In January 1943 the British actor Leslie Howard, best remembered for his role as Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, received a letter from Sir Malcolm Robertson, MP, chairman of the British Council, exploring the idea of a lecture tour in Portugal and Spain to coincide with the Spanish release of the film.
The threat of a German occupation of Spain had resurfaced as a major strategic challenge to the Allies in the months after the North African campaign had got under way in 1942, with supply lines stretched across North Africa.
Behind the Robertson proposal lay a secret plan prepared by the British and US embassies in Madrid to consolidate their influence on the Franco regime following the military success of Operation Torch. The plan was to use Howard as a propaganda tool, and to have him ingratiate himself with Franco by establishing ties with the Spanish film industry which the dictator was keen on developing as popular entertainment.
Over the preceding months the Americans had been expanding their presence in Spain using front companies as cover for the OSS and leasing a separate building for the Casa Americana. This was a thinly disguised propaganda department directly copied from an idea established by the British embassy’s press department and the British Council, with dozens of expatriate and local employees involved in the showing and distribution of pro-Allied films and news bulletins, as well as the financing of helpful agents of influence.
Burns almost certainly consulted with his US friends prior to having the British Council make its approach to Howard, who recent polls were showing to be the most popular actor in the Iberian Peninsula. Cover for Burns’s involvement was provided by Walter Starkie, the head of the British Council in Madrid, who volunteered to officially host the proposed Howard visit.
Starkie had been posted to Spain in the summer of 1940, after being plucked by government from relative obscurity because of his influential contacts and knowledge of the country and its people.
At the time Starkie was a Catholic professor at Trinity College, Dublin, who had spent his holidays before the war travelling round Spain, writing two books about living with gypsies and earning his keep with his fiddle. A self-taught expert on Irish jigs and flamenco, Starkie also hugely enjoyed Spanish food, wine and bulls. His camouflage as an eccentric expatriate was completed by marriage to an Argentine amateur opera singer of Italian descent.
Years later in his memoirs Burns credited Lord Lloyd, the then head of the British Council, with Starkie’s ‘imaginative appointment’ to Spain. ‘For how could official Spain ever say that Starkie was persona non grata? He knew more about the country, its literature and folklore than most Spaniards, politics had never concerned him and he could hardly be suspected of being a British agent,’ wrote Burns.
Starkie was a British agent, his eccentric public persona belying a background of discreet service to His Majesty’s Government as an Anglo-Irishman who strongly identified with the Allied cause and equally strongly opposed his native Ireland’s neutrality in the war on the grounds that he considered it part of the British Empire. ‘Walter wanted to do anything to help the Allied cause, in contrast to the neutrality adopted by the Irish government,’ recalled his daughter Alma years later.
Alma was thirteen when she arrived in Madrid with her parents. Term time was spent in a Catholic girls’ boarding school back in Ireland. Holidays were spent riding in the Retiro in Madrid with her best friend, Mary, the daughter of the American ambassador Carlton Hayes. ‘The horses belonged to the Spanish army. They had all the best horses,’ remembered Alma.
Her Buenos Aires-born mother, Italia Augusta, dropped her first name soon after Starkie’s appointment in Madrid. She thought it a price worth paying to avoid being branded an agent of Mussolini and to be allowed access to the exclusive club of British expatriate women.
As a result, during the war years, when not drinking tea or playing bridge, Augusta helped organise knitting groups at which the wives of diplomats and their elegant friends from the Spanish aristocracy made clothes for the poor children of Madrid out of the sacks with which food was transported to the embassy. The ‘knitting circle’ was presided over by the impeccably correct Lady Maud and regularly addressed with morale boosting speeches by her husband, the ambassador Sir Samuel. It was a joint act they had finessed while campaigning for the Conservative Party back in pre-war London. In their mutual dependence, the childless Hoares came across as a business partnership as much as a marriage. They certainly lived in more style than many of the people of wartime Madrid.
As Alma Starkie recalled, ‘The poor people of Madrid were in a bad state in those days,’ said Alma. ‘I remember the Council doctor having to attend a young woman who had fainted out in the street. He pronounced her dead from malnutrition.’
While the ladies drank tea and knitted rough jerseys for the cold winter, their husbands plotted and intrigued. Some wives and girlfriends volunteered to visit the refugee internment centre in Miranda del Ebro. A few took on the more dangerous task of providing cover for those who had eluded arrest. The Starkies allowed their own large flat at number 24 Calle del Prado – in the old quarter, dating back to the Spanish empire – to be used by the embassy as a safe house for escaping prisoners of war and Jewish refugees.
In his official and covert activities, Starkie found a friend and trusted colleague in Burns. Both men mixed in similar social circles of bullfighters and artists, and looked to each other’s foreignness to rescue them on occasions from the stuffy insularity of some of their diplomatic colleagues, not least the ambassador Sir Samuel Hoare, who barely tolerated the ‘Irishman’ Starkie, despite his declared anti-(Irish) republicanism.
While both shared a love of adventure, Starkie and Burns were physically striking contrasts. The Anglo-Irishman, short – with a height roughly equalling his girth – and with a huge bald head; the Anglo-Chilean with Scottish and Basque blood, tall and lean, with a healthy crop of dark hair swept back from his forehead, whose semblance, as the war wore on, seemed to transform into a disarming cross between Noël Coward and Leslie Howard, as if he had absorbed the mannerisms of the Allied propaganda stars through a process of osmosis.
Inevitably Starkie and Burns came to be dubbed Sancho Panza and Don Quixote by their Spanish friends. One of their more outrageous adventures together revolved around a trip they made to Gibraltar, at the invitation of Captain ‘Hooky’ Holland, Commander of the Ark Royal. While Burns touched base with local intelligence contacts, Starkie played a concert of Irish jigs in the great hangar below deck of the Royal Navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, ‘the crew crouched or suspended among the overhanging girders giving thunderous applause’. After a night of music and heavy drinking, ‘Hooky’ accepted Starkie’s invitation to accompany him and Burns, strictly incognito, to a flamenco party he had organised the next day in Madrid. It was held in Starkie’s flat which was lit with candles for the occasion. Music and dance was provided by a band of wild gypsies Starkie had befriended on his wanderings through the country. Much wine and whisky flowed. In the early hours, the inebriated Starkie struggled to his feet and proposed a toast, revealing his guest’s identity for the first time. ‘To my honoured guest Captain Holland of the Ark Royal!’ Starkie declared merrily, lifting his glass.
It had an instant, sobering effect on Burns. ‘It was a horrifying and dangerous breach of security. I devoutly hoped that our naval attaché would not come to hear of it, still less his German counterpart,’ Burns recalled. Luckily the incident was not reported by either side. ‘Hooky’ returned safely to Gibraltar, while Sancho Panza and Quixote got back to the Leslie Howard project.
The initial approach to the actor had met with a firm but polite refusal. While delighted that his films were well known in the Iberian Peninsula, Howard claimed he knew very little about the land or its people, had far less lecturing skills than other actors, and, anyway, had yet to finish The Lamp Still Burns, a morale-boosting film he was helping to produce in the UK. Undeterred, Burns enlisted the support of key Whitehall figures, among them Jack Beddington, the head of the Film Division at the MoI who had been helping the British embassy – with mixed results – to get British films distributed in Spain.
Beddington put Howard’s obstinacy partly down to lingering depression. His lover, Violette Cunnington, had died suddenly a few weeks earlier having contracted a mysterious skin infection. Beddington believed that the one thing that was driving Howard on was his enduring love of film. He also knew that his agent, Arthur Chenhalls, was looking to expand the commercial success of his client by exploiting the fledgling Spanish-language cinema audience. Beddington visited them both at Denham Studios. He was initially greeted with caution. When he asked Howard how soon he expected to finish his latest film, the actor turned to his director Maurice Elvey and said, not entirely tongue in cheek: ‘Ought we to tell him – isn’t he a spy from the MoI?’
Beddington kept a cool head and marked time before broaching the subject of the Iberian trip in terms he hoped Howard and his agent would find hard to refuse. He explained that the actor’s role would be that of an ambassador for the film industry, and that behind the trip was the potential to tap exciting new opportunities across Spain, Portugal and Latin America. Howard remained publicly non-committal, while privately sharing with Chenhalls his fear that he might present too easy a target for extreme fascists if he went to Franco’s Spain.
Such apprehension was not unjustified given that Howard was Jewish and there was a high-profile presence of Nazis in Spain who had the support of the regime. In fact there was evidence of the sort of political passions that Howard might stir a few days later in Madrid when, on 12 February, the US embassy sponsored a gala showing of Gone with the Wind at one of the principal theatres in Madrid. The event was preceded by a warning from the pro-German sectors of the Spanish media that the film showed life at its most decadent and was ‘immoral’. During a subsequent demonstration, Falangist youths threw nails and shouted pro-German slogans at those attending.
Nevertheless the US ambassador Hayes was encouraged by the huge support the film generated among other Spaniards. They included the Bishop of Madrid who occupied a front seat and stayed, seemingly enthralled, for the full four hours the showing lasted, along with the Spanish foreign minister Jordana, his family and hundreds of others in the audience.
Even more significant and surprising was the reaction to the film when it was later shown to Franco in the private cinema he had built himself in the Pardo Palace. The Generalísimo was enormously impressed with the film’s depiction of the suffering and survival of war and encouraged its subsequent distribution across Spain in defiance of Nazi advice that it was US propaganda and therefore should be banned along with the book on which the film was based, as had occurred in Germany.
‘It proved, indeed, to be a gala affair, and one of our best bits of propaganda,’ Carlton Hayes later recalled.
Days after the film’s successful showing in Madrid, Howard was subjected to further pressure from senior British government figures. Brendan Bracken, the MoI chief, and Anthony Eden, the foreign secretary, were among the ministers who personally contacted the actor. In response, Howard told Eden that, while he was happy to go to Lisbon, he was not prepared to cross the border. He had no desire to meet leading Falangists at official functions, which he thought unavoidable, and was worried that such meetings might upset the Russians.
Such sensitivity towards Moscow was curious. It suggests that Howard or his agent, or both, may have had some contact with one or other of the Soviet agents who had manoeuvred themselves into departments dealing with Spain, including Philby.
However, there were other elements in Whitehall, among them some of the Foreign Office’s top officials, that were unconvinced by Howard’s excuses. ‘Mr Leslie Howard is going to Spain to lecture on Shakespeare acting and film making. I feel that Mr Howard is exaggerating the damage which his visit may cause to his relations with the Russians …’ stated a Foreign Office memorandum of 16 April 1943. ‘I agree that Mr Howard is making heavy weather of this … the Russians understand our Spanish policy perfectly well, and are not going to hold it up against Mr Leslie Howard that he helped to forward anti-German propaganda in Spain,’ wrote Walter Roberts, the head of the Foreign Office’s European section, a day later.
The Foreign Office had by then received a secret telegram from the Madrid embassy confirming that arrangements for Howard’s visit were advanced and arguing strongly that to suspend them would prove hugely damaging in diplomatic and propaganda terms. Anthony Eden wrote to Howard: ‘It is very important just now to fly the British flag in Spain and to give encouragement to our many friends there … on the whole I think it would be best to avoid Spanish internal politics as a subject of conversation, and to concentrate on explaining the British war effort … I do not think either that you need fear that your journey will be misinterpreted by the Russians, who take a realistic view of Spanish affairs and of the importance of Spanish neutrality.’
A week later Howard and Arthur Chenhalls were on their way to Lisbon in an Ibis DC3. The two men stayed there ten days. Between receptions and lectures on Shakespeare and the British and American film industries, Howard spent much of his time in his shorts dictating notes to an young expatriate English secretary at his beachside hotel.
The warm sun and the casino at Estoril reminded him of California. Photographs taken at the time invariably show Howard in the company of young, attractive women. His grief for Violette had given way to the old philandering ways which had troubled his marriage during his Hollywood years. Howard found that the young secretaries at the British embassy and the pretty young daughters of the local Anglophile Portuguese were easily seduced by his charm and good looks and he felt invigorated in their presence.
‘He was very polite and simpatico, among the most interesting individuals I met in the whole war. Everyone fell in love with him,’ recalled Olive Stock, a member of the embassy staff who was appointed to help organise Howard’s accommodation and schedule before being transferred to the Madrid embassy as Burns’s assistant.
On 8 May, Howard and Chenhalls travelled to Madrid on the overnight Lusitania Express, to be greeted at Atocha station by Starkie in the midst of an early summer heat wave. Howard was furious when Starkie began almost immediately going through a packed list of planned engagements. They ranged from meetings with Spanish actors and attendance at embassy cocktail parties to numerous speaking engagements and intimate meetings with a select group of local artists and bullfighters. One of those he was scheduled to meet was the Hollywood Spanish actress Conchita Montenegro, with whom Howard had co-starred in the film Never the Twain Shall Meet in 1931, when she had just turned nineteen and he was thirty-seven years old. It was rumoured at that time that they had had a passionate affair. Both had aged well in the intervening twelve years, and they made a striking couple in wartime Madrid – she a beautiful, mature thirty-something-year-old, he a well-preserved and attractive forty-six. Montenegro was by now engaged to – and would marry within the year – Ricardo Giménez-Arnau, one of Burns’s contacts in the Falange where he was head of the right-wing party’s international affairs department. Her reunion with Howard appears to have prompted a light-hearted flirtation and nothing more serious. Prior to her death in April 2007, Montenegro gave an interview in which she alleged that she had helped secure a private meeting between Howard and Franco during which the actor passed on a secret message from Churchill that was critical in ensuring that Spain kept out of the war, although the evidence for this is largely circumstantial, and Burns, who would have known about it, left no record of it, either verbal or oral.
What is known with more certainty is that, once in Madrid, Howard insisted that his official schedule be cut back drastically so as to spare him the requirement of meeting too many representatives of a Spanish government. By contrast, he was keen to briefly rekindle an old flame in Montenegro, and got his opportunity when Burns sat him next to her at an intimate lunch party he arranged for the actor at a friendly restaurant the British embassy used for discreet encounters on the outskirts of Madrid. While Howard was in the Spanish capital, Burns allowed him three days free of any speaking engagements, a concession which is thought to have paved the way for the actor’s fateful amorous encounter with a beautician who worked in the Ritz where he was staying. She was one of several German agents who tracked Howard throughout his stay in the Iberian Peninsula. Among the others was Gloria von Furstenberg, the glamorous Mexican wife of a German count, to whom Howard was introduced by the Spanish actor Luis Escobar. In her memoirs the OSS agent Aline Griffith described von Furstenberg as the best-dressed woman she had ever seen – ‘the pure white shoulderless tube of a dress was embroidered with tiny blue stars mixed with geometric patterns that suggested … little swastikas’. Griffith believed that, while Howard may have been warned about von Furstenberg, he was so struck by her beauty that he spent much of the evening telling her about his future travel plans, including the fact that he was flying back to London via Lisbon within a week. The information is thought to have been subsequently passed on to the German embassy in Madrid.
Against this background of intrigue, Madrid remained submerged in a relentless war of propaganda between the Allies and the Axis. The British and US embassies were trying to maximise the publicity around the Allied military advance across North Africa and the massive bombings of German factories. For its part the German embassy was spreading rumours of an imminent Allied invasion of Spanish sovereign territory.
To the British embassy, Howard’s presence in Madrid represented an exciting new phase in their efforts to win the hearts and minds of Spaniards. In the words of his son Rodney, ‘this charming English export epitomised for many Spaniards the best and most admirable of British qualities’. But it was precisely such usefulness to the Allied cause and his record of anti-Nazism that made him a target for the Germans as a suspect enemy agent.
Among the subjects discussed by Howard and Arthur Chenhalls in their talks with representatives of the Spanish film industry was a plan for an Anglo-Spanish production of the life of Christopher Columbus, a project which hugely appealed to Franco. The figure of the explorer and ‘discoverer’ of the Americas was being resurrected by Franco’s government as a symbol of Spanish imperial greatness and of universal Christianity extending on both sides of the Atlantic. Columbus as a Christian hero went down well with the Catholics who were driving American and British policy on Spain.
But while Howard owed his stardom to America, his visit to Madrid was controlled by the British. Social events organised for him included a flamenco evening at the British Council to which Franco’s ambassador in London, the Duke of Alba, was invited along with other Anglophile members of the aristocracy and artists and writers who had survived the civil war.
Accompanied by John Marks of The Times, Burns also took Howard to a bullfight before introducing him to some of Madrid’s nightspots, in exchange for which he was expected to deliver on some of the programme that had been originally devised. The most successful events in propaganda terms were a lunch and press conference with foreign and Spanish journalists, and a lecture Howard gave on Hamlet, filled with thinly veiled allusions to the courage and nobility of the Allies in the face of the forces of darkness as represented by Nazism. The lecture was well received by a carefully selected audience of academics, dramatists and art critics, and its printed version – translated into Spanish – was distributed with the daily embassy bulletin across Madrid.
Howard then went to ground, disappearing to his room in the Ritz and not surfacing again for twenty-four hours. His schedule was hastily rearranged, again. Two further official engagements were cancelled, much to Hoare’s chagrin. However, Burns suffered Howard’s idiosyncrasies more readily that his ambassador, seeing in the maverick actor a kindred spirit with whom he had much in common. Long-term membership of the Garrick Club – where they had met on several occasions informally before the war – a fondness for women and a mixed foreign ancestry all helped fuel a genuine friendship.
Tragically, Burns failed to instil an element of self-discipline and caution into Howard’s reckless lifestyle. When Howard re-emerged at the Ritz he did so arm in arm with the hotel beautician. The next day she was with Howard when he took the train back to Lisbon, helping him give the slip to the embassy ‘minder’, a junior official the ambassador had insisted keep a close watch on him. The lovers shared a compartment while Chenhalls slept alone along the corridor.
Howard and the beautician separated on arriving in Lisbon, leaving the seemingly insatiable Howard to pick up where he had left off last time, sharing a romantic dinner with one of his female friends from the British embassy, in a seaside restaurant near the fishing village of Cascais.
Later that week Howard gave a short speech of introduction to The First of the Few before it was run for the first time in Portugal at a private showing organised by the British Council. It turned out to be Howard’s final public act of adherence to the Allied cause.
The First of the Few is probably one of the most unashamedly patriotic and propagandist of all the films that Howard acted in, a tribute to the RAF and a rallying call for continued heroism and perseverance. It was exactly the sort of line the MoI hoped to encourage.
On 1 June 1943, the day after the screening, the Ibis DC3 in which Howard was flying back to England was attacked over the Bay of Biscay by the Luftwaffe. It was the first commercial airliner to be shot down on the Lisbon–UK route in the Second World War. All on board, including Howard, were killed.
In the aftermath of the crash, British intelligence circulated rumours that the Germans had actually intended to kill Winston Churchill, mistakenly thinking he was on the plane. It was a theory that Churchill himself resolutely stuck to, along with others who were with Howard during his visit to Portugal and Spain.
Churchill was at the time in North Africa, at a military aerodrome in the desert outside Algiers briefing an American squadron that was about to bomb the island of Pantelleria, halfway between Tunisia and Sicily. A picturesque volcanic island, its capture was regarded as crucial to the Allied success in invading Sicily in 1943 because it allowed planes to be based in range of the larger island. Pantelleria was heavily bombarded in the days before the landing of the main Allied attack, and the garrison finally surrendered as the landing troops were approaching. Churchill had flown there, after talks with Roosevelt in Washington, by flying boat, first to Newfoundland and then to Gibraltar, a journey of seventeen hours during which the aircraft was struck by lightning. ‘There were no consequences, which, after all, is what is important on these journeys,’ Churchill commented later.
On 28 May Churchill had flown the three-hour trip from Gibraltar to Algiers in a specially converted Lancaster bomber. On 4 June he flew back to Gibraltar on the same plane. Because the weather was bad, he decided to continue his journey to England later that day in the Lancaster rather than the flying boat as was originally intended. Churchill was back in London by the morning of 5 June. ‘We have been rather anxious about you since they got Leslie Howard,’ his daughter Diana wrote.
It was only partly due to a British secret service disinformation campaign that the Germans were kept guessing about Churchill’s real flight plans, and believed that he might at one stage, during his visit to North Africa, divert at short notice and take a commercial flight from Lisbon.
As a result German agents were put on alert at Lisbon airport on 1 June. By then the passenger list of the Ibis DC3 flight to England had been changed at least once before Howard and Arthur Chenhalls were observed walking across the tarmac surrounded by other passengers to board the plane. Cigar-smoking, bald, portly and wearing a heavy coat, Chenhalls bore some physical similarity to Churchill but not one that stood up to close scrutiny.
The morning of departure was bright and sunny and both Howard and Chenhalls had lingered to say goodbye to Portuguese friends and embassy staff and to allow the local media to take photographs. It seems improbable that by the time the two men reached the aircraft their identity had not been established beyond doubt. Indeed, the fact that a German news agency first announced the crash, naming Howard and Chenhalls among the victims, suggests that, when the plane was shot down, it was not the prime minister but Howard who was the target of the Luftwaffe, and that British intelligence attempted to cover up the real reason for his death – the suspicion that he was not just a propagandist but also a spy. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the whole Leslie Howard affair is the possibility that, by June 1943, the breaking of German codes meant that a small exclusive sector of British intelligence may have known in advance of German plans to attack the aircraft, and that the information may have been deliberately suppressed so as not to compromise the Enigma breakthrough at Bletchley Park.
What is beyond doubt is that the manifest of the fourteen passengers originally booked on that fateful flight included at least two other individuals believed by the Germans to have had some involvement with British intelligence – Tyrrel Shervington, the Shell manager in Lisbon, and Wilfred Barthold Israel of the Jewish Refugee Mission.
It is also true that the young son of a British diplomat based in Washington, Major Frederick Partridge OBE, and his nanny were removed from the passenger list to make way for Howard and Chenhalls, and that a third passenger, a Catholic priest from the local English College, disembarked at the last minute, making the passenger list an unlucky thirteen.
The priest, Fr Holmes, withdrew from the flight after being told by an airport employee that he had received an unidentified telephone message requiring that he urgently call either the British embassy or the Papal Nunciature. When he did so he could find no trace of anyone making such a call. The providence and motive of the telephone call that had drawn the priest away from the flight was to remain a mystery. Although Fr Holmes may have had a premonition and made the call an excuse for missing the flight, he never suggested it. ‘It is just possible that the supernatural element has obscured the fact that the unknown caller may, indeed, have had a hot line to someone who really knew what was going to happen,’ Geoffrey Stow, the assistant air attaché in Lisbon at the time, wrote later.
Stow died without ever clarifying what he meant, even to his close family. If someone did deliberately warn Fr Holmes off the plane, the motive remains equally unclear since Fr Holmes had no known hidden agenda.
With the passing of the years and evidence emerging of the British government’s involvement in Howard’s mission, what seems far less in doubt is that the Germans would have had a perfectly valid reason for considering Howard an Allied propaganda tool, if not a paid-up agent of British intelligence. It was this theory that weighed heavily on the conscience of those who had encouraged him to go to Spain in the first place, and who did little to protect him from the prying eyes of German agents.
Only days after the crash did British embassy staff discover that Howard had devoted part of his final days in Lisbon to writing letters while relaxing on his balcony in the seaside Hotel Atlantico in Estoril.
To his long-suffering wife Ruth he wrote a light-hearted if prescient account of the Germans he would occasionally stumble across in the hotel: ‘The Herrenvolk are not hard to recognise and whenever they see us approaching they drop their voices and stare icily’. It suggested that Howard remained reconciled to hanging on to married life despite his serial infidelity, and that he was aware he was being pursued by the Nazis.
A seemingly perfect gentleman to the end, Howard also wrote several thank-you notes to his hosts in Madrid. As his son Ronald later explained, ‘to some he apologised for turning up late and others for not turning up at all’. They were token apologies in the main, perhaps made with one eye on maintaining his popularity and keeping open the prospect of making money in the Spanish film industry in the future. He took particular care with the letter he wrote to Burns. In it, Howard makes clear his belief that he owed him special thanks for his friendship and support during a tempestuous Iberian journey and an apology for his behaviour.
Dear Tom,
After the wild nightmare which in retrospect my Madrid trip seems to have been, I just want to let you know how grateful I am for all you did to get what I hope will have proved successful results. There may have been occasions when I seemed far from grateful, but you will, I know, take that in good part. It was very hot, I was not feeling very well, and the nights were very short. I quite realise that all the visits you arranged to the bull-fight and the film studios were a necessary contribution towards the result for which we are all striving. It may please you to hear that in the view of the Spaniards to whom I spoke to you are one of the aces among the English. Naturally I was most interested in the film situation, which I think merits a good deal of attention, and I do think I might come back one day in this connection. If there ever is such a project, and you are still there, I shall be in touch with you very quickly. If you ever want to reach me in England, Denham Studios, where I have my office, always finds me.
Au revoir, and many thanks and give my love to all the people I really like.
The letter was written on 29 May 1943. It reached Burns in Madrid two days later. By then news was filtering through to the embassy that a commercial airliner believed to be transporting a group of British civilians, including the actor Leslie Howard, had been shot down by enemy aircraft off the coast of Galicia, in northern Spain. There were seventeen people on board, including four crewmen. There were no survivors. Nor were any remains of the aircraft ever found.
* * *
Two weeks later, Burns sent a message to the MoI reporting that distribution problems had forced him to suspend the sending of copies of Spanish newsreels with the exception of one piece which he felt was useful in propaganda terms. It was a clip of Howard visiting a Spanish film studio, days before his doomed flight from Lisbon. By then the British and American embassies were reporting that matters in Spain were improving after the embassies had successfully contained the diplomatic fallout from the successful implementation of Operation Torch.
Rumours of a German invasion persisted, however, and the autumn of 1943 witnessed the beginning of the ‘last major crisis’ the British embassy in Madrid had to deal with as the Allies quarrelled over how best to limit the sale of Spanish wolfram to Germany. Delivery of the metal was vital to the German steel industry, which produced tanks and guns, and made possible the continuation of the war. Nevertheless, the ensuing period leading up to the final Allied victory would also see the betrayals and deceptions of wartime Madrid reach a resolution in diplomatic as well as personal terms for one of its key members of staff. For it saw the unfolding of, arguably, Burns’s greatest propaganda coup, his love affair with a Spanish woman of not inconsiderable beauty, charm and influence. On 10 October 1943 Burns received an invitation to visit her father, Gregorio Marañón. A doctor, writer and consummate political networker, Marañón was a man of considerable public standing who had been cultivated by the British. Early that summer, Marañón had been the key guest at a dinner hosted by the British Council’s Starkie for a team of British doctors and academics on a Foreign Office-sponsored visit to Spain.
Marañón was subsequently described by one of the English doctors thus: ‘I enjoyed meeting Marañón very much, although he speaks very little English, and his conversational Spanish was rather too much for me. He is a literateure, interested in art and politics as well as medicine. He had, and still has a great reputation as a physician, the true basis of which I was unable to assess. Indeed I do not recall discussing any medical subject with him at all. I am inclined to think that the diversity of his interests argues a certain superficiality, and that his success has depended more upon his personality than anything else.’
A less grudging assessment of Marañón was sent to the Foreign Office around this time by Ambassador Hoare. In his secret dispatch to London, Hoare described Marañón as ‘intellectually, one of the best minds in Spain’. Marañón featured on a named list of four ‘representative Spaniards’ Hoare regarded as ‘important contacts’, along with the Cardinal Archbishop of Madrid, Pedro Segura, the writer José Martínez Ruiz Azorín and General Matallana, a senior army officer who had fought against Franco during the civil war.
Marañón made a name for himself in his country’s politics in the 1920s, after taking a stand against the authoritarian rule of General Primo de Rivera and earning a prison sentence for his pains. He was later one of a group of leading liberal intellectuals who forced the abdication of King Alfonso XIII and helped bring about the proclamation of the Spanish Republic in 1931. It proved a short-lived engagement with left-wing politics.
Marañón became disillusioned with the political radicalisation of the Republic, and within a year of the outbreak of civil war had led his family into exile in Paris. Although he had been threatened by extreme elements on both sides of the political spectrum, Marañón’s sympathies increasingly shifted in favour of a Franco victory, which he saw as necessary to restore a sense of political stability and national unity prior to what he hoped would be the restoration of a constitutional monarchy. Marañón returned to Spain in October 1942.
He was allowed to resume his medical practice in Madrid on the condition that he did not immediately assume his pre-war position as a physician in one of Madrid’s major hospitals and kept out of politics. He complied by not publicly criticising the regime, while maintaining discreet political contacts with those, like himself, who mistakenly believed and hoped that Franco would pave the way for a democratic monarchy once the war was over, or even sooner.
The intelligence gathered by the British embassy on Marañón suggested there was still a potential conspirator beneath the skin of the popular doctor: ‘Although one of the public men mainly responsible for King Alfonso’s downfall, he is now an advocate for Don Juan. He spoke more bitterly than ever of Franco and the Falange and also criticised the Church leaders for not having adopted a more independent attitude.
He declared that a close friend of his who had recently been Minister at the Vatican had told him that the Pope was growing exercised over the want of independence in the Church,’ reported Hoare.
The privileged access to Marañón that Burns enjoyed came about thanks to his membership of the literary and artistic clubs that began to re-form after their disintegration during the civil war. Through the tertulias Burns won the trust of some of Marañón’s closest friends, among them the sculptor Sebastián Miranda. It was Miranda who secured Burns an invitation to the sixteenth-century convent near Toledo that Marañón had converted into his country retreat and which at the time he generally reserved for close family, trusted friends or individuals brought along on their recommendation. ‘Marañón is back and you must meet him,’ Miranda announced to Burns one day with a characteristic sense of drama.
The invitation was for Sunday sobremesa, literally translated as ‘on the table’ but meaning the extended period over coffee, brandy, anis and cigars, during which Spaniards – and Spanish men in particular – engaged in relaxed conversation on politics, art or bulls.
Burns and Miranda duly set off for Toledo in one of the embassy cars, Burns’s dog Juerga sitting on the sculptor’s lap in the front seat. The journey took them through working-class suburbs and towns around Madrid that had seen some of the worst fighting during the capital’s prolonged siege. The ruins of houses destroyed by artillery, the windows and walls shattered by machine-gun fire and the spreading shanty towns along the way served as a reminder as to why many Spaniards had no desire to go through another war.
As they approached Toledo, Burns found his progress blocked at a level crossing by a long, stationary goods train that seemed in no hurry to move. Miranda jumped out, walked over to the train driver and indicated the Union Jack on the bonnet of Burns’s car. It was, Miranda insisted, the emblem of the British ambassador and he was in the car, late for a very important meeting with Toledo’s military governor. Within seconds the train was moving again, allowing the two men to proceed, laughing, on their way. The route to Marañón’s cigarral took Burns and Miranda across the Roman bridge of San Martín and up a hill on the other side of the wide and fast-flowing Tagus. A large wooden gate with a wall made of rough tiles on either side marked the entrance to the narrow, unpaved lane that wound its way down to the house, with its magnificent view of the old imperial city perched over the valley.
Burns drove the final metres to Marañón’s house with a growing sense of anticipation, through an avenue of young cypress trees bordering wild rosemary bushes and olive groves, the extraordinary peace and isolation of the doctor’s country retreat fuelling a belief that he had been brought to a temple of wisdom across a biblical landscape. Don Gregorio, as Miranda introduced him, was waiting with his wife Lolita, son Gregorio, son-in-law Alejandro, three daughters, Carmen, Belén and Mabel, and two grandchildren – a chieftain among his most intimate tribe.
Apart from Marañón himself, ‘powerfully built with head suggestive of a noble Roman’, according to Burns’s first sight of him, and Gregorio junior – with whom Burns had had brief dealings over the issue of British support for Spanish journalists – only one member of the family came into proper focus that afternoon. That was Mabel. Aged twenty-five, the youngest and prettiest of Marañón’s two unmarried daughters, petite, like her mother, with smiling brown eyes, full mouth, fresh olive skin, and short, dark brown hair, she displayed a disarming mix of innocence and alert self-confidence. Burns’s memory of this first brief encounter with Mabel – twelve years his junior – is all that remains on record of his first visit to the legendary Cigarral de Menores. From the outset Burns was struck by the fact that Mabel seemed the only member of her family who spoke almost flawless English. She said she had learnt it from her longest serving nanny Miss Burns (a namesake but no relation of their visitor), a Liverpudlian Catholic of Irish descent. Mabel confided that she was going away until Christmas to stay at Gómez Cardeña, a bull ranch in Andalusia, at the invitation of its owner, the bullfighter Belmonte, as it happened one of Burns’s Spanish friends. Winter was the season for identifying and rounding up bulls that were suitable for the fight and, having ridden horses from childhood, and developed her father’s love of bullfighting, Mabel was looking forward to a working holiday on the ranch.
By chance Burns met Mabel a week later in Madrid, on the eve of her journey south. They had both been invited to a cocktail party given by the Marqueses de Quintanar and Miraflores, well-known members of the Spanish political right before the war who had shifted their allegiance away from the Axis towards the Allies after the success of the joint British and American landings in North Africa.
Parties thrown by the Quintanars were popular and offered the perfect opportunity in wartime Madrid for the exchange of gossip, and above all to be seen in the company of the rich and powerful. And yet Burns was less motivated on this occasion by his professional calling than by a stirring of the heart as he and Mabel spotted each other in the social mêlée: ‘It seemed natural that we should gravitate towards each other across the crowded room and that it would seem empty apart from her presence,’ he later recalled. Burns felt that his love life was taking a profound turn for the better for the first time in years. From that autumn of 1943, Mabel Marañón became the sole target of Burns’s wartime affections as he gradually discovered the extent to which her youth belied a depth of experience he, now thirty-seven, had never imagined could be possessed by a Spanish woman of her age and social upbringing.
Mabel’s early memories were of a strict childhood largely dominated by a series of English governesses, none of whom lasted as long or exercised such influence as Miss Burns. The young governess arrived in Madrid in 1926, when Mabel was eight, and stayed in the Marañón household for the next seven years.
Miss Burns was a strict Victorian in attitude, who believed in limiting Mabel’s access to her parents, and imposed a regime of lessons and formal meals which included five o’clock tea laid out with milk and cakes. She was blue-eyed and red-headed and extremely prim. She was therefore horrified by the wolf whistles of workers as she walked through the streets of Madrid. Her idea of intimacy was the rare occasions she allowed Mabel to give her a manicure while she read Dickens.
Every month copies of the Illustrated London News arrived at the house and Mabel’s mother would cut out and frame the photographs of the royal princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Despite Marañón’s Republican leanings, he and his wife had maintained cordial relations with the Spanish King Alfonso XIII and his wife, who was a first cousin of Queen Victoria. They shared a common affinity with the British royal family.
Far from stifling the young Mabel, such tutelage and privileged upbringing merely fuelled a fascination for the world that was apparently out of bounds but which she sensed from an early age to be a great deal more exciting and engaging that the repressed environment in which Miss Burns sought comfort.
The year Miss Burns arrived in Madrid was also the year Gregorio Marañón was thrown into prison for a month after being accused, along with a group of liberal military officers and intellectuals, of plotting the overthrow of the dictator Primo de Rivera. Marañón’s subsequent release on payment of a 100,000-peseta fine served as a reminder of his popularity and influence. Throughout his imprisonment his cell was garlanded with flowers sent by well-wishers and he received a constant stream of visitors, from ordinary workers to establishment figures campaigning for his liberty.
Five years later, the Spanish Republic Marañón helped proclaim brought the social and political tensions that had been simmering for decades to the boil; there were agrarian revolts, strikes, and churches were attacked. The left pressed for greater freedoms and root and branch constitutional reform. The bastions of privilege and political reaction – the landed aristocracy, right-wing politicians, sectors of the military and the Church – plotted and conspired. In the midst of the ferment, Mabel felt drawn to a new generation of Spanish women who, rather than marry young or join a convent, took advantage of the educational reforms to emancipate themselves. She volunteered as a nurse in her father’s hospital and prepared to apply for university.
Then Mabel’s life was brutally interrupted by the outbreak of civil war. Her father initially reacted to the military uprising by signing a manifesto with other leading intellectuals in defence of democracy. He also volunteered to go on working as a doctor in Madrid while the capital remained in Republican hands. Mabel decided to continue as a nurse in order to stay close to her father.
The Marañóns stuck together in Madrid, only to find themselves, like so many other Spaniards, swept up by events which seemed rapidly to run out of control. In the following weeks, Marañón became increasingly horrified by the violence and intolerance that engulfed Spain and tried with limited success to intercede on behalf of those persecuted by one side or the other. But before the year was out he himself was under threat, his liberal politics challenged by the increasingly fanatical elements on the left and the right that were determining the course of the war.
One night he received a summons to appear at a barracks held by Republican militias in the Casa de Campo, the large woodland park on the outskirts of Madrid where hundreds of prisoners were held and interrogated, the majority prior to summary execution. Fearful of what might await him, he asked Mabel to accompany him in his chauffeurdriven car as a witness. As they approached the barracks Marañón told the chauffeur to stop and warned his daughter to stay in the car. ‘If I am not out of here in one hour, I want you to get to Madrid and raise the alarm,’ he told Mabel before embracing her and leaving her with the fear that she might never see him again.
Mabel would remember that wait for the rest of her life. Time passed neither quickly nor slowly. It was suspended while the best and most valued moments of her life so far – those spent in her father’s presence – filled her thoughts, and she struggled with a sense of despair and panic. She desperately wanted to believe he was still alive against the look of hate in the eyes of the sentries, the creeping darkness that enveloped the park and the staccato machine-gun fire which periodically shattered the claustrophobic silence.
Almost an hour later Marañón emerged from the barracks, his face pale and drawn with exhaustion, his suit dishevelled and smudged with dirt after he’d been interrogated about his political leanings by an ad hoc workers’ committee. All the way back to Madrid, Marañón held his daughter’s hand in silence, squeezing it gently every now and then as a way of reassuring her, a habit Mabel would replicate with her own children in later years. But he had decided that, for the sake of his family and his own survival, he had no option but to go into exile. Two countries had offered him asylum – Mexico and France. He chose the latter in order to stay closer to Spain and to friends who were already in exile north of the Pyrenees. He also had with him an invitation from the French consulate in Madrid to give a lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris where he had been made an honorary fellow in 1932. This helped him secure safe-conduct papers from the Republican government.
Less than a month later, Marañón and his family left Madrid in a small convoy of cars. They were accompanied by another well-known Spanish intellectual, Ramón Menéndez Pidal, and his family and by a young captain of the anarchist militias, a nephew of Angel Ganivet whose seminal essays on the character of Spain and its history hugely influenced the so-called generation of ’14 to which Marañón and others belonged. The captain suspected from the outset that the Sorbonne invitation was a cover to help Marañón escape from the execution squads in Madrid, but took it upon himself to help save his uncle’s friend and disciple.
Under Captain Ganivet’s protection, the convoy drove south-east through territory occupied by anti-Franco forces. They reached the Republican-held port of Alicante where HMS Active, a Royal Navy frigate that was helping transport refugees out of Spain under the auspices of the International Red Cross, was anchored off the coast.
The small family convoy made its way to the harbour and there found a young English officer with a team of ratings in a small boat waiting to take the latest contingent of refugees out to the ship. The Marañón and Menéndez Pidal families were just stepping aboard when two local militiamen broke into an argument with Captain Ganivet, insisting that the two youngest male members of the party – Mabel’s brother Gregorio and Gonzalo, the son of Menéndez Pidal – should stay behind and enlist in the Republican army.
Of the two, young Gregorio was most at risk because he had enlisted in the Falange youth movement which the extreme left regarded as criminally fascist. But both he and Gonzalo were saved thanks to the timely intervention of the English officer, and the added distraction caused by Captain Ganivet as he officiously waved safe-conduct papers.
As Ganivet engaged the militiamen, Gregorio and Gonzalo were bundled on to the waiting boat, and, shielded by their families and the British sailors, were speedily transferred to Active. Only later did the militiamen receive confirmation that the safe-conduct papers did not cover young Gregorio and that he was therefore a fugitive from the Spanish Republic and subject to a military tribunal. By then Active’s anchor had been raised and the vessel was steaming out of port.