Winter in Madrid

In 1939–40 the main question before Franco was whether to enter the war on Hitler’s side, as the Falange wanted. Franco himself had dreams of carving out an expanded Spanish African empire from the colonies of defeated France, but the Monarchists wanted to stay neutral, regarding entry into the war as a risky venture as well as one that would consolidate Falange power. In the end, as usual, Franco’s position was pragmatic. The son of a naval officer, he knew the power of the British navy, which was blockading Spain and could turn off supplies easily. Therefore he would only join the war if and when Britain was almost defeated. When this seemed to have happened in June 1940 he made overtures to Hitler, but the Führer’s reply was cautious. By autumn 1940, when Hitler wanted Franco in mainly so that Gibraltar could be taken, the Battle of Britain had ended in German defeat and Franco realized that Britain was far from finished.

The meeting between Hitler and Franco on the French–Spanish border in October 1940 remains a focus for argument. Franco’s apologists contend that his skilful diplomacy kept Spain neutral; his opponents argue he would have entered the war if the terms were right. I think the latter view is correct; but by the autumn of 1940, the amount of German aid Franco would have needed to prevent a British blockade driving Spain into starvation and perhaps renewed revolution was impossible for Hitler to provide. Franco’s persistent demands resulted in the Führer leaving the Hendaye meeting in disgust. Thereafter negotiations between Franco and the Axis continued but any real prospect of Spain’s entering the war receded, thanks to the Royal Navy’s continued control of the seas.

In May 1940 Churchill, Prime Minister of Britain’s new wartime coalition, sacked Sir Samuel Hoare from the Cabinet and sent him to Spain as Ambassador on Special Mission with a brief to keep Franco out of the war. Hoare had been a Conservative minister since 1931 and a leading appeaser. Vain, effete and arrogant, but a skilful administrator and politician, Hoare’s abilities, status and history of soothing dictators made him a shrewd choice, though he was disappointed not to achieve his long-held ambition of becoming Viceroy of India. Churchill neither liked nor trusted Hoare, and may have chosen his friend Alan Hillgarth as officer in charge of covert operations in Spain (including the bribery of potentially sympathetic Monarchists) partly to keep an eye on Hoare. Certainly Hillgarth reported directly to Churchill.

As ambassador, during the autumn and winter of 1940–1, Hoare followed a predictable path. Franco and his chief minister, the pro-Falange Serrano Suñer, treated him with disdain but he managed to build links with the Monarchists and to obtain important information from them. He was insistent that (apart from bribery) covert activities in Spain be limited to intelligence gathering; there were to be no SOE men ‘setting Europe ablaze’ and he rebuffed approaches from the underground left-wing opposition, arguing that Franco’s was the established government and all Britain’s efforts should be concentrated there. That seems to me a poor argument: the threat of support for the opposition would surely have added another string to Britain’s bow. But Hoare’s outlook, like that of many British conservatives, was emotionally sympathetic to the aristocratic, anti-revolutionary Monarchists. Hoare argued successfully for a policy of having no truck with the Spanish left, thus sowing the seeds of the postwar Allied policy of leaving the Franco regime in place.

Hoare’s views, however, changed as the war progressed and by the time his ambassadorship ended in 1944 he had become a vigorous opponent of leaving the Franco regime in place after the war, arguing for a programme of propaganda and economic sanctions. The thinking of Churchill, however, had evolved in the opposite direction. He had come to believe that Fanco was a bulwark against Communism and should be left in place. Hoare was unable to shake Churchill’s view, which in the end was decisive.

My interpretation of Hoare’s and Hillgarth’s characters is my own; it may seem harsh but is, I think, in accord with the known facts. All the other British and Spanish characters are fictional, except for some of the major figures of Spanish history in those years who make brief appearances: Azaña, the bizarre Millán Astray, and of course Franco himself.

The picture I have painted of Spain in 1940 is a grim one, but it is based largely on accounts by contemporary observers. The camp outside Cuenca is fictitious, but there were many real ones. I do not think my picture of the Spanish Church at the period is unfair; they were involved root and branch with the policy of a violent regime in its most brutal phase and those like Father Eduardo who found it hard to square their consciences seem to have been few and far between.

General Franco’s archaic vision of an authoritarian, Catholic Spain died with him in 1975. Spaniards immediately turned their backs on his legacy and embraced democracy. The past was forgotten in the ‘pacto de olvido’ – the pact of forgetting. Perhaps that was the price of a peaceful transition to democracy. Only now, as the 1940s generation passes away, is that changing and Spanish historians are looking at the early years of the Franco regime once more, uncovering many new stories of horror that will be of little comfort to the regime’s apologists but remind us of what ordinary Spaniards endured, not only during the Civil War, but after it was won.

I have tried to be scrupulous in tying the pattern of events in the novel in with historical dates. Twice, however, I have altered these slightly to meet the demands of the plot: I have postdated Himmler’s visit to Madrid by a couple of days, and antedated the founding of La Barraca by a year to 1931. I have also invented Franco’s attendance at the first performance of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, which was actually in Barcelona.

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful indeed to a number of friends who read the manuscript of Winter in Madrid, and who grappled with me over the thorny issues of political, historical and cultural perspective which the book raised from a refreshingly wide variety of viewpoints. My thanks to Roz Brody, Emily Furman, Mike Holmes, Caroline Hume, Jan King, Tony Macaulay, Charles Pe

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

There are many books in English on the Spanish Civil War and its origins. After more than sixty years I think Gerald Brenan’s The Spanish Labyrinth (Cambridge 1943) is still the best on the origins of the war. Antony Beever’s The Spanish Civil War (Cassell 1982) is the most accessible introduction to the war itself.

Denis Smyth’s Diplomacy and the Strategy of Survival: British policy and Franco’s Spain 1940–41 (Cambridge UP 1986) is the main academic account of the period, though I think it underestimates the importance of the cultural affinities between the Spanish Monarchists and the British ruling classes. Paul Preston’s monumental biography Franco (Harper-Collins 1993) is also very useful on the regime’s wartime foreign policy, although discussion of domestic conditions in those years is curiously absent. Hoare’s account of his ambassadorship, written after he became Viscount Templewood, Ambassador on Special Mission (London 1947), is self-serving and unreliable in its account of events in 1940–1 (although many aspects, such as the bribery of ministers, could not be revealed when it was written), but shows the evolution of his thought to a strongly anti-Franco position by the war’s end. Richard Wigg’s Churchill and Spain (Routledge 2005) throws interesting new light on the evolution of both Churchill’s and Hoare’s perspectives on Spain as the war progressed. Phillip Knightley’s Philby, KGB Masterspy (London 1978) opened the world of wartime espionage for me. Miss Maxse was real; she interviewed Philby for the SIS in St Ermin’s Hotel. Caroline Moorhead’s Dunant’s Dream (HarperCollins 1998) is a history of the Red Cross that manages to be both vivid and fair. The article by J. Bandrés and R. Llavona, ‘Psychology in Franco’s Concentration Camps’ (Psychology in Spain, 1997, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 3–9) is a chilling account of the abuse of psychiatry. For details of the goldmine fraud I have drawn on the story of an even more remarkable modern fraud told in V. Danielson and J. White’s Bre-X: Gold Today, Gone Tomorrow (Canada 1997).