Forgotten children of Spain's civil war reunite 75 years after exile

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/may/11/forgotten-children-spain-civil-war

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For the more superstitious inhabitants of the Basque village of El Regato, the beginning of the Spanish civil war was portended not so much by Francisco Franco's coup as by the onset of a sudden turmoil in the heavens.

"People were saying the war is starting because all the stars in the sky are rushing around," says Herminio Martínez, who, even as a six-year-old then, was beginning to grow sceptical. "I would look up in the sky but I couldn't see the stars rushing around."

More material proof of the conflict was not long in coming. Soon enough, bombers were rumbling through the skies towards Bilbao, shotguns were being collected for the front, and Martínez's father was one of the men gathering in the mine to make small bombs from tomato tins and dynamite.

As the food shortages worsened and the bombing intensified, the Basque government decided the area around Bilbao was becoming too dangerous for children, and many were evacuated to France, Belgium, Russia and Mexico.

Far less keen to take the Basque children was the British government, which was still hoping that the non-intervention agreement it had signed would prevent the war spilling over the Pyrenees.

Hitler had fewer scruples. Just under a month after the Nazi bombing of Guernica on 26 April 1937, Westminster reluctantly gave in and 3,840 young Basques – among them young Herminio and his older brother, Victor – were taken to the port of Santurce and put aboard the steamship Habana, bound for Southampton.

To this day, the Expedición a Inglaterra, as the evacuation was christened, remains one of the least-known chapters in the history of 1930s Britain. To mark its 75th anniversary, some of the surviving niños vascos will gather at Southampton University this weekend to meet and to remember their exile.

"I remember saying goodbye to my father, who was very upset," recalls Martínez, who had turned seven a week before leaving Spain. "He just handed us over and left. Downstairs it was quite disconcerting because it was absolutely crowded with children." As well as the gales of homesick weeping, Martínez particularly remembers crossing the Bay of Biscay during a storm.

"Most of us were downstairs, sleeping on the floor, rolling about and being sick all over ourselves and each other. I remember a girl crying and saying, 'Tell the captain to go back. I want to go back home to my parents.'"

If the British government was less than thrilled by the Basques' arrival, the people of Southampton – and many of the other English towns where the young exiles subsequently ended up – were only too happy to help.

Tom Webb, a retired accountant now involved with the Basque Children's Association, can remember his father taking him to visit the outdoor camp near Southampton that was the first English home for the children and the teachers and priests who accompanied them.

"I remember seeing hundreds and hundreds of children running about and playing games. The only thing I recollect about the children – but I was wrong, of course – was that they all had black hair. I didn't know they were Spanish and I didn't know anything about it."

Webb's father, an aircraft engineer who built Spitfires at the nearby Supermarine works, was one of the many local people who did what they could for the children. "It was a big event for Southampton to have 4,000 foreign children arrive overnight as it were," says Webb. "People had to provide food and clothing for the children because the government did nothing."

Three years later, when the full futility of appeasement had become apparent, a piece of historical symmetry afforded him a horrible insight into the lives that the Basque children had fled: on 24 September 1940 Webb's father was killed when the Germans bombed the Supermarine factory. Webb, who is now 85, spent more than half a century unaware of the significance of what he had seen at the camp that afternoon in 1937. It was only when he read about the foundation of the association 10 years ago that he began to learn about the niños vascos.

Despite the publication of Adrian Bell's book on the children, Only for Three Months, and Steve Bowles's documentary, The Guernica Children, the story of the niños is often overlooked amid the myriad horrors of Spain's three-year civil war.

Natalia Benjamin, whose mother taught some of the Basque children, co-founded the association to bring together the surviving niños and to reclaim their story from obscurity.

"The niños are the forgotten ones of the Spanish civil war; nobody talks about them," she says. "In the history books that were written about the civil war, they're confined to about three lines, but they were victims of Franco just as much as other people were."

Although most of the children had been repatriated by the start of the second world war, a few hundred remained because their parents were either dead, imprisoned or had started new lives abroad. By 1945 there were around 250 niños still in the UK, including Martínez and his older brother.

Having lived with other Basque children in "colonies" in Swansea, Brampton, Tynemouth, Margate and Carshalton – and with an English Methodist family in Leicester – Martínez decided to stay put in the UK where he educated himself at night school and Birkbeck College and became a pattern-maker and then a teacher and lecturer. Victor emigrated to Australia at the end of the 1950s.

Martínez was reunited with his mother in 1948; his father, who was arrested and imprisoned after being denounced by a neighbour, spent four or five years in prison before being released because he was unable to do hard labour after being fed industrial oil, leaving him semi-paralysed and in poor health for the rest of his life.

Martínez may have turned his back on Franco's Spain and chosen to live, marry and raise his children in England, but, 75 years after he stepped on to the Habana, he remains a man exiled by history. The shelves of his London flat are striped with books about the civil war, and from the top of the bag he has packed for Southampton spills the red, yellow and purple flag of the short-lived second republic.

"I am of that Spanish generation that never was," he says, "the Spain that never flowered because it was cut off. Life has been very interesting, but I still have within me a sadness, a loneliness. In essence, I don't belong."