Authors: Preston Paul
Liston Oak was involved peripherally in the scandal surrounding the death of José Robles Pazos and in the consequent fall-out. It was almost certainly Oak who was the first person to tell Coco Robles that he had heard that his father was dead. That was on 9 April, the day after
John Dos Passos arrived in Valencia and visited the press office to get safe-conducts and make travel arrangements for his trip to Madrid. They must have known each other before, but the renewal of their acquaintance now would play some role in Dos Passos’ drift into anti-Communism. Within three weeks, Oak would be in Barcelona pleading with Dos Passos to help him get out of Spain. The reason for his ostensible panic was that he had been increasingly indiscreet about his contacts with the POUM. Certainly, links with an organization regarded by the Russians as Trotskyist would do nothing to enhance his position as an employee of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
However, job security was probably not Liston Oak’s main priority. According to Kate Mangan, Oak had already shown a desire to get out of Valencia: ‘Liston was beginning to be a bit restless in his post, he was losing interest and discharging his duties more and more perfunctorily. He complained increasingly of his rheumatism. He said his health would not stand the damp climate in Valencia.’ He went briefly to Madrid and talked vaguely of starting a bureau there. However, finding the besieged capital too dangerous, he came back to Valencia, but he soon left for Barcelona, claiming that it was merely for a visit. Constancia de la Mora pointed out that the climate there was even damper and cooler. However, Kate felt that Liston would be more at home in Catalonia, because of his sympathy with the POUM. He never formally resigned his post at the press office. Rubio Hidalgo thought highly of Oak and took it for granted that he would soon be back. The Valencia office continued to send him copies of their press releases and commissioned him to write articles on the Catalan economic situation. When he failed to respond to any of their communications and no articles materialized, ‘at last we realized that he had deserted his post’. Milly Bennett commented: ‘It’s just like him to leave a job as soon as he has got it started. He has been a failure all his life.’
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The departure of Liston Oak hardly affected the functioning of the press office. The reorganization set off by Fischer’s report on the Republic’s propaganda deficit was still six months in the future. The late spring did, however, see one of the denizens of the office meet an unfortunate end. Since his marriage had broken up, Basil Murray had begun to drink. Having been persuaded not to join the International
Brigades, he had devoted himself to a quest for romance, but every woman on whom he cast eyes turned him down. He became morose and, according to Delmer, ‘what had once been charming eccentricity developed into a phobic moodiness and mad romantic exaltation’. Constancia de la Mora could not ‘find much use for this disturbed and disturbing young man, who had come to Spain to play the part of Byron, and who could not be relied on to turn up at the office and play the part of a hack’. After losing his job at the press office, he joined the International News Service of William Randolph Hearst. He did not last long. He was amused by the fact that, in the square, there was a performing goat which balanced, with all four legs together, on top of a pole. His frequent mentions of the goat seemed a gratuitous frivolity to his employers and he was fired.
Unemployed, he drank more and his life became more aimless. Then he fell in love with a mysterious reporter. According to Delmer, she was called Mary Mulliner and appears in Kate Mangan’s memoir as ‘Geraldine O’Brien’. Kate recalled that she ‘behaved so much like a spy that, in my opinion, it was impossible that she could have been one. If she was a spy I could not guess which side employed her’. Cockburn, who was working for the security service as some kind of counterespionage agent devoted to vetting Anglo-Saxon visitors, had no doubts: ‘had she had the words “I am a Nazi spy” printed on her hat, that could hardly have made her position clearer than it was’. Whatever else she was up to, the woman in question toyed with Basil, ‘poor, dear, limp rag that he was’, trying to make him jealous of other men. Then, suddenly she fled Valencia, heading, according to Cockburn, ‘for Berlin, in the company of a high-ranking officer of the International Brigade, who proved also to be an agent of the enemy’. Basil inevitably became more gloomy than ever.
To distract Basil, Ed Knoblaugh took him drinking in the red light district of the port. At a street circus, Basil was entranced to see swinging on a trapeze ‘a fine buxom she-ape with all the indications of her sex emphatically developed’. He offered to buy the ape and the reluctant owner was forced into selling by some watching militiamen. They, Basil, Knoblaugh and the ape then went off on a bar-crawl which ended at the Hotel Victoria. The Manager refused entry until, backed by the
drunken militiamen, Basil successfully argued that this was intolerable discrimination: ‘What about all the other apes in the hotel?’ Knoblaugh told Delmer that the last he saw of Basil was ‘when he turned on the water for his bath. “And now my poppet”, he was saying as I closed the door, “you shall have a lovely warm bath with plenty of lovely lavender soap. Do you like soap, oh Queen of my heart?”’ After a couple of days, there was no sign of Basil so Knoblaugh went back to the hotel. In the room, he found mayhem, the ape huddled in a nest of blankets and, a feverish Basil, both coughing helplessly. He had caught a virulent form of pneumonia from the ape. His enemies spread a rumour that it was a result of intimate relations with the ape; others that he had fallen into a drunken stupor and in an effort to rouse him, the bored ape had bitten him. Patience Darton arranged for him to be transferred to a British hospital ship. Basil recovered sufficiently to send proposals of marriage to several eligible girls in London, but died before reaching England.
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Distress over the fate of individuals was overshadowed by preoccupation with the progress of the war. The summer and the early autumn of 1937 saw some short-lived triumphs for the Republic, such as the initial successes at Brunete and Belchite, but also saw the disastrous loss of the north. Despite the gradual erosion of territory, morale remained high in Valencia. The move of the press office to Barcelona, along with the rest of the government, coincided with a reorganization of Republican resources, which seemed to bear fruit with the initial assault on Teruel in mid-December 1937 and its capture on 8 January 1938. In the first twelve days of the encounter, with Hemingway, Tom Delmer and Robert Capa, Herbert Matthews would drive each day from Valencia to the battle-front in bitterly cold conditions. They drove nearly three thousand miles, and produced scoop after scoop, beating the other correspondents by anything up to four days. On 17 December 1937, Hemingway, Delmer and Matthews entered Teruel with the Republican attackers. They then drove back to Valencia. Matthews recalled later: ‘after twenty hours on the go, I sat down at midnight, writing until four in the morning. It was the best story I got in the Spanish Civil War.’
Despite writing what he considered the best reporting of his life, Matthews found his piece brutally cut and buried on the inside pages of the
New York Times,
once again the victim of the pro-Catholic
‘bull-pen’. They reprimanded him for the length of the piece. In contrast, the paper printed a vivid, but entirely faked, description by William Carney of the retaking of the city and the rescue of the besieged rebel garrison. Not for the first time, Carney, safely ensconced in Zaragoza, had parroted, and then embellished, rebel press handouts that had overconfidently announced the recapture of the city. In contrast, Matthews had made the hazardous journey through snow and ice to Teruel and found it still in Republican hands. His vivid account utterly discredited what had been submitted by Carney. Nevertheless, the managing editor, Jimmy ‘Dressy’ James, issued Carney with no more than the most gentle reprimand.
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Hemingway was furious. When Matthews’ book,
Two Wars and More to Come,
was due to come out some months later, he sent a telegram to the publishers:
Herbert Matthews is the straightest the ablest and the bravest war correspondent writing today stop he has seen the truth where it was very dangerous to see and in this book he brings that rarest commodity to you stop in a world where faking now is far more successful than the truth he stands like a gaunt lighthouse of honesty stop and when the fakers are all dead they will read Matthews in the schools to find out what really happened stop I hope his office will keep some uncut copies of his dispatches in case he dies.
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The eventual rebel recapture of Teruel on 21 February opened the way to a massive rebel advance which reached the sea on 15 April and thus split the Republican zone in two. The end was in sight but Negrín was determined to fight on, refusing to believe that the democracies could go on being blind to the Axis threat. His optimism and commitment were shared by the majority of correspondents. Even when the situation grew ever more bleak for the Republic, there was no tightening of the censorship nor of working conditions for journalists beyond the hardships that they had to share with the rest of the population. In Barcelona, there was little food, no hot water for bathing, little by way of public transport and growing shortages of essential drugs.
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Bombing raids on the Catalan capital were ever more intense and Franco’s growing numerical superiority made visits to the front ever more dangerous.
In March 1938, Hemingway, another young correspondent, Jim Lardner, son of the novelist Ring Lardner, and Jimmy Sheean had all visited the press office situated in the broad avenue of the Diagonal in Barcelona. As with most other buildings in the city, the windows were criss-crossed with strips of gummed paper to prevent splintering from bomb blasts. Constancia de la Mora arranged hotel rooms for Sheean and Lardner. Feeling inadequate as a correspondent, Lardner would soon join the International Brigades and be killed at the battle of the Ebro.
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Despite rebel advances through Aragón and the recent appalling bombing raids in Barcelona, Sheean found Constancia de la Mora as cheerful and busy as ever. After the rebels broke through to the Mediterranean in mid-April, he was pleasantly surprised to note the deference with which the credentials issued by Connie’s office were treated in both halves of the Republican zone. His work faced few restrictions:
One time I went off to the front for three or four days by myself (rather against the advice of the local press attaché) and never had a moment’s trouble. The boys who drove trucks of food or munitions were always ready to give me a lift; the military commanders were affable and informative; I could always find a place to sleep and a blanket to cover me.
In the ferocity of rebel attacks, ‘the Republicans were inclined to assume that anybody who came up to the front was a friend. I never heard of a war in which a stray foreigner could roam about so freely, even with press credentials.’ Far from being threatened, as was the fate of correspondents in the Nationalist zone, Sheean and others found themselves being invited to share the soldiers’ meagre rations.
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In mid-1938, with the situation for the Republic worsening dramatically, Cedric Salter, who had worked for both the
Daily Telegraph
and the
News Chronicle
in Spain, was hoping to get a job representing the
Daily Mail.
Since Lord Rothermere’s paper was notorious for its doggedly pro-fascist views, it seemed unlikely that it would want a
correspondent in Spain or indeed that the Republican authorities would grant permission. However, Salter was persuaded by the Reuters correspondent, Bill Williams, to try his luck. The first part of the operation would be to persuade the Republican press office that to have relatively objective reporting in the hitherto ferociously Francoist
Daily Mail
would be to the infinite benefit of the Republic. The second part of the operation would be to persuade the editor of the
Daily Mail
that the inevitable fall of the Republic told from the inside would be a tremendous news story which, with no correspondent as things stood, they would be unable to report.
Accordingly, Salter went to see Constancia de la Mora, whom he described as ‘the dictator of the Foreign Press Department’. Although he was suspicious of her commitment to the Communist Party, he was in awe of her:
Few people and no other woman have ever impressed me with the same sense of latent mental power. She was in the middle thirties, rather masculine in manner and clothes, and had a nice taste in pretty secretaries. Everything that she did and said was quietly efficient, passionless, and far-seeing.
He argued the case that it might help the Republican cause to get a hearing in the
Daily Mail.
She granted her approval, albeit not without making it clear that she knew that he was motivated by the need for another job after being replaced as the
News Chronicle
correspondent by William Forrest: ‘I always left Constancia feeling that she was at least three jumps ahead of me.’ With her permission secured, Salter hastened to London and persuaded the
Daily Mail
to take him on as their first, last and only correspondent in Government Spain. He began his mission of reporting on the final days of the Republic at the beginning of June 1938.
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After Willie Forrest had returned to Spain in the spring of 1937, he impressed all who met him with his courage. According to Cedric Salter, Forrest never showed the slightest awareness of danger, ‘strolling about happily with bullets whining uncomfortably close, and not bothering even to duck’. Apparently, the only sign that he recognized danger
was that his Scottish accent intensified noticeably. During one of the most notorious artillery bombardments to affect the Hotel Florida, on 22 April 1937, Josephine Herbst described him as a sheep-faced man, ‘behaving very well with grayish look’. However, it was his sensitive and realistic reporting that impressed every bit as much as his bravery. When Willie had been in Madrid during the worst days of the siege, Geoffrey Cox had recognized his uncanny ability to capture the intensity of the moment in his articles by the use of some concrete detail. Not all journalists were as impressed as Cox. Certainly not the interpreter assigned to Willie by the press office, the Swedish Kajsa Rothman. Not appreciating how he worked, she complained to Herbst that Willie ‘always wants to know unimportant things’. Constancia de la Mora, however, shared Cox’s appreciation of Forrest, regarding him as