Richard Baxell

The women who rallied to the Republican cause in Spain

‘I didn’t even want to go to Spain. I had to. Because’, said the American writer Josephine Herbst – just one of the sisterhood to become immersed in the struggle

The German photojournalist Gerda Taro in 1936 – a year before she died in Spain, aged 26, while covering the Battle of Brunete. [Getty Images]

‘We English,’ the prime minister Stanley Baldwin allegedly remarked following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, ‘hate fascism, but we loathe bolshevism as much. So if there is somewhere where fascists and bolsheviks can kill each other off, so much the better.’

Initially, many in Britain probably agreed with Baldwin, seeing no reason to be drawn into another country’s civil war. But a sizeable minority thought very differently, believing that the conflict was not just a civil war but part of an ongoing struggle between democracy and fascism. To them, Spain became a rallying cry, and over the course of the war many thousands from around the world volunteered to join it. Most fought in the communist-controlled International Brigades, but others went to report on the conflict as part of ‘fact-finding missions’, or simply to show their support for the Spanish government’s cause.

The experiences of a number of these visitors, witnesses and reporters are described in Tomorrow Perhaps the Future (the title taken from W.H. Auden’s poem ‘Spain’), by Sarah Watling, the author of Noble Savages, the prize-winning biography of the bohemian Olivier sisters. Its characters are not the familiar ones of Auden, Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and George Orwell. Instead, Watling’s study marks her determination to write women into the history books.

This is not to say, of course, that women have been invisible in the literature of the Spanish Civil War, particularly not this celebrity cohort, which includes the heiress to the Cunard shipping empire, the daughter of a baron, and a number of prominent writers. Nevertheless, as Virginia Woolf (one of the book’s subjects) remarked, war is generally a male affair, and women’s roles often get downplayed or glossed over. Watling points out that the German photojournalist Gerda Taro and the American war correspondent Martha Gellhorn were for many years overshadowed by Robert Capa and Hemingway, their more famous partners; and I suspect that few are aware that the first British volunteer to be killed in Spain was Felicia Browne, a sculptor from Slade School of Art.

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