We Saw Spain Die (20 page)

The things that happened in and around the Valencia office were dramatically different from those that characterized the bureau in besieged Madrid. Hundreds of kilometres from the battle-front, Valencia lived little of the fear and none of the exhilaration of the capital. The straightforward life-or-death issues of the rebel shells whistling towards the Telefónica were unknown. The daily bombing raids did not come to Valencia until later and were never to be as intense as in Madrid or Barcelona. Philip Jordan arrived just after Christmas 1936. He wrote with some bitterness later that, when he arrived, ‘I thought Valencia was a part of the war and I was excited by it’, but ‘how little, in fact, the embusqué of Valencia were doing for Madrid I did not learn until I had found it out for myself’.
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Stephen Spender visited the press office in the early summer of 1937 and remembered later: ‘Valencia had a far more normal appearance than Madrid. Only on nights when there was a full moon like brilliant floodlighting exposing walls of bone-coloured palaces to the meticulous observing instruments of bombers, did it seem a city haunted by war.’
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A similar comment was made in an article by the American journalist Elizabeth O. Deeble – who signed her articles E. O. Deeble because editors were reluctant to accept articles from a woman. This became a joke with her friends, to whom she came to be known simply as ‘Deeble’. She wrote of the fact that, as of the end of 1936, no one had actually seen an enemy bomber. On the other hand, the city was flooded with refugees:

unhappy people whose poor homes no longer exist and who still carry their worldly goods upon their backs, are still pouring into Valencia at all hours. Were it not for the extraordinary efficiency with which they are fed, clothed, comforted and shipped out again to nearby towns and villages, they would indeed be a heavy problem, for this city of 400,000 inhabitants has received during
the last month almost a million outsiders of one sort or another.
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The most pressing daily problems for foreign correspondents were the impossibility of finding a hotel room and the difficulty of getting transport for visits to Madrid. Resolving these problems was one of the tasks undertaken by the office of press and propaganda. The quality of daily life in Valencia, in terms of safety and access to food, at times made it possible to forget that there was a war going on. Philip Jordan managed to get a room at the rather grand Hotel Victoria, only to discover that his fellow guests were vultures:

armament men – most of them Germans – from every place you could think of, spies, harlots, more spies, job-hunters, propaganda men, sap-headed intellectuals who had never been properly appreciated in their own countries, drunken aviators, drummed out of other services: all riff-raff on the make in a town where gold was easy because the war was yet young.

Jordan expected, and was disappointed not to find, the heroic atmosphere of besieged Madrid: ‘Perpetual gala was not my idea of war, although it seemed to be Valencia’s.’
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Vincent ‘Jimmy’ Sheean wrote as late as May 1938: ‘Valencia was a pleasant place. There was a good deal of food there in the spring, as all the crops of vegetables and fruits had been excellent in the rich coastal plain of which it is the capital. We had meat in Hotel Metropole twice a day, and one vegetable (cauliflower or the like), with oranges to follow.’ By that time, according to Sheean, there were air-raids every day, but they were concentrated on the port district and ‘they did not come over the centre of the town at any time when I was there’. He noted the lack of a wartime atmosphere and that you could buy most things in the shops.
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However, one issue that clouded the horizon for the press and propaganda office was the air of vigilance and the sense of intrigue that inevitably went with the need for a strategic control of information in the wartime capital. It is possible to get a vivid insight into much of what went on thanks to the surviving memoirs and letters left by various
people who worked at or with the Valencia press bureau. Unique among these are the memoirs of Kate Mangan, who was employed there from early to mid-1937. Born in 1904 as Katherine Prideaux Foster, she was a beautiful model and artist, who had studied at the Slade School of Art in University College, London and also worked as a mannequin. She married the Irish-American left-wing writer Sherry Mangan in 1931. The marriage was not happy, partly because of financial constraints but also because he was jealous of her desire to write. After falling in love with Jan Kurzke, a German who had come to London on the run from the Nazis, she had divorced Sherry Mangan in 1935, although they remained friends. Jan Kurzke had volunteered to fight in the International Brigades and she had gone to Spain in October 1936 in the hope of being with him.
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At first she had picked up casual jobs as an interpreter in Barcelona and then acted as secretary to an old friend from London, Hugh/Humphrey Slater, with whom she had studied at the Slade and with whom she had an affair in Spain.
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Through Hugh Slater, she met Tom Wintringham, the senior British Communist who would soon be the commander of the British battalion in the International Brigades, although officially he had come to Spain as a correspondent of the CPGB’s newspaper, the
Daily Worker.
Through both, she got to know a ‘petite and vivacious American girl’ called Katherine ‘Kitty’ Bowler (‘Louise Mallory’ in Kate Mangan’s memoirs). Kate Mangan would eventually find herself sharing a hotel room with her and ‘swept into the whirl of Louise’s [Kitty’s] life’, which in turn would lead to her working in the Valencia press office.
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Kitty Bowler was an aspiring left-wing freelance journalist from a wealthy American family who had become Wintringham’s lover not long after meeting him in Barcelona in September 1936. Her local newspaper in Plymouth, Massachusetts, described her as ‘of less than medium height, slender, with large brown eyes and a short tousled bob, not unlike Amelia Earhart’.
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A young woman of boundless energy, extremely pretty, with a mischievous look, she was ambitious but also deeply committed to the Popular Front cause. She had previously been in Moscow, where she had had a relationship with the famously pro-Stalinist
New York Times
correspondent there, the one-legged Liverpudlian Walter Duranty.
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After a frantic period in August in Paris trying to get the
necessary passes to get into Spain, she nervously crossed the border with recommendations from the American Communist Party and with a flimsy commission from the
People’s Press
of New York, but with a fierce determination to make good. When she reached Barcelona along with a group of international volunteers, she met up with Duranty again and volunteered to work for the Generalitat’s spontaneously assembled press and propaganda office. The Catalan Communist Party, the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, had arranged for her to have board and lodging at the Hotel Regina near the Plaça de Catalunya.
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However, her hotel room was requisitioned to house a family of refugees. She wandered ‘desolate and forlorn’ to the Café Rambla, where she found a table around which sat a group of Englishmen wearing, shockingly for Catalan eyes, baggy shorts: ‘Like the story book waif who peeks through the frosted pane at the happy family gathered round the fireside, I eyed the little group sitting at a corner table.’ They looked at her coldly as, ‘shy but desperate’, she approached them. As she turned to leave, ‘a soft-voiced bald man touched my arm. “You must join us”.’
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It was Tom Wintringham. Balding, bespectacled and already married, Wintringham, while hardly handsome, had a romantic air. She was entranced by his fertile conversation, his gentle manner and humour, and they immediately became friends. Initially, Kitty was principally delighted to have found someone with the influence and contacts to help her gather information for her articles. However, they had quickly and passionately fallen in love. Shortly afterwards, Tom wrote an account of how their relationship had developed, an account that he later omitted from his memoir of the Spanish Civil War:

She had been in Barcelona a few days when in the Rambla there appeared suddenly a moving forest of bare knees, some of which – for the English can appear incredibly tall – were almost on a level with her eyes. The first British medical unit, in shorts: and with it, vaguely attached to it, a bald-headed journalist whose name she knew from a book she had read in the States.

After a trip to a dark, lonely and frightened Madrid, she returned, feeling ‘lost and small and afraid’, but was cheered by his welcome:

It went quickly then, though not very quickly: some meals together, coffee and cognac at the café Rambla where friendly waiters knew what was happening at least as soon as the pair of them did, and indicated with a nod or a lifted hand to the latecomer where to find the other. After that there was the going home to her hotel, ‘hell and gone’ down the tramlines in the dark; she liked company on that lonely walk and he walked it with her three times before he kissed her goodnight.

Quite soon, just before going to the front for a few days, he had proposed to her ‘curtly and nervously, without prejudice to any other interest either might have in other people a thousand or three thousand miles away’. While he was away, she had begun

to think that she was in love with him (and he thought of little else). And a day before she expected he was back, to find her compact of tenderness, a warmth and reassurance of humanity. And someone in the room below had snored like a grass-cutter mowing, all night long. They heard it all night long, laughing a good deal at this but not because of this, they laughed because a loneliness and a strain was ended, with release and happiness.
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Kitty was not a member of the American Communist Party, but she belonged to the League Against War and Fascism. She threw herself into the work of propagating the Republican cause. She worked on a volunteer basis for the improvised propaganda department of the Catalan Generalitat. Aware that the relatively small amount of news about Catalonia that reached the United States was heavily weighted to give an impression of anarchist-inspired chaos and disorder, she persuaded the recently created Catalan Commissariat for Propaganda to send photographs regularly to American left-wing organs such as
Fight,
the
New Masses
and the official Communist newspaper, the
Daily Worker.
Set up on 3 October 1936 under the direction of Jaume Miravitlles, a close friend of the President Lluís Companys, the Commissariat was the first state organism in the Republican zone to
exercise some centralized control over the media. What she wrote to Joe North, when he was still in New York as the editor of the
Daily Worker,
informing him of this and asking for copies of the paper to be sent to the Generalitat, to herself and to the PSUC, is revealing of both of her efforts and her anxiety for recognition: ‘A copy regularly to the CP headquarters here would be much appreciated. They were very pleased when we arranged for them to receive the English Worker regularly.’ Rather coyly, she added: ‘It would do me no harm if you mentioned the fact that I suggested that you send it.’ She went on to explain that, ‘I am working very closely here with Al Edwards and Tom Wintringham. They are both working very hard at other things so that I am doing most of the dirty work of getting out propaganda and also articles for the bourgeois press.’
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Thus, without the slightest doubt of her political reliability, Tom was delighted to let her act as a kind of secretary and messenger, something that would soon get both of them into serious trouble. Indeed, their relationship and her activities on his behalf would lead to her being one of the few correspondents ever arrested in, and then expelled from, the Republican zone. Kitty was soon writing on a regular basis, sending the articles to a friend in New York, the playwright Leslie Reade, in the hope that he could place them for her. When he could not find somewhere that would pay a fee, he was empowered to give them to left-wing papers such as
Fight,
the
New Masses
or the
Daily Worker.
She also wrote articles with Tom’s help, publishing them under her own name in the British press and under his name in the British
Daily Worker.
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With his help, she got permission to tour the Aragón front in October and to visit the International Brigade hospital at Grañén in Huesca, where she worked briefly as a nurse. Equally, she was also writing her own lively and colourful articles for the Manchester
Guardian
and the
Daily Herald,
which drew on her own good relations with various left-wing groups in Catalonia – something that would later be held against her.
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Indeed, it was an indication of how the relationship would be politically damaging to him that, shortly after he met Kitty, Tom was the object of a hostile report by two erstwhile friends, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentine Ackland. They wrote to CPGB headquarters: ‘He is largely occupied with personal affairs and side issues of journalism.’
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This impression was confirmed in early November 1936. Kitty had gone to London in the hope of picking up some commissions for newspaper articles. She was successful in that the Manchester
Guardian
agreed for her to stand in for the more usual correspondent from Barcelona, her friend, Elizabeth Deeble. However, Tom had taken advantage of her journey to send various messages to London. These included one that involved her going to CPGB headquarters in King Street to try to persuade the Secretary General, Harry Pollitt, to raise more volunteers for Spain. Kitty was a less than prudent choice as an emissary given that, not only was Wintringham married to a respectably Marxist wife, Elizabeth, but he also had a lover in London with whom he had had a child. She, Millie, was another (married) party functionary who happened to have worked at King Street and to be a friend of Harry Pollitt. Matters were confused by the fact that, although they never married, Millie had changed her name to Wintringham by deed poll.