by Preston Paul
In fact, Delmer was concerned only with the implications for British interests and told Virginia Cowles that ‘the people over here are less dangerous to England’. She described him as being reasonably sympathetic to the Republic.14 However, according to Constancia de la Mora, ‘everyone in the Foreign Press Bureau disliked and distrusted Sefton Delmer’. She claimed that this was largely because he only pretended to be favourable to the Republic, although her view may have reflected her own snobbery:
He would always appear in my office in ancient ragged clothes, dirty shirts, mud-caked shoes, trousers stiff with grease. We considered his strange clothing an insult for we knew that in London he was something of a dandy. Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona were perfectly civilized cities – even if they were Spanish. Delmer always talked and behaved as though the Spanish people were some strange, benighted tribe of savages engaged in a rather silly, primitive type of bow-and-arrow contest.
Twenty years later, Delmer admitted that he had usually worn ‘the dirtiest of shrunken and frayed grey flannels, a soup stained brown leather jacket over a khaki shirt’. He declared proudly in reply to Connie: ‘I liked my get up. But it shocked the bourgeois prejudices of some of the Communists. They found it particularly shocking when I only wore a shirt and shorts.’15
However, the contemptuous and patronizing way in which Delmer generalized about Spaniards in his memoirs rather supported Connie’s view. There he spoke of ‘the amazing mixture of exaltation, fatalism and delight in sheer destruction that made up their attitude to life and to death’.16 However, Geoffrey Cox, who had great admiration for Delmer’s independent mind, thought it likely that what had infuriated Constancia was his apparently frivolous and mocking attitude.17 However, a more substantial reason for her dislike of Delmer was related to his efforts to evade the censorship. Sam Russell, a young British Communist who had been invalided out of the International Brigades and returned to make English-language broadcasts from Barcelona, recalled a ferocious clash between the two. While the government was in Valencia, Delmer had written a series of articles which Constancia prevented him from transmitting. He had gone behind her back and had them sent to London via a British warship patrolling on the Spanish coast. He had then returned to England but later applied for a Spanish Republican visa in London, got it and returned to Spain. He went to the press office in Barcelona to see Connie to get the necessary passes. Sam was there as he came in and could hear through the flimsy partition her swearing at him. Apparently, her repertoire of English obscenity, learned while she was a convent girl in Ireland, was capable of peeling the wallpaper. She had no choice but to give Delmer the permits, but she never forgave him his earlier deceit.18
In the main, however, Connie was much more friendly and helpful to journalists than Rubio Hidalgo had ever been. He apparently had a phobia concerning journalists, keeping them at arm’s length, making his dark office as unwelcoming as possible. Requests for passes or petrol vouchers for visits to the front would be left for days without response. Aware that Rubio’s rudeness was leading to irritated correspondents making comments about inefficiency within the Republic, she suggested that the newspapermen be helped rather than hindered. Rubio was happy to be spared the chore of actually meeting the correspondents and left Constancia to deal with them. She set to enthusiastically, finding rooms for them in overcrowded Valencia, arranging transport and interviews: ‘I knew, as all of us did – that the cause of the Republic depended on the world knowing the facts.’ She secured for them passes and petrol for their cars so that they could get the facts for themselves.19
She was struck by the determination of correspondents such as Herbert Matthews to check facts for themselves and by their healthy suspicion of the official line:
I came to admire terribly this passion for fact. I was irritated at first, I suppose, not to find myself believed. But I came to see that this, after all, was the way to get the facts into print, to have the men who sent them convinced of their accuracy because they themselves had got them. I have to smile when I hear stories of how we ‘influenced’ the foreign correspondents. And now, of course, as one looks back over their coverage, one sees that if they erred it was on the side of understatement.
Despite close friendships with Jay Allen, Henry Buckley, Burnett Bolloten and others, it was probably Herbert Matthews who most stimulated Constancia’s fondness for the correspondents. Certainly, her affectionate description suggested as much:
Tall, lean, and lanky, Matthews was one of the shyest, most diffident men in Spain. He used to come in every evening, always dressed in his gray flannels, after arduous and dangerous trips to the front, to telephone his story to Paris, whence it was cabled to New York. […] For months he would not come near us except to telephone his stories – for fear, I suppose, that we might influence him somehow. He was so careful; he used to spend days tracking down some simple fact – how many churches in such and such a small town; what the Government’s agricultural program was achieving in this or that region. Finally, when he discovered that we never tried to volunteer any information, even to the point of not offering him the latest press release unless he specifically requested it, he relaxed a little. Matthews had his own car and he used to drive to the front more often than almost any other reporter. We had to sell him the gasoline from our own restricted stores, and he was always running out of his monthly quota. Then he used to come to my desk, very shy, to beg for more. And we always tried to find it for him: both because we liked and respected him and because we did not want the New York Times correspondent to lack gasoline to check the truth of our latest news bulletin.20
She was referring to the fact that the press office in Valencia not only censored the work of foreign correspondents, but made available to them a daily hand-out on the progress of the war.
According to Louis Fischer, Constancia ‘was a brilliant success. She knew languages and the psychology of foreigners, and the correspondents liked her.’ Philip Jordan of the News Chronicle wrote: ‘no one was so kind as Constancia, or took so much trouble to make life easy’.21 Peter Spencer, Viscount Churchill (cousin to Winston), spent nearly two years in Spain with the British group known as Spanish Medical Aid. He later provided an account of the preconceptions of foreign journalists and of their reaction to Constancia de la Mora. They usually arrived, he claimed in a considerable over-generalization, which perhaps contained an element of autobiography, already deeply frustrated by the deficiencies of the transport available. In consequence, they were
in a state of fury and resentment, determined to stand no nonsense from the peasants who were running things. What they did not know, because the Press in most countries had failed to report it, was that some of the finest brains in Spain were at the head of affairs on the Government side: cultured, travelled people, many of them eminent in their various professions.
Among them, he gave pride of place to
the head of the Foreign Press Bureau in the person of Constancia de la Mora, the strikingly beautiful and brilliant wife of an ex-military attaché. Constancia carried with her the unmistakable aura of the social and diplomatic world of Paris, New York and London. She also had considerable wit and was a linguist. Ushered into her presence the foreigner was likely to become suddenly more conscious of his unshaven chin than of his grievances.22
A similar tribute to the demands made on the diplomatic skills of the press office came from the memoirs of Kate Mangan, who wrote:
There was often an awkward gap between the manners of our visitors and those of their hosts. Some of our visitors were exceedingly proletarian, crude and unpolished; the hosts were all urbane and civilised to Geneva League of Nations’ standard. Many of the Spaniards and most of those in the Government must have seemed disappointingly moderate liberals to our guests.
Certainly not all correspondents were as polite and diffident as Herbert Matthews. Kate Mangan remembered having to cope with impatient demands for information from Lillian Hellman, the thirty-two-y
ear-old American playwright, Hollywood scriptwriter and lover of Dashiell Hammett. Although not a Communist, the fellow-travelling Hellman was in Spain to participate in the making of the film The Spanish Earth, being made by the Dutch Communist Joris Ivens to a script by Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos, and also to write about the Abraham Lincoln battalion of the XV International Brigade. Although she helped to raise money for the Spanish Republic in the United States, during her stay in Valencia, Hellman ‘made no allowance for the hasty and provisional nature of everything or the war’. Another prominent writer who left a less than favourable impression was Ilya Ehrenburg, whom Kate recalled as looking like ‘an old grey rat’.23
The things that happened in and around the Valencia office were dramatically different from those that characterized the bureau in besieged Madrid. Hundreds of kilometres from the battle-front, Valencia lived little of the fear and none of the exhilaration of the capital. The straightforward life-or-death issues of the rebel shells whistling towards the Telefónica were unknown. The daily bombing raids did not come to Valencia until later and were never to be as intense as in Madrid or Barcelona. Philip Jordan arrived just after Christmas 1936. He wrote with some bitterness later that, when he arrived, ‘I thought Valencia was a part of the war and I was excited by it’, but ‘how little, in fact, the embusqué of Valencia were doing for Madrid I did not learn until I had found it out for myself’.24
Stephen Spender visited the press office in the early summer of 1937 and remembered later: ‘Valencia had a far more normal appearance than Madrid. Only on nights when there was a full moon like brilliant floodlighting exposing walls of bone-coloured palaces to the meticulous observing instruments of bombers, did it seem a city haunted by war.’25 A similar comment was made in an article by the American journalist Elizabeth O. Deeble – who signed her articles E. O. Deeble because editors were reluctant to accept articles from a woman. This became a joke with her friends, to whom she came to be known simply as ‘Deeble’. She wrote of the fact that, as of the end of 1936, no one had actually seen an enemy bomber. On the other hand, the city was flooded with refugees:
unhappy people whose poor homes no longer exist and who still carry their worldly goods upon their backs, are still pouring into Valencia at all hours. Were it not for the extraordinary efficiency with which they are fed, clothed, comforted and shipped out again to nearby towns and villages, they would indeed be a heavy problem, for this city of 400,000 inhabitants has received during the last month almost a million outsiders of one sort or another.26
The most pressing daily problems for foreign correspondents were the impossibility of finding a hotel room and the difficulty of getting transport for visits to Madrid. Resolving these problems was one of the tasks undertaken by the office of press and propaganda. The quality of daily life in Valencia, in terms of safety and access to food, at times made it possible to forget that there was a war going on. Philip Jordan managed to get a room at the rather grand Hotel Victoria, only to discover that his fellow guests were vultures:
armament men – most of them Germans – from every place you could think of, spies, harlots, more spies, job-hunters, propaganda men, sap-headed intellectuals who had never been properly appreciated in their own countries, drunken aviators, drummed out of other services: all riff-raff on the make in a town where gold was easy because the war was yet young.
Jordan expected, and was disappointed not to find, the heroic atmosphere of besieged Madrid: ‘Perpetual gala was not my idea of war, although it seemed to be Valencia’s.’27 Vincent ‘Jimmy’ Sheean wrote as late as May 1938: ‘Valencia was a pleasant place. There was a good deal of food there in the spring, as all the crops of vegetables and fruits had been excellent in the rich coastal plain of which it is the capital. We had meat in Hotel Metropole twice a day, and one vegetable (cauliflower or the like), with oranges to follow.’ By that time, according to Sheean, there were air-raids every day, but they were concentrated on the port district and ‘they did not come over the centre of the town at any time when I was there’. He noted the lack of a wartime atmosphere and that you could buy most things in the shops.28
However, one issue that clouded the horizon for the press and propaganda office was the air of vigilance and the sense of intrigue that inevitably went with the need for a strategic control of information in the wartime capital. It is possible to get a vivid insight into much of what went on thanks to the surviving memoirs and letters left by various people who worked at or with the Valencia press bureau. Unique among these are the memoirs of Kate Mangan, who was employed there from early to mid-1937. Born in 1904 as Katherine Prideaux Foster, she was a beautiful model and artist, who had studied at the Slade School of Art in University College, London and also worked as a mannequin. She married the Irish-American left-wing writer Sherry Mangan in 1931. The marriage was not happy, partly because of financial constraints but also because he was jealous of her desire to write. After falling in love with Jan Kurzke, a German who had come to London on the run from the Nazis, she had divorced Sherry Mangan in 1935, although they remained friends. Jan Kurzke had volunteered to fight in the International Brigades and she had gone to Spain in October 1936 in the hope of being with him.29 At first she had picked up casual jobs as an interpreter in Barcelona and then acted as secretary to an old friend from London, Hugh/Humphrey Slater, with whom she had studied at the Slade and with whom she had an affair in Spain.30 Through Hugh Slater, she met Tom Wintringham, the senior British Communist who would soon be the commander of the British battalion in the International Brigades, although officially he had come to Spain as a correspondent of the CPGB’s newspaper, the Daily Worker. Through both, she got to know a ‘petite and vivacious American girl’ called Katherine ‘Kitty’ Bowler (‘Louise Mallory’ in Kate Mangan’s memoirs). Kate Mangan would eventually find herself sharing a hotel room with her and ‘swept into the whirl of Louise’s [Kitty’s] life’, which in turn would lead to her working in the Valencia press office.31
Kitty Bowler was an aspiring left-wing freelance journalist from a wealthy American family who had become Wintringham’s lover not long after meeting him in Barcelona in September 1936. Her local newspaper in Plymouth, Massachusetts, described her as ‘of less than medium height, slender, with large brown eyes and a short tousled bob, not unlike Amelia Earhart’.32 A young woman of boundless energy, extremely pretty, with a mischievous look, she was ambitious but also deeply committed to the Popular Front cause. She had previously been in Moscow, where she had had a relationship with the famously pro-Stalinist New York Times correspondent there, the one-legged Liverpudlian Walter Duranty.33 After a frantic period in August in Paris trying to get the necessary passes to get into Spain, she nervously crossed the border with recommendations from the American Communist Party and with a flimsy commission from the People’s Press of New York, but with a fierce determination to make good. When she reached Barcelona along with a group of international volunteers, she met up with Duranty again and volunteered to work for the Generalitat’s spontaneously assembled press and propaganda office. The Catalan Communist Party, the Partit Socialista Unificat de Catalunya, had arranged for her to have board and lodging at the Hotel Regina near the Plaça de Catalunya.34 However, her hotel room was requisitioned to house a family of refugees. She wandered ‘desolate and forlorn’ to the Café Rambla, where she found a table around which sat a group of Englishmen wearing, shockingly for Catalan eyes, baggy shorts: ‘Like the story book waif who peeks through the frosted pane at the happy family gathered round the fireside, I eyed the little group sitting at a corner table.’ They looked at her coldly as, ‘shy but desperate’, she approached them. As she turned to leave, ‘a soft-voiced bald man touched my arm. “You must join us”.’35
It was Tom Wintringham. Balding, bespectacled and already married, Wintringham, while hardly handsome, had a romantic air. She was entranced by his fertile conversation, his gentle manner and humour, and they immediately became friends. Initially,
Kitty was principally delighted to have found someone with the influence and contacts to help her gather information for her articles. However, they had quickly and passionately fallen in love. Shortly afterwards, Tom wrote an account of how their relationship had developed, an account that he later omitted from his memoir of the Spanish Civil War:
She had been in Barcelona a few days when in the Rambla there appeared suddenly a moving forest of bare knees, some of which – for the English can appear incredibly tall – were almost on a level with her eyes. The first British medical unit, in shorts: and with it, vaguely attached to it, a bald-headed journalist whose name she knew from a book she had read in the States.
After a trip to a dark, lonely and frightened Madrid, she returned, feeling ‘lost and small and afraid’, but was cheered by his welcome:
It went quickly then, though not very quickly: some meals together, coffee and cognac at the café Rambla where friendly waiters knew what was happening at least as soon as the pair of them did, and indicated with a nod or a lifted hand to the latecomer where to find the other. After that there was the going home to her hotel, ‘hell and gone’ down the tramlines in the dark; she liked company on that lonely walk and he walked it with her three times before he kissed her goodnight.
Quite soon, just before going to the front for a few days, he had proposed to her ‘curtly and nervously, without prejudice to any other interest either might have in other people a thousand or three thousand miles away’. While he was away, she had begun
to think that she was in love with him (and he thought of little else). And a day before she expected he was back, to find her compact of tenderness, a warmth and reassurance of humanity. And someone in the room below had snored like a grass-cutter mowing, all night long. They heard it all night long, laughing a good deal at this but not because of this, they laughed because a loneliness and a strain was ended, with release and happiness.36
