Authors: Preston Paul
In 1949, he returned to Madrid as director of the Reuters office there, where he remained until September 1966 apart from brief assignments to Morocco, Portugal and Algeria. On 11 January 1961, along with other members of the
junta directiva
of the Agrupación de Corresponsales de Prensa Extranjeros de España, he was received by General Franco. In 1962, he covered the last stand of the OAS in Oran. He maintained his friendship with Hemingway and they would meet whenever the American novelist visited Madrid. After thirty years in Spain, the Spanish Government marked his retirement in 1966 with the award of the Cruz de Caballero de la Orden de Isabel la Católica, which was given him by the then Foreign Minister Fernando María Castiella. In January 1968, Queen Elizabeth II of England appointed him Member of the Order of the British Empire, which was conferred upon him by the then British Ambassador, Sir Alan Williams.
After 1966, Henry Buckley retired to live in Sitges, but continued to work for the BBC as an occasional correspondent. He died on 9 November 1972. He was much loved and admired by his professional colleagues for his honesty and gentleness of manner. No less a figure than the great Francoist journalist Manuel Aznar wrote in
La Vanguardia:
‘Being an Englishman of a distinguished kind, he was for us an example of courtesy. If only all the English were like that when they are with us.’ The Spanish journalists who knew him heard little of his experiences during the Civil War or of his friendship with Negrín. For Hemingway, Hugh Thomas and others, he was a living archive of the war. Fortunately for those who could not consult him personally, he left
Life and Death of the Spanish Republic,
a worthy monument to a great correspondent.
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n 1963, the Franco dictatorship set up a special department to counter the subversive effect of the work of a man called Herbert Rutledge Southworth. Yet, until that date, hardly anyone had heard of Herbert Southworth outside of the small circle of Jay Allen, Louis Fischer and Constancia de la Mora. Yet his published work struck so hard at the dictatorship’s complex justification of its own existence that the regime’s efforts merely to prevent his work entering Spain were deemed to be insufficient. The partisan accounts of recent Spanish history that were used to vindicate a brutal regime were, as a result of his writing, no longer sustainable. The principal task of the new department was to come up with more plausible and modernized versions. This inevitably involved the implicit recognition that its earlier accounts were untrue. Once the dam had been breached, of course, there was no going back. The subsequent attempts were even more easily ridiculed. In this sense, Herbert Southworth, who had once been a part of the pro-Republican group that lobbied for the Spanish Republic in the United States, would do more for the anti-Franco cause than any of his more famous friends. Long after they had been forgotten, he made his presence felt to the extent of being denominated the Franco regime’s public enemy number one.
Southworth struck this blow, and thus became a major figure in the historiography of the Spanish Civil War, as a result of the publication in Paris in 1963 of his book,
El mito de la cruzada de Franco.
It was issued by Ediciones Ruedo Ibérico, the great publishing house of the Spanish anti-Franco exile run by an eccentric and massively well-read anarchist, José Martínez Guerricabeitia. Smuggled into Spain and sold
clandestinely, Ruedo Ibérico’s books had enormous impact, particularly after the publication of a Spanish translation of Hugh Thomas’ classic work on the Spanish Civil War. From the first moments of the conspiracy that became the military coup of 18 July 1936, the rebels were falsifying their own history and that of their enemies. Hugh Thomas’ book recounted the history of the war in a readable and objective style – in itself a devastating blow for the partisans of what they called Franco’s crusade – and was therefore devoured hungrily by anyone who could get hold of a copy. Southworth’s book was infinitely less immediately popular, but much more devastating. It did not narrate the war but rather dismantled, line by line, the structures of lies that the Franco regime had erected to justify its existence. The consequence of the arrival in Spain of both books was an attempt by the then Minister of Information, the dynamic Manuel Fraga Iribarne, to seal the frontier against the arrival of more copies and to counteract the intellectual and moral impact of both – but especially of the Southworth book, for its corrosive effect on the regime’s self-image.
In fact, the book by Thomas had arrived first and had been smuggled into Spain in large quantities. Its success saw a tightening of frontier restrictions. Herbert’s book was sent to the Canary Islands, where the customs were much slacker and from there entry into the mainland was relatively easy. This meant that the price when it was finally sold, under the counter, in Spanish bookshops, was more than double that in France. The profit went to the smuggler and the bookseller. Herbert wrote to Jay Allen: ‘I have been writing for more than three years and I have not earned a single centime, a new or an old franc. I have not even recovered the money I advanced to publish the first book in Spanish. It has sold more than 3000 copies, which in view of the difficulties in getting it into Spain is not too bad.’
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Nevertheless, those three thousand copies that filtered in were enough to provoke the creation, within the Ministry of Information, of the special department under the name Sección de Estudios sobre la Guerra de España.
To direct it, Fraga chose a clever young functionary of the ministry, a chemist who had trained to be a Jesuit before leaving to marry, Ricardo de la Cierva y de Hoces. He came from a famous conservative family; his grandfather had been Minister of the Interior in the governments
of the monarchy, his uncle had invented the autogiro and his father had been killed by the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War. His job was, broadly speaking, to bring up to date the official historiography of the regime in order to repel the attacks coming from Paris. The principal weapon in the armoury of this new unit of intellectual warfare was provided by the purchase of the magnificent library on the Spanish Civil War, built up over many years by the Italian journalist, Cesare Gullino, who had originally been sent to Spain by Mussolini. Southworth quickly became the department’s main enemy. In comparison with Hugh Thomas, who was already well known after the worldwide success of his book on the Spanish war, Herbert Southworth was virtually unknown. However, there was another crucial difference between the two men. Thomas had written his great book on the conflict, but the Spanish Civil War was not going to be the central objective of his life. He was already working on his monumental history of Cuba. Southworth, in contrast, dedicated his life to the study of the Spanish Civil War. Moreover, against de la Cierva, who had the staff and resources of a ministry at his disposal, Southworth had his own arsenal: one of the world’s greatest collections of books on the war.
As well as being an anti-Francoist author, Southworth was one of the investors who made possible the survival of the important Spanish publishing house in Paris, Editions Ruedo Ibérico.
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That Ricardo de la Cierva y de Hoces saw Southworth as an opponent to be feared was soon revealed. In 1965, de la Cierva had written to him, saying: ‘I have great respect for you as an expert on the bibliography of our war and many people have been made aware of your book thanks to me. But I sincerely believe, Mr Southworth, that if you were to eliminate all the passion and prejudice that is found in your pages, your work would achieve the status that it deserves’
(Tengo una gran estima por Vd. Como especialista en la bibliografía de nuestra Guerra y muchas personas han conocido su libro por mi medio. Pero creo sinceramente, Mr Southworth, que si Vd suprimiera toda la pasión y todo el partidisimo que rebosa en sus páginas, su obra alcanzaría todo el valor que se merece).
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They met in Madrid in 1965 and de la Cierva invited him to dinner. Southworth told me later that de la Cierva had proudly recounted to him how the police had orders to seize copies of
El mito de la cruzada,
found when
searching bookshops and the homes of political suspects. De la Cierva confided that he recommended and even gave to his friends confiscated copies of the book, proceeding to distribute copies to the other dinner guests. However, in Franco’s Spain, what was said in private was often far removed from what was said in public. Ricardo de la Cierva wrote:
H. R. Southworth is, without argument, the great expert on the bibliography of our war, as seen from the Republican side… His library on our war is the world’s most important private collection: more than seven thousand titles. I am almost certain that he has read all seven thousand. And he keeps, in a tremendous photographic memory, all the important facts and all the relevant cross-references between these books.
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De la Cierva had underestimated the numerical size of the library, but not Southworth’s detailed knowledge of its contents. This praise was immediately followed by some ferocious, but superficial, attacks on the alleged deficiencies of Southworth’s methodology.
Who was this Herbert Southworth, the legendary book-collector who for many years to come would be the legendary intellectual scourge of General Franco’s dictatorship? His books would be quarried by the most serious specialists on the Spanish Civil War and his study of the bombing of Guernica would be one of the three or four most important of the many thousands of volumes written on the conflict. Even so, few people knew who he was because, not having a position in a university, he lacked an easy label. Nevertheless, he had had an extraordinary existence. His passage from poverty in the American West to crusading left-wing journalist during the Spanish Civil War had elements of a John Steinbeck novel. His later transformation into successful radio station magnate and then into a scholar of world-wide reputation was reminiscent of one of Theodore Dreiser’s self-made heroes.
He was born in Canton, a tiny Oklahama town, on 6 February 1908. When the town bank owned by his father failed in 1917, the family moved briefly to Tulsa in eastern Oklahoma. They stayed longer in Abilene, Texas, where his father prospected for oil. Herbert’s principal memory of that time was reading his father’s collection of the Harvard
Classics. The theft of one of the volumes when he was twelve affected him so deeply that it was perhaps the beginning of his own obsessive book-collecting. He educated himself among the stacks of the Carnegie Public Library in Abilene. There, after months of reading
The Nation
and
The New Republic,
he decided to abandon Protestantism and the conservative Republicanism of the Bible belt. He became a socialist and an avid lifetime reader of what he joyfully called ‘the muckraker’s school of journalism’. It was to be the basis of his astonishing transformation into a formidable scholar in Europe.
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He went to secondary school in Abilene until the age of fifteen. He worked at various jobs in the construction industry in Texas and then in a copper mine in Morenci, Arizona. There, he learned Spanish working with Mexican miners. The collapse of the price of copper after the Wall Street crash left him unemployed. He then decided to work his way through Arizona University and when his savings ran out, he went to the Texas Technological College in Lubbock – better known as the birthplace of Buddy Holly. There, he lived in acute poverty, paying for his studies by working in the college library. He majored in history with a minor in Spanish. The work in the library had deepened his love for books. With the encouragement of the college librarian, he left, in 1934, with only one thought in mind: to seek work in the world’s most important book collection, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. When he finally got a post in the Document Department, it was at a salary of less than half of what he had received in the copper mines. Yet, although it barely allowed him to eat, he was happy just to be able to pass his days among the bookshelves.
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When the Spanish Civil War broke out, he began to review books on the conflict and write the occasional article for the
Washington Post.
The articles were immensely well informed and based on thorough study of the international press.
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The reviews foreshadowed both the sardonic humour and the hawk-eyed critical acuity that were to be the hallmarks of his later writing. Reviewing Theo Rogers’
Spain: A Tragic Journey,
he wrote:
There is a frightening confusion about this book. I mean the careless, perhaps deliberate, confusing of the words Anarchist
and Communist. There is a wide difference between the two and intelligent people recognize it. As Mr Rogers uses the words, they betray the worried indignation of his mind; they do not convey information. It is not fair to speak vaguely of people bought with ‘Moscow gold’ and offer no specific proofs. It is disingenuous to deny that Franco is a fascist and then add that he merely believes in the ‘totalitarian state’.
He ended his article with the suggestion that readers would ‘doubtless open Mr Rogers’ book (if they open it at all) with hearty approval of the strange words of Sir Wilmott Lewis, who contributes the foreword: “I know nothing save the title of the book for which this is written as a foreword, and with its conclusions, if it draws any, I imagine I should strongly disagree”.’
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His review of Harold Cardozo’s
The March of a Nation
noted the contradictions between a series of statements: that on 18 July Queipo de Llano had ‘barely 180 trained soldiers on whom he could depend’ and had to use ‘this handful of men’ cunningly in order ‘to overawe the teeming population’; that ‘the ready supply of volunteers, 300,000 in all, within the first few months of the war, was the best proof that the Army movement was really a national one’, and that in October, ‘General Varela was very short of men. His march to Toledo had been a daring feat of bluff and his march to Madrid was to be even more daring. The African expeditionary force itself did not number much more than fourteen to fifteen thousand men, and it was by shuffling the unit from one side to another that General Varela was able to appear in strength.’
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