“Every war is a war against children,” Eglantyne Jebb, the founder of Save the Children said. This was particularly true during the Spanish Civil War, as Maggie Brookes explains.
When the bombing of Madrid by Franco‘s fascists began in the autumn and winter of 1936, women scrambled aboard trains and took their children north to Barcelona. But there they faced new problems: bread was in short supply, and milk and sugar were almost non-existent because Franco had gained control of Spain’s principal farming areas.
My novel, Acts of Love and War, tells the story of the dedicated individuals who stepped into this brutal war to help the children.
In December 1936 the British-American Quaker Alfred Jacob set up a canteen in Barcelona station, giving warm milk to the women and children who arrived at night. Soon 1,000 refugees were arriving a week.
The Quakers and Save The Children made a joint appeal in the UK for the children of Spain. Quaker companies like Cadbury-Fry, McVities, MacFarlane and Quaker Oats freely donated many tons of their products.
By January 1937 the Spanish Republican government’s Council for the Protection of Childhood was already responsible for 7,000 displaced children. International Red Aid, a Comintern-founded organisation, had placed 2,000 children in 200 ‘children’s colonies.’
Although the colonies were set up like orphanages to house and educate youngsters, many of the children were sent there by their parents to get them away from the areas of worst bombardment.
As Franco‘s army took the southern city of Malaga in February 1937, more than 100,000 people grabbed what possessions they could carry and began to walk north along the N-340.
At night they were picked out by searchlights and shelled by warships. During the day they were strafed by Italian planes. It is estimated that 3–5,000 people died on the road.
The survivors had to walk for more than 20 hours to reach Motril before the International Brigades were able to protect them. A Canadian ambulance driver called Norman Bethune drove back and forth along the road.
“At first we decided to take only children and mothers, but the pain of separation between father and child, husband and wife became too cruel to bear,” he said. “We finished by transporting families with the largest number of young children and the solitary children, of which there were hundreds without parents.”
Many Malagans continued north to Murcia, a poor town of 60,000 people, which was soon swollen by another 20,000 refugees and soldiers. The civil authorities set up ‘night shelters.’ An unfinished nine-storey apartment block without running water or sanitation housed 4,000 Malagan refugees, many of whom were children.
Aid worker Francesca Wilson described the din, the stench, the filth, the flies and mosquitoes. “This is the greatest misery I have ever seen in my life,” she said, “and I’ve seen some terrible sights.”
The Quakers urgently sent powdered milk and food, though it was not enough to keep the weakest alive, and there was a 50 per cent mortality rate among babies. Refugee children desperately needed medical attention but there was no room in the hospitals.
The aristocrat Sir George Young had already set up an ambulance unit and a hospital in Almeria. Francesca contacted him and within weeks a suitable villa in Murcia was equipped, staffed and opened as a children’s hospital. Typhus was rife among the young patients.
Meanwhile, Franco’s army, supported by Italian and German forces, was advancing along the northern coast of Spain, and the Republican-backed Basque Government appealed for foreign countries to accept child refugees. France, Russia, Belgium, Mexico, Switzerland and Denmark between them accepted almost 29,000 children.
Britain held back until after the bombing of Guernica in April 1937, when there was such outrage that the British government reluctantly agreed to allow a single boatload of refugee children and their accompanying adults to enter the UK.
On 21 May, 1937, the SS Habana evacuated almost 4,000 children from Bilbao to Southampton, although the UK government insisted they were to be supported entirely by volunteers and voluntary funds.
Back in Barcelona, Alfred Jacob was incensed. He believed that the children should be kept in Spain and cared for there.
Within six months of his arrival he had set up five canteens (one run by Norwegian Quakers) and was serving 3,000 children and mothers a day with breakfasts. The American Red Cross and American Quakers sent donations including 6,000 tons of wheat flour. Save the Children sent massive shipments of condensed milk.
Early in 1938 the British Quaker Edith Pye began an organisation which became the International Commission for the Assistance of Child Refugees in Spain. Before long 24 governments were contributing and it set up a base in Geneva. It didn’t have workers on the ground in Spain but designated the British Quakers under Alfred Jacob to run the relief efforts in Catalonia, the American Quakers and Mennonites in Southern Spain, and the International Voluntary Service for Peace in central Spain.
They worked alongside local government agencies and organisations like Solidaridad Internacional Antifascista (International Antifascist Solidarity). There was also a host of small independent organisations: for example, the News Chronicle‘s journalist John Langdon-Davies set up the Foster Parents Scheme for Children in Spain, running three children’s colonies at Puigcerdà in the Pyrenees.
By February 1938 there were 15 canteens in Barcelona, feeding 5,000 children a day, and 40 colonies housed 4,000 children. But refugees continued to pour into the city, which was now under siege by Franco with daily bombing raids. By September 1938 Alfred Jacobs’s team was running 74 canteens feeding 15,164 children, and by January 1939 132 canteens served 27,532 every day.
As Franco’s forces closed in on Barcelona, people began to surge north towards France. Thousands began to congregate in border towns like Puigcerdà, and the relief organisations ran mobile canteens to feed them. On 26 January, 1939, Franco took Barcelona, though Madrid continued to hold out until March.
It is thought that by November 1938 there were more than a million refugees in Catalonia, of whom about half fled the country at the end of the war, though they were not welcomed by the French authorities.
It is not possible to estimate the number of children whose parents were killed, or who went into ‘children’s colonies’ or to overseas countries and never saw their families again.
In 1947 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the British and American Quakers for their “compassionate effort to relieve human suffering”, which included recognition of their efforts in Spain during the civil war. It was given for their “silent help from the nameless to the name less,” the majority of whom were children.
Acts of Love and War by Maggie Brookes is published on 9 June, 2022
Find out more about this book.
Maggie Brookes is a novelist and poet who relishes uncovering stories about the strength of women and the power of friendship and love in the most terrible of circumstances. Acts of Love and War is her second novel with Penguin Random House.
Read Judith Allnatt‘s review of Acts of Love and War.
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Read more about Eglantyne Jebb and Save the Children in Historia’s interview with Clare Mulley, her biographer.
Clare has also written about Erich Karl, one of the first children saved by Eglantyne Jebb after the First World War.
Emma Darwin, the novelist, writing oracle and Historia’s agony aunt for historical writers, mentions her uncle, John Cornford, the first Briton to be killed in the Spanish Civil War, in her recent non-biography of her famous ancestor, This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin.
Images:
- Children take refuge in a sewer during the Francoist bombing over Madrid, 1937: Ministry of Culture of Spain via Wikipedia (public domain)
- Spain’s Children are Hungry: ©Britain Yearly Meeting
- Map showing Spain during the Civil War, Spring 1937: ©DKB Creative Ltd
- Waiting for the doctor – a clinic at Murcia ©Britain Yearly Meeting
- Welcoming Basque children to Newcastle upon Tyne, 29 June 1937: Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums on Flickr (no known copyright restrictions)
- Map showing Spain during the Civil War, Summer 1938: ©DKB Creative Ltd
- Residents of the War Resisters’ International home in the French Pyrenees at Prats-de-Mollo, housing refugees from the Spanish Civil War, in the care of Professor José Brocca, 1937–39: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
