We Saw Spain Die (6 page)

Gorrell’s three arrests showed that, in both zones, troops near the front were understandably jittery and indeed trigger-happy when confronted by prying civilians who might be spies. Nevertheless, the contrasting treatment received – apologies and dinner from the Republic’s authorities, death threats and expulsion from the rebels – was representative of the attitudes of both sides towards journalists. To put it simply, the Republican press apparatus tended to facilitate rather than impede the work of correspondents. A section of the Ministerio de Estado (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) had been set up within a few days of the military coup. The Madrid press office was housed in the thirteen-storey Telefónica building, the headquarters of the American International Telephone and Telegraph Company, situated on the central avenue known as the Gran Vía. It was from there that the journalists delivered their stories to the censors before they were allowed to
telephone them to their papers. At night, camp beds were set up for those who were waiting to send out their stories. In a chaotic din of languages, ITT employees who acted as the first censors had to listen in to ensure that what was read out did not diverge from the censored text. If the newspapermen deviated from the approved wording, they were immediately cut off. By early November, as rebel forces approached, ready to occupy the city, the Telefónica, Madrid’s tallest building, became a daily target for artillery fire and was regularly hit. Despite the shelling, the censors, the switchboard girls and the correspondents simply carried on.
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In the early days of the war, the censorship in Madrid was inefficient and sometimes heavy-handed. None of the early censors understood English and articles had to be submitted with a Spanish translation before approval for transmission was granted. There were no fixed guidelines and each censor exercised his authority as he thought best. One correspondent might see his dispatch passed for transmission while the same story worded differently by a colleague would be censored shortly after. Lester Ziffren described this situation in his diary on 23 August 1936:

Rebel planes made their first raid on Madrid’s environs and bombed the Getafe aerodrome. The government confirmed the news in its 10 p.m. broadcast. The censor would not permit transmission of cables carrying the text of this broadcast. Apparently decided such news may be all right for the Spanish people but not for the press abroad. In view of this situation, I instructed my Paris office to pick up the official broadcasts because I could not send the texts out of Spain by cable.
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The position of the censorship was put on a more rational basis from the first week of September with the appointment as Foreign Minister in Largo Caballero’s cabinet of Julio Álvarez del Vayo, himself a one-time journalist. Born in Madrid in 1891, the highly cosmopolitan Álvarez del Vayo had studied with Sydney and Beatrice Webb at the London School of Economics in 1912 and then in the following year at the University of Leipzig, where he became friends with Juan Negrín. He also came into
contact with Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. He later wrote a biography of Rosa Luxembourg,
La senda roja
(Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1934). In 1916, he met Lenin in Switzerland. He visited Russia several times and wrote two books about the Soviet experiment,
La nueva Rusia
(Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1926), and
Rusia a los doce años
(Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1929). On 18 September 1936, Álvarez del Vayo appointed his friend Luis Rubio Hidalgo, another experienced newspaperman, as Chief Censor at the Foreign Press and Propaganda Office of the Ministry.
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Henceforth, it was much easier for correspondents to get their stories transmitted. Having known him for some years as a colleague, Lester Ziffren found Rubio Hidalgo to be helpful and co-operative. However, he was considered by others to be a suave scheming careerist. Rubio Hidalgo was, according to the highly experienced
Daily Express
correspondent, Sefton ‘Tom’ Delmer, ‘an opportunist official who went out of his way to look as Machiavellian as he could with a thin streak of a black moustache on his upper lip, a superior cynical smile when he talked, and dark glasses hiding what were really timid eyes beneath the traditional mask of the international conspirator’.
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Ziffren felt that Rubio tried to make the censorship less irksome, and confined censorship to prohibiting references to troop movements, military plans or atrocities. Previously, the censorship had applied the same criteria to news for domestic use and the stories submitted by foreign correspondents: ‘Defeats were never admitted in the Loyalist press which was engaged principally in publishing material intended to strengthen the public morale.’ The hardened American journalist Louis Fischer was shocked by the fact that the Republican press did not tell all the truth:

The first question put to me when I arrived in Barcelona was, ‘Have we lost Irún?’ It has been lost weeks ago. The government has never announced it. Nor does the public know officially about the surrender of San Sebastián. The daily War Office reports are replete with victories; no repulse is recorded. It would be difficult to understand after collating all these broadcasts why the enemy is approaching Madrid. The Loyalists should, instead be approaching Madrid.
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Fischer put pressure on his friend Álvarez del Vayo to recognize that reporting of the truth would benefit the Republic. Rubio was authorized by Álvarez del Vayo to permit news of government defeats after he too had argued that it made more sense to admit a fact immediately rather than try to deny facts which would any way be broadcast by the rebels. Consequently more accurate news had been published abroad about the true situation than was printed in Spain. Ziffren wrote warmly that Rubio Hidalgo’s efforts to improve on the previously inefficient and clumsy censorship rendered it ‘more tractable and workable’.
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It is more than likely, however, that the changes noted by Ziffren were actually the work of others. It is certainly not difficult to find criticisms of Rubio Hidalgo from those who wanted to see the working conditions of correspondents made even easier, on the grounds that they would then be more likely to write in a manner that favoured the Republic.

As the rebel columns moving from the south came ever nearer to Madrid, the problems of the censorship machinery were merely part of the difficulties faced by the Republican government. As retreating militia units streamed back towards the capital, it would have been impossible to keep a blanket on news of what seemed like an impending defeat. Correspondents would drive south towards Toledo and in the small towns and villages to the south of the capital see, and indeed talk with, the demoralized Republican militiamen. The horror stories of the advancing columns of fierce foreign legionaries and Moorish mercenaries and the German and Italian aircraft which covered them could hardly be kept out of the press. Nevertheless, Rubio did his best. Louis Fischer was appalled when at dinner on 10 October, Madrid’s longest-serving correspondent, Henry Buckley who reported for the
Daily Telegraph
and the
Observer,
told him that Rubio had commented blithely ‘Wait six days. The tide will turn.’ Fischer noted: ‘The same story – they expect outside aid. They should also help themselves by organizing, introducing some discipline and generating a little energy.’
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Rubio’s optimism rang all the more false in the light of cases of correspondents being captured, imprisoned and mistreated by the rebels, as had happened with Dennis Weaver and Hank Gorrell. Indeed, behind the mask of optimism, the Republican government was so sure that
Madrid would fall that arrangements would be made for its evacuation to Valencia. This would not happen until 6 November, when the city was to find itself entrusted to a rapidly improvised Defence Junta, a move that, for a time at least, would leave the machinery of press censorship in chaos.

In the weeks before the rebel forces had reached the outskirts of Madrid, some journalists stayed at the Hotel Florida, lower down the Gran Vía from the Telefónica. On the corner of the Plaza de Callao, the Florida was much nearer the front and would become a visible target. Before the siege, there had been some wild nights at the Florida. Frequented by prostitutes, the hotel housed young aviators, journalists and a bizarre mixture of arms dealers and spies. The pilots sported large knives and even larger revolvers. Once the prostitutes began to sidle in at siesta time after lunch, the noise and scandal would intensify until, in the early hours of the morning, there would be drunken rows and people running shouting into the corridors. The frenzied merrymaking did not survive the worst of the siege. Once the rebel columns arrived and the hotel became a prominent artillery target, correspondents began to drift away from the Florida and then avoided it altogether.
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During the worst days of the assault by Franco’s forces throughout November 1936, many of the British and American newspapermen slept at their respective embassies. Some journalists lived in the Hotel Gran Vía, which was on the other side of the street opposite the Telefónica. Later, when the heat of the siege had cooled and the rebel attack blunted, correspondents started to use the Florida again and the revels recommenced.

In the Republican zone in general, but particularly in the besieged capital, the greatest hazards were bombing raids and material shortages. In the words of Lester Ziffren, ‘For the first time in newspaper history, journalists felt the insecurity and chills which come to residents of a besieged city, ruthlessly torn to pieces day and night by relentless cannonading and bombing.’
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Since coal from the Asturias mines could not reach Madrid, there was almost no heat or hot water in the hotels. The Madrileños took to eating dinner at 7.30 or 8 p.m., ‘since bed was about the only warm place in any home, most residents were there by 9’. The young English journalist Kate Mangan wrote: ‘The cold got into
my bones. Nowhere was there any heating and, though I gave up washing and went to bed in most of my clothes, I was never warm and ached and shivered at night so that I could not sleep.’ When her friend, the American reporter Kitty Bowler, visited Madrid in December 1936, it was so cold that her fingers stuck to the keys on her typewriter.
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Few restaurants were open for business and those that were had little to offer. Most foreign journalists ate in the grill in the basement of the Hotel Gran Vía. Run by the government, the restaurant was one of the few open in Madrid and its clientele was mainly policemen, soldiers, officials, journalists and prostitutes. Lester Ziffren recalled: ‘We ate in our overcoats because there was no heat, and the meals consisted almost daily of beans, lentils, cauliflower, pickled sardines of unknown age, potatoes, cakes and fruit.’
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As early as 28 September 1936, Louis Fischer, who had arrived to report for
The Nation
of New York, noted in his diary: ‘I tried to eat in the Hotel Gran Vía this evening. They had practically nothing I wanted. Finally, the waiter said sourly: “Look at this menu. No meat, no chicken, no fish, no butter.” That was true but much depends on the resourcefulness of the manager.’
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Increasingly, correspondents were expected to forage for their own supplies. When he arrived in Madrid in November, having been expelled from the Nationalist zone in September, the
Daily Express
correspondent, Sefton Delmer, brought in food from France. ‘Huge, burly, cosmopolitan, of Irish-Australian blood and born in Berlin’, Delmer was a man of enormous self-confidence and ingenuity. In the midst of the siege, he took up residence, along with many others, in the British Embassy.
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Barely a week before the government and many journalists left Madrid, the new young correspondent of the
News Chronicle,
the Oxford-educated New Zealander Geoffrey Cox, arrived in Madrid. He was chosen because his paper did not want to risk losing a more celebrated reporter when the city fell. After discussing this immensely dangerous assignment with his wife, he decided that he had to go. The next day, 28 October, he flew to Paris, where he got the necessary authorization from the Spanish Embassy. While in the French capital, Cox also met one of the best-informed of all the correspondents who covered the Spanish war, Jay Allen of the
Chicago Daily Tribune.
Allen surprised him by predicting that Madrid would hold out. From Paris, Cox took
the overnight train to Toulouse, where he took the next morning’s Air France flight over the Pyrenees to Barcelona airport. There militiamen taught him the essential skill of drinking wine from the spout of a glass
porrón.
The next stage of the journey took him to Alicante. The long wait at the airfield there preyed on his nerves and he began to think to himself: ‘It’s quite extraordinary, what the hell am I doing here…a New Zealander in the worst bloody place? I’m sorry to say, had someone come along and said “Look, this isn’t worth the bloody trouble. C’mon, you’d better board the helicopter and come back with me”, I’d have been sorely tempted to do it, but as it was there was no escape thank God.’ The sense of dread was livened only by the adrenalin flow on a flight to Madrid barely a few hundred feet above the hills. The only defence against possible attack by German or Italian aircraft came from a militiaman stationed by the open door with a light machine-gun.
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Despite the hair-rising circumstances of the flight, Cox arrived safely in Madrid on the evening of 29 October. He headed for the Hotel Gran Vía. At this stage of the battle for the capital, few correspondents went to the Hotel Florida. As Cox was checking in, a small, kindly, sandy-haired Englishman shook his hand and introduced himself as Jan Yindrich, one of the Madrid correspondents of the United Press. Yindrich took him over to the censorship office in the Telefónica and showed him the ropes. Cox quickly got to know that area to the south of Madrid into which Franco’s troops were advancing. He was surprised by the freedom granted to correspondents: ‘We were free to go where we would – or we dared.’ Contrary to what happened in the rebel zone, there was no supervision by army officers obliging newspapermen to go only to approved areas. Once a correspondent was issued with a pass to visit the front and provided with a car and driver by the Ministry of War, he could go wherever he liked. What he wrote and tried to transmit was, however, subject to censorship. The consequence of such freedom of movement was that, like Gorrell and Weaver, correspondents ran the risk of mistakenly entering the other zone. This happened once to Cox when travelling with the Swedish correspondent, Barbro Alving, a stocky young blonde, who signed her articles ‘Bang’. At a village south of the capital, they narrowly escaped capture by a convoy of Moorish troops.
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