ever … Neil was sprawled in the back …’
Robson put Philby’s survival down to incredible luck. However, neither Robson nor the soldiers he was sheltering with, still less the two press officers who were blown off their feet, were in a position to see exactly what happened. Of the four journalists hit by the blast, one, Johnson, had died instantly, Sheepshanks died later that evening without regaining consciousness and Neil died of gangrene two days later. Only Philby survived to tell the tale. He had emerged largely untouched except for cuts on his forehead and wrist, telling Robson and others who were first on the scene that his car had been hit by shrapnel as they were entering the village. By his own account, Philby, who was sitting in the back seat, managed to ‘jump out’.
After being treated in a local field hospital, Philby went back to Tarragona where he was joined by Bunny Noble. He met her in a restaurant, his head heavily bandaged but neatly, cleanly rolled and stacked like a Sikh turban. Otherwise, Philby was dressed in a fur-lined military coat lent to him by a Spanish officer, as if he had emerged heroically from the trenches, his apparent serenity masking a deeper inner tension. He asked for a drink as soon as he sat down at table. ‘His hands were shaking,’ Bunny later recalled, ‘but his mind was absolutely clear.’
So clear that on that day, the day Neil died, Philby filed a story to The Times, reporting dispassionately on the death of his travelling companions and his own extraordinary escape. It was published alongside a photograph of Philby, with his head bandaged, looking more like a man in fancy-dress than an injured hero. In subsequent years conflicting accounts developed as to what really happened that cold day in December 1937. One version had it that the car had been hit by a Russian-made shell, and that the reason Philby omitted this detail from his report was that he could not bring himself to tell the world that a country he had secretly sworn allegiance to had not only killed three journalists, but also nearly killed him.
What is known about Philby is that in his years as a spy he displayed utter ruthlessness in betraying British agents in the field, and was also a master at covering his tracks. Philby’s own version of what happened that winter in Spain leaves more questions than answers that, with detailed forensic investigation, might have got at the truth that was lost in the fog of war.
Philby emerged from the incident with his reputation as a loyal journalist enhanced in the eyes of Franco, who promptly honoured him with the Cross of Military Merit for bravery in the line of duty. Similar medals were awarded posthumously to the journalists who had been killed after their corpses had been returned for immediate burial to their own countries – Sheepshanks’s to the UK, Neil’s and Johnson’s to the United States. Philby recovered, spending more time with his mistress in Zaragoza, and later in France. Then, feeling confident enough to resume his cover as a Times journalist, he returned to Burgos. There he continued to report on Franco’s military planning and political manoeuvrings, including the institutionalisation of the Generalísimos rule on 30 January 1938 with the formation of Franco’s first cabinet.
The Spanish Civil War was now entering its third year. By then, some left-wing intellectuals who, like Philby, had studied at Cambridge, had been killed fighting against Franco. They included the poets John Cornford and Julian Bell and the writer David Haden-Guest. Philby showed no regret or sense of grieving. Instead he enthusiastically went on to report for The Times on the ‘liberation’ of Barcelona by Franco’s troops. The city that George Orwell had witnessed in a state of euphoric revolution in the first months of the civil war in 1936 now greeted Franco with a mixture of hysterical abandon and disbelief. As one of his biographers later put it, it was in this moment of disaster for the international left that Philby celebrated the fact that his Spanish cover story had acquired perfection.
By then the civil war had secretly defined Philby politically, as it had done, in quite different ways, those English Catholics he so resented, not least Tom Burns, whose influential role as a publisher was by now well known to journalists on The Times. While in Burgos, Philby and Burns had separately made the acquaintance of a German officer named Ulrich von der Osten, or Don Julio, as Franco’s soldiers called him.
According to Philby, the German spent much time in Burgos entertaining him, with the hope of recruiting Bunny Noble to the Nazi cause, preferably in bed. Philby later boasted that he thought he had deceived the German into believing he had done him a good turn by suggesting he could have Noble for one night, an offer she indignantly turned down.
Philby made much of von der Osten, inflating his importance as a member of the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service. The two men would make a habit of meeting in the Convento de Las Esclavas, a convent which had been converted into a logistics depot and media centre. Philby, who was by this time passing his secrets to the KGB, would later claim it was in Burgos that he had first managed to infiltrate German intelligence, a boast he used to get himself recruited by the British secret services for similar anti-Nazi work after the beginning of the Second World War.