by Preston Paul
As the war went on, journalists, like the rest of the Republican population, had to scrounge ever more desperately for food and cigarettes. Things would get gradually worse. When Martha Gellhorn arrived in Madrid on 27 March 1937, her first meal at the Gran Vía consisted of a minuscule portion of garbanzos (chickpeas) and strong-smelling bacalao (dried cod). The American novelist Josephine Herbst, who was there in April 1937, commented: ‘Though food was on everyone’s mind, I never heard anyone complain of the lack of it or because some of the dishes served at the restaurant on the Gran Vía stank to high heaven.’ The altogether more celebrated American writer, John Dos Passos, there at the same time, also referred to ‘the stink of the food at the Gran Vía’.72 Virginia Cowles, an elegant and wealthy twenty-seven-year-old American, reached Madrid towards the end of March 1937. She was a friend of the Churchill family and had made her reputation writing travel pieces for Harper’s Bazaar and the Hearst Sunday Syndicate. Having secured an interview with Mussolini in 1935, she managed to get a commission to cover the Spanish war. The dowdy Josephine Herbst enviously described her ‘dressed in black, with heavy gold bracelets on her slender wrists and wearing tiny black shoes with incredibly high heels’.73 Her room on the fifth floor of the Hotel Florida, overlooking the front and in the direct line of Franco’s artillery, provoked a degree of nervousness. This was dissipated somewhat by the bustle of ordinary life which sprang forth every day in the square below like ‘a huge movie set swarming with extras ready to play a part’. Virginia Cowles described the food at the Gran Vía as ‘meagre and at times scarcely eatable’, yet it was not so inedible as to deter hungry Madrileños from trying to force their way through the heavily guarded doors. When she arrived in Madrid, ‘Tom’ Delmer, with whom she struck up a friendship at the Florida, pointed out her error in failing to bring any food with her.74
As food got scarcer, Ernest Hemingway, who reached Madrid in March 1937, consolidated his popularity by dint of the inexhaustible store of bacon, eggs, coffee and marmalade, and drink, whisky and gin, that he kept in his room at the Florida. International Brigade volunteers were always welcome and would always find plenty of bottles and tinned food. His stocks were both replenished and distributed by his faithful crony, Sidney Franklin, the American bullfighter, described by John Dos Passos as ‘a sallow slender blackhaired man with the skin so dark around the eyes he looked as if he had a couple of shiners’. Herbst referred to him as Hemingway’s ‘devoted friend and a sort of “valet de chambre” ’ largely because of his skills as a scrounger.75 Such was the austerity of the Florida that a visit to the altogether better-provisioned Hotel Gaylord where the senior Russian advisers were housed was seen as a rare privilege. On 25 March 1937, Ilya Ehrenburg went there to visit the highly influential Pravda correspondent, Mikhail Koltsov. He went eagerly because ‘you could get warm there and have a good meal’. On this occasion, in Koltsov’s crowded room, Ehrenburg noticed a large ham and profusion of bottles, but forgot about both when he was introduced to Hemingway, a writer whose works he revered.
Ehrenburg gushingly tried to express his admiration to the already inebriated novelist, who was infinitely more interested in the large glass of whisky he held. Ehrenburg asked in French what he was doing in Madrid and Hemingway reluctantly explained in Spanish that he was there as the correspondent of the North American Newspaper Alliance. Ehrenburg then enquired if he had to telegraph just substantial articles or also news items (nouvelles). Hemingway was furious, having translated nouvelles into the Spanish novelas (novels). He jumped up and grabbed a bottle, with which he tried to hit Ehrenburg. Before serious bloodshed took place, he was restrained.76 Hemingway clearly made a habit of creating scenes. In the winter of 1937, the beautiful American correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, had gone with Hemingway to another party in Mikhail Koltsov’s room. She was distressed to be ushered away from the delicious food on offer when, once again, in characteristically boorish style, Hemingway had made a scene. Believing that the Communist commander Juan Modesto had made a pass at Martha, he had jealously challenged him to a duel of Russian roulette. After they circled each other menacingly, each with one end of a handkerchief between his teeth, they were unceremoniously separated and Hemingway, with a hungry Martha Gellhorn in tow, was required to leave.77
The Hotel Florida, like the Telefónica, was in the firing line of Nationalist artillery, but Hemingway assured his nightly guests that his room had a ‘dead angle’ and was therefore invulnerable. Tom Delmer’s room, however, was eventually hit and his utensils destroyed. Given the impossibility of sleeping through artillery bombardments, every night became a fiesta either in the larger rooms or else in the patio around which the hotel was built. It was still frequented by prostitutes, nicknamed ‘whores de combat’ by Hemingway. To Gustav Regler, the German Communist writer, and commissar of the XII International Brigade, it was ‘a noisy bordello’. Cedric Salter, who stayed at the Florida in the spring of 1937 while writing for the Daily Telegraph, complained of being unable to sleep because of
a dim roaring noise from below, not unlike that to be heard in the Lion House at the Zoo, shortly before feeding time. In desperation I rang and asked what caused this strange sound. That, I was told, was the Russian aviators having fun in the bar. Yes, to be sure, it always went on like that until dawn unless they drank more than usual, in which case they might fall asleep on the floors around 4 a.m.
Having managed, with the help of cotton wool in his ears, to fall asleep, Salter was awakened when a naked woman flung open his door and ran screaming into his bathroom, followed by a very large Russian dressed only in cotton underpants. Only with some difficulty could he persuade them to leave. Delmer agreed with Salter: ‘it was not until three or four in the morning that the shrieking and brawling and flamenco singing died down’.78 In contrast, more serious guests remembered principally the efforts of the staff to keep things as apparently normal as possible. Winston Churchill’s cousin, Peter Spencer, otherwise known by his title as Viscount Churchill, was with the British medical aid unit and often stayed at the Florida. Kitty Bowler described him as ‘the most distinguished living skeleton I have ever met’. His principal recollection from April 1937 was the fact that ‘the chambermaid kept everything on her floor looking most elegant, although the end of the corridor was blasted, and from it you could see half across Madrid’.79
The bulk of those who stayed at the Florida tried hard to maintain a high level of objective and honest reporting. However, the standards aspired to by Matthews, Jay Allen, Henry Buckley, Lawrence Fernsworth and Geoffrey Cox and many others was not universal. It was certainly not achieved by the Oxford-educated Communist Claud Cockburn. He was the founder and editor of the satirical news-sheet, The Week, whose mimeographed sheets were highly influential in exposing the pro-fascist sympathies of the upper-class ‘Cliveden Set’ and the salon conspiracies that lay behind the farce of appeasement. Cockburn was on holiday in Salou near Tarragona when the Spanish Civil War began. The British Communist Party invited him to act as correspondent for its newspaper, the Daily Worker. He did so eventually, using the pseudonym ‘Frank Pitcairn’, but only after first going to Barcelona and then to Madrid. There he volunteered for the militia unit known as the Quinto Regimiento and fought in the sierra to the north. It was always the view of Koltsov and Otto Katz that good journalists could serve the cause better in front of their typewriters than in the trenches. Accordingly, like Arthur Koestler, he was persuaded to return to journalism. Having done so, as a result of a close friendship with both Mikhail Koltsov and Otto Katz, and a readiness to toe the party line, Cockburn received privileged information on a regular basis.80
What Cockburn published was not, however, always based on accurate information. On one notorious occasion, Katz and Cockburn worked together during the Republican push against Teruel. With urgently needed artillery held up on the French side of the border, Katz summoned Cockburn to Paris and announced; ‘You are the first eyewitness of the revolt at Tetuán.
’ Cockburn, who had never set foot in Tetuán, sought elucidation. Katz explained that a delegation of French Communists and Socialists was about to try to persuade the premier, Léon Blum, to open the frontier. To get Blum into a receptive mood, Katz hoped to plant a newspaper story that would suggest that Franco was facing difficulties. Realizing that a story about some apocryphal Republican victory would have little influence, Katz decided to put out a story that would make it seem that Franco’s power was crumbling in the very fount of its strength, Spanish Morocco. Together, they fabricated a military rebellion in Tetuán, using only the Guide Bleu and a couple of other travel guides to describe the streets and squares in which the mutiny had allegedly taken place. Complete with ‘details’ of places and participants, Cockburn remembered that it had ‘emerged as one of the soundest, most factual pieces of war correspondence ever written’. When the delegation met Blum, all he could talk about was that morning’s headlines about the ‘revolt in Tetuán’ and the frontier was reopened.81
Another journalist who could hardly be considered either objective or accurate was Hugh Slater, a handsome middle-class English Communist, who was a graduate of the Slade School of Art. In London, he used his real name, ‘Humphrey’, but, for Spain, had adopted the somewhat more proletarian ‘Hugh’. Along with William Forrest, Slater had driven into Spain in an aged white Rolls Royce. His objective was to write for Imprecor (the International Press Correspondence), the Comintern’s English-language newspaper. The Rolls Royce guzzled petrol and was ‘dreadfully noticeable on the battlefield’. For some time, Forrest and Slater commuted from Madrid to Toledo each day to follow the siege of the Alcázar but Slater was dissatisfied with his journalistic work. Kate Mangan, who worked for a time as Slater’s secretary in Madrid, noted: ‘I had realised at length that Humphry [sic] was jealous of the soldiers. It sounds an odd thing to say but he envied them their heroism.’82
Wanting to do more than merely recite the party line in Imprecor, Slater joined the International Brigade and was appointed political commissar of the British battalion’s anti-tank battery. His working-class comrades regarded him suspiciously as merely a middle-class ideologue, ‘amiable and decorative’ in the words of Fred Thomas, ‘extremely arrogant’ according to Tony McLean. A brigade report from May 1937 described him as ‘generally unpopular due to sectarian activities etc. alleged. To some extent this may have been eliminated but manner is not one conducive to successful work with rank-and-file.’ A later report commented that he ‘was disliked by the majority of the men. They considered him a schemer.’ Nevertheless, he was apparently a more than competent military tactician, and was named commander of the antitank battery on 30 July 1937. Three months later he was promoted to captain and on 8 April 1938, he was made chief of operations in the general staff of the XV Brigade. Official brigade reports described him as ‘a leader almost of genius but too keen on his own comfort, which had a bad effect on his unit’. He was badly affected by a bout of typhoid and was repatriated in October 1938. After the Spanish Civil War, disillusioned with Stalinism, he became a novelist.83
The difficulties facing journalists who tried to maintain a commitment both to the Republican cause and to the ethics of their profession were illustrated by an incident on the Madrid front involving Louis Fischer. As the rebel Army of Africa approached the capital, Cockburn and Koltsov were joined by ‘an American journalist’ – Fischer – who had just published a brilliant and rather moving article about the demoralization of the Republican militia who were trying in vain to halt the advance of Franco’s African columns. One of Fischer’s recurrent themes was the imbalance between the rebels’ well-armed, well-trained forces and the barely armed scratch militia of the Republic – ‘untrained, inexperienced, undisciplined and badly officered. They melt away under fire.’ He lamented that, on 25 September, two days before the city fell, he had witnessed frightened militiamen fleeing from German bombing raids on Toledo. Datelined 8 October, his article appeared two weeks later.84 A couple of days after that, Fischer coincided with Cockburn and Koltsov south of Madrid.
When he saw Fischer get out of his car and walk towards them, a furious Koltsov spat on the ground in disgust and refused to shake hands with him. When Fischer asked what he had done wrong, Koltsov said that he had just received the text of the article from Moscow. Fischer remonstrated that he had merely reported the facts, saying: ‘What’s the good of pretending our militia here aren’t demoralized and bewildered? Who’s going to believe me if I tell the old story once again?’ Koltsov responded sarcastically: ‘Yes. Those are the facts. How extraordinarily observant and truthful you are.’ The discussion grew more bitter. Koltsov said: ‘You, with your reputation, you can really spread alarm and despondency. And that’s what you’ve done. You’ve done more harm than thirty British MPs working for Franco. And you expect me to shake hands with you.’ When Fischer persisted that the facts were the facts and that the readers had the right to know them, Koltsov replied: ‘If you were a little more frank, you’d say that what you’re really interested in is your damned reputation as a journalist. You’re afraid that if you don’t put out this stuff, and it comes through someone else, you’ll be thought a bad reporter, can’t see the facts under his nose. Probably in the pay of the Republicans. That’s why you, as the French say, have lost an excellent opportunity to keep your mouth shut.’ Cockburn himself agreed with Koltsov that the public did not necessarily have the right to read the truth. When his wife questioned this, he would respond angrily: ‘Who gave them such a right? Perhaps when they have exerted themselves enough to alter the policy of their bloody government, and the Fascists are beaten in Spain, they will have such a right. This isn’t an abstract question. It’s a shooting war.’85
Despite his outburst against Fischer, Koltsov was not entirely comfortable with the need to tailor what he wrote to political necessity. This can be discerned in what another Soviet correspondent, Ilya Ehrenburg, wrote years later:
The history of Soviet journalism knows no greater name, and his fame was well deserved. But having raised journalism to a high standard, having demonstrated to his readers that a report or an article could be a work of art, he did not believe it himself. More than once he said to me with wry irony: ‘Other people write novels. But what will remain of me after I’ve gone? Newspaper articles are ephemeral stuff. Even an historian won’t find them very useful, because we don’t show in our articles what is going on in Spain, only what ought to be happening.’86
That it was possible to combine high professional standards with a passionate belief in the Spanish Republic was demonstrated by Matthews, Fischer, Buckley, Forrest, Cox, Fernsworth and many others, but perhaps most of all by Jay Allen. Like Buckley and Fernsworth, Allen had followed events in Spain for a long time, first working out of Paris in the 1920s and eventually going to live in Spain at the beginning of 1934. There he formed close friendships with many of the most prominent figures of the Socialist Party. A deep interest in the problems of rural Spain lay behind a warm appreciation of the Republic’s attempts to introduce universal education and agrarian reform. Among many important articles written before and after the military coup of July 1936, Jay Allen filed what, along with Mario Neves’ reports on the massacre of Badajoz and George Steer’s report on the bombing of Guernica, were three of the most important, and frequently quoted, articles written during the war. These were an exclusive interview with Franco in Tetuán on 27 July 1936, his own account of the aftermath of the Nationalist capture of Badajoz and the last ever interview given by the about-to-be-executed founder of the Spanish fascist party, the Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. The interview with Franco was remarkable for the rebel leader’s declaration of his readiness to unleash mass slaughter in order to achieve his ends.87 The immensely moving report from Badajoz led to Jay Allen being denigrated by right-wing broadcasters and journalists across the United States.88
A journalist who supplied defamatory material about Jay Allen, William P. Carney,
was one of a small number of pro-rebel correspondents who worked for a time in the Republican zone. A thirty-eight-year-old Catholic from San Antonio, Texas, Carney had been covering Spanish Republican politics since 1931, on the basis of regular short trips from the New York Times’s Paris office.89 Carney had spent the early months of the war as the New York Times correspondent in Madrid. After some friction with various Republican authorities, he was reassigned to Salamanca. In both zones, he frequently used his reports to benefit the Francoist cause and, in consequence, he was nicknamed ‘General Bill’ by other correspondents. As a correspondent of the rival New York Herald Tribune, James Minifie believed that Carney not only tilted articles in favour of the rebels, but also invented ‘news’ on the basis of ‘eye-witness’ reports. When these ‘absentee eye-witness reports’ appeared in the New York Times, Minifie would receive from his own paper queries about the episodes described. So blatant were they that he was able to respond adequately simply by cabling back the words ‘Another Carney exclusive’. He remembered later the difficulties created for Herbert Matthews by Carney’s practices. Matthews not only found his own credibility questioned but also, according to Minifie, ‘was conscientious enough to check every wide-eyed Carney story that his paper had printed. He was then faced with the problem of straightening out the facts, without too obviously undercutting his colleague.’90
