Basque Refugees in England

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Torn roots

After the bombing of Guernica, many Basque children were evacuated to the UK. Sixty-five years on speak about their experiences

Peter Lennon
Guardian

Wednesday May 22, 2002

Sixty-five years ago today, the luxury liner Habana steamed into Southampton harbour with 3,800 half-starved Basque children crammed into a vessel which normally accommodated 400. The British government's policy of strict non-intervention in the Spanish civil war had been severely tested when Guernica, the ancient capital of the Basques, was bombed mercilessly by planes of the Nazi Condor Legion on April 26, 1937, making a mockery of Germany's official stance of non-intervention.

The images of women and children in the burning ruins of this small town of no military significance so inflamed public opinion here that the Conservative government was obliged at least to permit the entry of child refugees. But the terms were inflexible: the refugee committees which organised the exodus had to guarantee they would be responsible for the upkeep of the children for the entire length of their stay.

On May 21, the evacuation began from besieged Bilbao. The crossing of the storm-lashed Bay of Biscay, under the reluctant escort of the Royal Navy, was nightmarish.

Helvecia Hidalgo, now 79, was 14 when she sailed on the Habana with her 10-year-old brother and eight-year-old sister. "When we arrived in Southampton, the Salvation Army were waiting for us, throwing sweets at us," she recalls. "We thought the English always dressed up like that.

"We were sent to a camp at North Stoneham, outside Southampton, where we lived 10 to a tent. When we first came in the camp, they gave us tea. I couldn't bear tea. 'Oh no', we said, 'in Spain we only have it for medicine'. I wouldn't touch it for years.

"But we had lovely white bread; we had rationing in Bilbao, where gradually the bread got darker and darker. We used to say they swept the floor to make it. It tasted horrible, so when we arrived here it tasted so delicious some children got ill from eating too much white bread."

Hermino Martinez, now 72, came from a small mining village outside Bilbao. "My mother had five other children, so they sent me, aged seven, and my 11-year-old brother to England," he says. "All 3,800 of us were put in tents at Stoneham. The committee had only a few days to prepare for 2,000 children, but double that number came. Later it rained and rained; there were bog conditions - appalling. The latrines were just an open trench thrown up by volunteers."

The scene at Stoneham camp on June 15, when Bilbao fell to Franco's forces, was described at the time by Yvonne Cloud, a member of the Basque Children's Committee. "A priest announced the news from a loudspeaker van," she wrote. "The impulse to destroy the bearer of evil news was swift. From the wailing and weeping crowd of children, swaying rhythmically in an abandonment of grief, a little knot sprang forward, rushing the van in an impotent attempt to vent feelings of aggression."

One group of children wrote a letter to the prime minister, adding with a precocious understanding of the realities of politics "or whoever most rules England", asking for "some big boat... to defend our mothers and brothers and grandfathers and our invalids". But the government never budged on its policy of non-intervention and never gave a penny towards the welfare of the children.

Adrian Bell, author of Only for Three Months: the Basque Children in Exile, comments: "When I was writing that book [in 1996], there was this report about stranded Bosnian child refugees. It was winter and there was this busload of children, coming to England, stuck on a mountain pass because the Home Office could not get their act together to provide entry visas. Just like 1937."

The Basque children began to be dispersed throughout Britain, the intention of never separating siblings often having to be abandoned by the hard-pressed refugee committees.

"In August, I was sent to a colony in Carshalton," Hidalgo remembers, "where they would take whole families. A lovely big farm called the Oaks and it had a mansion. They put us in the servants' quarters: the rest of the place was open to visitors on Sundays, but we were not supposed to go there. We had a matron who spoke Spanish. We all had jobs on a rota and looked after the younger ones."

But such comfort was rare. "I was sent all over the country," Martinez says. "To Swansea, to Tynemouth, to Brampton, near Carlisle. The worst place was Margate. It was that terrible winter of 1939 and there was no heating. The place was so bad it had to be closed down. I was sent to live with a family in Leicester. I was very happy with them - we still keep in touch. But by that time, I was separated from my brother".

With the outbreak of war, financial support for the Basque children diminished and their survival depended often on the generosity of working people. "The miners were marvellous," Martinez says. "They gave even when they could ill afford it.

"There was constant pressure from Franco's government to have us sent back. They claimed my parents had signed a document, but it had been falsified. The fact is my father was in jail, only allowed out when he became partly paralysed when they used machine oil for cooking. My mother was terribly poor and only too willing for us to be taken away from hunger."

Hidalgo married a Catalan she met when working at the Spanish Institute in London where she still lives. Martinez married a Swiss woman he met when she came to Britain on holiday in the 1950s. He got a degree going to night school, taught at a comprehensive and retired as head of a large technical department of a school in Barnet, north London, near his present home. Over the years, the majority of the children were reunited with their parents, but often in foreign countries to which Basque families had fled - typically, France or South America. "I went back for the first time in 1959," Martinez says. "What first shocked me was the fear of the people under Franco.

"Meeting my family was not a very joyful experience. We were such strangers. They had suffered so much and they thought that in England I had had a very comfortable life, which was anything but the case. They were still very, very poor working people, struggling to survive. My parents were illiterate and I had managed to get an honours degree. They realised I was educated. It was heartbreaking."

"I did not see my mother for 12 years," Hidalgo says. "Thinking very, very closely and considering we had a much better life than we would have had in Spain, even so I sometimes think that the children should be left with their parents. It's never the same after; a bond is broken."

Martinez adds: "When Labour took over [in Britain] in 1945, we had great hopes, following the defeat of fascism in Europe, that Spain would be dealt with. But of course it was not to be. The US saw fit to keep Franco in power. We had terrible fascism in Spain long after it had been defeated in Europe."

For more information you can also read the post about Dorothy Legarreta's book titled "The Gernika Generation".

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