EP 01 - Spanish Civil War

Spanish Civil War

- Episode 01 -

Is there a new story to tell?

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Spanish Civil War

Thursday 29 July 2021

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Cherry Picking (in Spain) by Luis Jimenez y Aranda, 1890

Jon in search of the Spanish Civil War
In the early 1990s I was making a documentary film about the history of Spain and wanted to find a sequence about the Spanish Civil War 1936-39. Like most British people, I didn’t know much about it and at that time there wasn’t much you could read. But from what I knew about civil wars – and wars in general – I took a guess that geography probably had something to do with it.

Along the Mediterranean coast between Valencia and Alicante, there is a relatively narrow coastal plain. It is known as the huerta – the orchard – and is covered in orange and lemon trees. In season the scent of their blossom fills the air – it’s intoxicating even as you drive through on the fast road. But rising up behind is a sharp escarpment and beyond it is a hill country, gloriously filled with cherry and almond blossom. I discovered, as I’d half expected, that above and below the escarpment had been on different sides in the Civil War.

Some weeks later, in one village I met two elderly couples who had lived in one of the tiny villages all their lives. One were cherry farmers and, even though they were in their eighties, I had to talk to them as they stood on their ladders picking their crop. Apparently cherries have to be picked on the right day and you can’t delay. They told me that in the Civil War the hilltop villages had been Franquista – on the side of the right wing insurgent General Franco. The coastal huerta, however, had been Rojo – red, on the side of the elected socialist government. Then they described how los Rojos would climb up the escarpment and force the villagers into their army. They shot one man who had ignored their shouts and stayed up in his fields. The man was deaf.

The other couple were also in their eighties. He had been a carpenter. Perhaps because he was an artisan and not a farmer, he had chosen to support los Rojos. In fact he had been the only man in the village who had. Inevitably the other villagers denounced him and he ended in prison. Bravely, after the war, he had returned home and, more than fifty years later, was still there. As we talked about it, sitting in the dark cool of their house, his wife began to weep. I asked her if we should stop, if it was too much to talk about. ‘No, no,’ she replied. ‘It’s good to talk about these things. It’s just that we’ve never spoken to anyone about it before.’

More than fifty years of silence in a tiny village, surrounded with people who had denounced you. To misquote Twelfth Night, everybody is born with history (because our lives are shaped by what has happened before.) Some achieve greater historical understanding. But some have history thrust upon them.

Spanish Civil War - is there a new story to tell?

Guernica, 1937 by Pablo Picasso - original is at Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid

A vast canvas: 3.49 metres by 7.76 metres, in black and white, painted in Paris in response to the Nazi bombing of Guernica town in the Basque Country, northern Spain, on 26 April 1937. The German bombers had been requested by Franco's 'nationalists'.

Guernica was exhibited at the 1937 Paris International Exposition. Our series, 2 May 1937: the king, his wife, their Führer, the lobster touches on this.

BUT what we want to know is whether there's a new story to tell about the Spanish Civil War? Everyone we meet out here in Andalucia tells us they'd love to see us give it the History Cafe treatment. But we ask, what do people outside Spain think the traditional story is? and is there any chance that that's wrong?

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