Authors: Preston Paul
When the government moved from Valencia to Barcelona in November 1937, the foreign press bureau was forced to share premises with the Propaganda Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Luis Rubio Hidalgo was said to be piqued at what he perceived as a loss of independence and importance. However, he was chosen to go to Paris as titular head of the Spanish Republican News Agency, Agence Espagne. Constancia de la Mora, forgiven for her clash with Prieto, was made the director of the foreign press office.
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These changes seem to have been made as a result of a report on the Republic’s propaganda deficit prepared for Negrín by Louis Fischer.
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The real brains behind the Agence Espagne was the Comintern’s brilliant propagandist, Otto Katz. Kate Mangan met him on his occasional visits to Valencia, where he used his pseudonym of André Simon. She recalled later: ‘No longer young, he was a very charming man, an artful propagandist amazingly good at ingratiating himself with the most diverse types and making use of them for propaganda purposes without their realising it.’
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On her way back to England in the autumn of 1937, she met him in Paris with Louis Fischer and thought them both ‘sweet’.
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Fischer’s report, probably compiled after consultation with Katz, was crucial. As his own intensely felt yet perceptively analytical articles reveal, Fischer believed that the best thing a journalist could do for the Republic was to write as accurately as wartime conditions permitted. He had been introduced to Negrín by Jay Allen before the war. Now, he
was drawn ever closer to the prime minister as he tried to implement his vision that the survival of the Republic required a change of policy from the democracies and that, in turn, depended on getting British, French and American public opinion to put pressure on their politicians to abandon non-intervention. Interestingly, Katz had been with Fischer in October 1937 when he accompanied Negrín on a visit to the International Brigade hospital at Benicasim. Fischer took Negrín around the hospital where, among the wounded, he introduced him to the English veteran Tom Wintringham, whom he already knew both from his time as quartermaster in the Brigades and through the young American correspondent Kitty Bowler.
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Not long after, on 9 November 1937, Fischer wrote to Negrín from Paris in terms that revealed just how close their collaboration had become:
There is a general impression in Paris and London that
our
military situation is very bad and that Franco will soon win. […] An effective method of counteracting this tendency is to give correct and optimistic statements regarding our military situation. Apart from the dry cold, official staff communiqués there is little that goes abroad about the republican military status. I propose the following: 1) A weekly survey of the military situation written by, say, Cruz Salido or some other good journalist. This is to be published in the Agence Espagne and simultaneously given to all foreign correspondents in Spain. […] 2) From time to time, and preferably often, you or Prieto or Rojo should receive one or more foreign journalists and talk to them about
our
military situation and prospects. The world gets too little news out of Republican Spain. 3) The newspapers still complain that their correspondents cannot go to the front. They cannot send their representatives to a country at war without a guarantee that these representatives can go to the scene of the fighting. For these and many other matters it is essential that you should have a department in your office for the foreign press. […] It is also very necessary to take full advantage of Spanish radio facilities. These are not well exploited. You ought to have a
radio director in your chancellery. Occasionally it is important to encourage correspondents and persons of prominence in political life to visit Spain. We thought, for instance, that in connection with the depression of favourable sentiment towards
us
a group of French and British journalists should go down for a special interview with you.
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Fischer was actually saying what the more perceptive staff on the ground in the main press offices in Madrid and Valencia, Ilsa Kulcsar and Constancia de la Mora, already knew. They had quickly reached the conclusion that the best way to counteract right-wing propaganda about the Republic was ‘to give foreign correspondents every opportunity we could to see the truth, and then every facility possible for writing it and getting it sent abroad’. Like Ilsa before her, Constancia found that a policy of providing contacts with senior government officials and visits to the battle-fronts paid off, although there were occasional mishaps. One such was the case of William Carney, of the
New York Times,
who in 1936 revealed the details of Republican gun emplacements in Madrid to the benefit of his Francoist friends. Another case, infinitely less clear, related to the highly distinguished correspondent of the
Daily Express,
Sefton ‘Tom’ Delmer. Expelled by the Nationalists in September 1936 because his reporting was considered insufficiently favourable to their cause, Delmer then represented the
Daily Express
in the Republican zone. Although highly rated by his fellow newspapermen, who jokingly paid tribute to his ability to get a story by calling him ‘Seldom Defter’, the staff of the Valencia press office considered him to be hostile to the Republic.
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.
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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.’
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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’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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-year-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’.
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