Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Women Rebels: The Spanish Civil War

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

From aristocratic rebels to Civil Rights activists, tens of thousands of people travelled to Spain during the Civil War - and not all of them were men...Whether they were fighting, nursing or reporting, in this episode of Betwixt the Sheets we are going to meet a few of the women who chose to risk their lives.Kate is joined by Sarah Watling, author of ‘Tomorrow Perhaps the Future’ to hear about Gerda Taro, Martha Gelhorn and more.*WARNING there are adult words and themes in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Anisha Deva.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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then you have nobody to blame but yourself if you are offended. Because fair do's, you have been warned. Picture the scene betwixters. It's 1936. Nationalist rebels have begun a military revolt against Spain's Republican government and this uprising has become a civil war. Machine guns and cannons are battering the country and you don't live there, mind you, but you're aware this civil war is going on. What would it have taken for you to upsticks, travel to Spain and try and help? I'm not sure I would have done that. But lots of people did. And today, Betwixt the Sheets, we're going to find out who they were. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect confidence of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and putting the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I have nothing to do with it, Derry. Oh, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandling. society with me, Kate Listerre. Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell and Robert Kappa, and names often called on as examples of people who went to fight in the Spanish Civil War. People who went to fight when they didn't have to. But these men, they're just three of tens of thousands of people who went to fight, report on and otherwise assist in Spain. And it wasn't

just men, not by a long shot. Many women went to go and fight. They didn't have to, but they went anyway. Today I am joined by Sarah Watling to find out more about who these women were, why they went to Spain, what their involvement was and what the war can tell us about them. Let's do this. Welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's Sarah Watling. How are you? I'm all right, thank you. How are you? I'm so excited to be talking to you today because this is a subject that I really don't know very much about at all. And then when I was researching it a little bit knowing that I was going to talk to you. I said, why don't I know more about this? I should. This is a really big thing that happened. The Spanish Civil War. So what was it

that made you think there's stories to tell here? This is what I want to look at. Have you always been a war historian or is it something draw you to this particular conflict? No, I'm not a war historian at all. And I have to, I mean, in a way, this isn't a book about war at all. You know, like it was a really good vehicle to tell some fascinating stories and investigate some questions that were kind of bothering me. And I think, you know, you're right. Like the Spanish Civil War was this huge event for so many people, but actually there are so many ways in which it was kind of overshadowed by everything that followed it because, you know, the war ran from 1936 and 1939. So, you know, within months of that conflict ending, you have the Second World War erupting, which kind of,

you know, of course just kind of blows everything else out of the water and means that the memory of the Spanish Civil War is also kind of somewhat overshadowed by that sense. of hindsight of how, you know, its tragedy is also kind of seen as a tragedy for Europe because it was understood as a missed opportunity to face down fascism and prevent the larger war, you know? So sometimes that means that it isn't really seen in its own context of what it meant to the Spanish people, but it also does kind of give it this extra sort of sense of poignancy that, you know, many of the women that I write about in the book were going to Spain because they saw it as a chance to a war that did ultimately end up happening. Always listen to the women. So the Spanish Civil War

happened and then Hitler pretty much went, hold my beer, and then all of that happened. It's definitely overshadowed, isn't it? Can I start with a really basic, obvious beginner, page one, usborn guide to the Spanish Civil War question? Can I ask, what was it about? What happened? Like, what caused it? I mean, that is a really good question and not a beginner's question at all, because this is one of those wars where actually it has so many different meanings for so many different people. And one of the things that's fascinating about it is the different kind of causes and motivations that people brought to it. To go to the kind of short guide introduction to the Spanish Civil War, so it started, as I said, in the summer of 1936. It was essentially an attempted coup by a group of

generals to overthrow the democratically elected government of Spain. So they wanted to end the Spanish Republic, which actually had only been in existence since 1931. So this is a new democracy in Europe. And the reason that it kind of took on these kind of international ramifications is that it very quickly became clear that Franco, who eventually emerged as the leader of the nationalist generals, was being given very significant support from abroad by Mussolini and Hitler. So, you know, the kind of the international fascist powers who are growing more aggressive during the 1930s are kind of immediately involved. They've picked aside. And on, you know, the other side of the things, on the democratic government side of things, they're appealing to their fellow democracies in Europe and in the US for

support, which is their right as a recognised government. And they don't receive it. So the British, for example, their response is to gather the other nations, I think they have 27 nations they get to agree to the non-intervention agreement where they basically say we're not going to aid either side. Although, you know, there are, that is one way of putting it. The people who are watching what's going on in Europe at this time and are seeing that, you know, Germany is remilitarising that Italy has just invaded Ethiopia, you know, that these are the kind of forces that pose a real threat to world peace.

They are outraged. You know, that is their reaction as well, that their own democratic governments will not even stand up in support of a democracy that's being attacked by these powers. So it's a real kind of, you know, yeah, I mean, it's the kind of conflict that really politicizes a generation. You know, there are people who were young in that period who decades later were writing about the Spanish Civil War and how much it meant to them. And Albert Camus famously wrote that, I think he put it that the men of his generation, but as we can discuss, it was not just the man of his generation. He said that they carried Spain in their hearts like an evil wound

because it was the cause that made them realize that being right about something wasn't enough to mean that you emerge victorious. You know, if the other side was stronger, it was this kind of incredibly disillusioning moment for them that they weren't able to save the Republic. It just seemed so mad that, like, they managed to get everyone together, all 27 nations, and then they sat around and came to the decision to do nothing. That was the decision.

You know, the 1930s, they're still living with the legacy of the First World War. Everywhere there was this kind of real, you know, desire to avoid a conflict, like that. I can see that. But it's that sort of idea that if you don't kind of prod the bullies, they'll leave you alone. And that, you know, it doesn't work. You know, these powers are, you know, they want more and more and more. And unless you stand up to them, they're just going to keep taking it. I feel angry and I'm not even there. And I feel like, why isn't anyone going to do anything? Women aren't really meant to get angry, you know. It's not very attractive for a lady in the 1930s to be angry all the time. But actually following these people and not just women, but everyone,

like who went to Spain, who were angry about what they were seeing and made me realize that, you know, there is a way to make anger into a productive emotion, you know, and they were, they were afraid, you know, they were afraid of what was coming for them, if the fascist powers, because a lot of these people that I'm following, they were kind of outsiders, you know, so they knew that if, you know, the fascist powers took power in Europe, they were the kind of people who were going to be in real danger, so they were afraid, you know, they were looking towards the future with dread, and yet they had a productive reaction to it, you know, they took action. And people went. People volunteered to go, it wasn't just, like, from all across Europe,

across the world, they went to fight. Yeah, so this is one of the kind of famous features of the Spanish Civil War, is that it did kind of galvanise all these volunteers from across the world. A lot of them were motivated by communism, because Stalin was one of the few kind of international leaders who was willing to support the Republic at this point. And one of the forces that the Spanish Republic had on its side, in the end was the international brigades, which was these sort of militias of volunteers who came from, you know, per the name, they came from abroad. They were international volunteers. And there were people who risked their lives. You know, it wasn't their country. They weren't defending their own homelands. They went because they saw it as a cause worth fighting for.

Did they get in trouble for going? I mean, apart from, you know, you might get shot, but like, you know, like going into another country, fighting for another war, taking up another country's issues. Was there any, like, repercussions for them for that? So in a lot of countries, it was technically illegal, you know, to volunteer for another national army. You know, because they were afraid of this war escalating into a bigger European war, they did make a lot of effort to stop people from volunteering. So, you know, new passports being, you know, when Sylvia Townsend Warner tried to go to Spain for a second time in 1937, her passport came back, stamped not valid for travel in Spain. And after the war as well,

because this Spanish Republican cause was kind of associated with the left wing, where you have quite conservative government in the US, for example, there's a lot of kind of suspicion and hostility about the people coming back from Spain and they were labelled premature anti-fascists. Right. You know, as if it's only fine to kind of oppose a thing once your government's decided it's an issue. You know, they couldn't get jobs. They were kind of harassed and intimidated often. So they really suffered real hardship a lot of people who wanted for the Republic. Who was going? Do we have some, I mean, we'll get to the women who are the focus of your book, and rightly so, but like with a big name. Hemingway was a photojournalist, wasn't he? He went,

was that right? With other people? Well, Hemingway, very famously went there as a reporter who say George Orwell was there, the sort of Cambridge poets like Orden and Spender all kind of showed up. They must have been very useful when they showed it. The Spanish people must be good. Thank God the poets are here.

Yeah, exactly. You know, there were some young poets who were killed fighting in the international gate. It's not only of the really famous ones. All right, I take it all back. But you're right, because this is one of the misconceptions, I think, is because there are some really famous men who kind of showed up and keeping us that they wrote about it, that there are records kind of,

kind of dominate the sort of cultural memory that we have of it. But actually, it was an incredibly diverse group of people who went, you know, actually the majority of the British volunteers for the international brigades were working class men. About a quarter of the international brigades were Jewish. There were about 100 African Americans. There were, I mean, thousands of people volunteered from the US and from Canada. So, you know, they are people who are associating Franco and his allies with the kind of battles that they're used to fighting at home. So someone like Langston Hughes, who was a poet from, you know, who'd been living in Harlem when he came to Spain, he connected Franco to the Ku Klux Klan. You know, so they're seeing these kind of globally spanning kind of ways of thought, essentially, that will threaten the lives of people like them.

And they were right, really, weren't they? Because it was horrible. Is that too reductive? I mean, I wouldn't argue with you all that. Well, the proof is in the regime that he established after he won the war, you know, and that was a very repressive regime. Yeah, and it was a great tragedy, I think, that the Spanish Republic was a democracy that didn't survive. I'm just wondering to myself, would I have gone, would I have thought at the time, and what could have been avoided if, if action? That's the thing about all history, isn't it? It's looking back and wondering what if. But let's talk about the women who are the subject of your book.

And this was one of those things. When I started looking at your research, I thought, oh, she'll have, like, there'll be like one or two case studies. No, there were so many women going and fighting a war voluntarily. They didn't have to do this. I think that's what blew my mind about all these people going there. They didn't have to do this. But especially the women. Just, no, fuck this.

I'm going. Yeah, I mean, why should it only be men who are paying attention to what's going on in the world, you know? That's so true. I mean, so often this story has been told, you know, using Hemingway and all well, as if they can tell us everything about the Spanish Civil War, you know? I mean, you're right that most of the main characters in my book are women. But, you know, the title doesn't mention women, for example. And it's so interesting to me that everybody,

you know, lots of people are kind of picking up on this being a book about women, or rather that it's glaringly obvious to them that men have been marginalized in my account of this history, you know, in a way that's... Oh, sit down. But like so often, you know, you'll get a history of 1930s literature or a history of the Spanish Civil War that actually is a history of white men's take on 19th century's literature, or it's how Orwell and Hemingway experienced the Spanish of War. And nobody sees those histories as incomplete.

But actually, you know, once I started research, the Spanish of War. It was astonishing to me the range of people who'd been motivated by this cause. You know, there's extraordinary women who were like, this matters to me. And actually, you can write a book that covers all kinds of questions through the lives of women. It doesn't have to be a book about women. You know, women's lives can be used to tell us more about what it's like to be a woman in a certain period, you know? Women are just as motivated and interested in the big questions as men are. Absolutely. And it's about creating a complete picture, isn't it? It's about that it wasn't just these people who wrote these big accounts of it that were fighting.

It was, we need to get all of these stories and bring them back in. Yeah, and I think we have a much richer sense of history and a much better understanding of what a cause actually meant to the people living through that moment if we have a kind of broader sense of who was there and why they weren't. I'm going to ask you about some names in a minute who first caught your attention and wanted to tell their stories. But also I want to get a sense of what were they doing in the war. They went to fight, but I'm going to presume they weren't allowed like on the front lines

in this conflict. So what were they doing while they were there? Yeah. So, I mean, when we're talking about the international regades, we're not really talking about female soldiers. I mean, there were nurses who went, for example, and another one of the women I follow, Nang Green, went in a kind of administrative role,

which is not to say that they weren't taking huge risks by going there. But actually, one of the kind of museworthy features of the forces who were fighting for the Spanish Republic and the Spanish Republic itself was that they did have female fighters at the beginning of the war. Oh, hello. Right. Okay. Yeah, and this is something that kind of naturally, you know, one of my characters in the book is Gerdarro, who's a female photojournalist, and one of her most

kind of iconic and beautiful images is of this woman kneeling on a beach outside Barcelona, holding a gun, training to be a soldier. And, you know, she obviously picked out that image because she knew that was going to really get people's attention internationally. But I'm sure that on some level, that subject appealed to her because it is this moment of like, look, what women can do, you know, see these women proving their capabilities. And, you know, the Spanish Republic, it was part of their constitution that women could vote in Spain for the first time. You know, they made divorce available. So it was the kind of government that they could sort of get behind on a feminist level, I'm sure, but also one of the effects of the coup, because it was coming from within the army,

meant that the Republic actually didn't have its kind of full military force to draw on. It didn't have the full national army when it was fighting these forces. So it had to kind of muster a kind of ad hoc army from whoever was available. So, you know, there were all these young women who wanted to fight. And that was kind of one of the things that made it seem so revolutionary, you know? Yeah. I mean, you've mentioned a few names there, and I definitely want to hear more about Gerdr, Tara, because she was a Jewish photographer as well, wasn't she? That's right, yeah, and she came from Germany. Wow. Who was the first person whose story you wanted to tell? That you're like, if I'm going to tell no one else's, this is the one that I want to tell.

I've been interested in the Spanish War for a long time, but it's something that's been written about a lot, you know, and the person who made me, who kind of raised the questions that made me think, oh, this is my way in, you know, this is how I can really kind of get to grips with this subject. But someone called Nancy Kuhnaud. Good name. Great name. There's something about the name Nancy that makes me feel like she's going to be trouble, you know. Yeah, Nancy's a good name.

She's somebody who's still more kind of remembered as a sort of muse and socialite. She was the daughter of a British aristocrat, and it was a classic kind of one of those marriages of British aristocracy to American money, essentially. So her mother was this kind of American heiress, came to Britain to marry to Beach Kuna. moved into his kind of enormous parl in Leicestershire quickly became extremely, extremely bored and sort of, you know, eventually left him because it was too dull up in the countryside, and became one of London's kind of great society hostesses. So Nancy kind of grew up with this mother who could sort of attract all of the kind of big names of the era, the statesmen and the artists and the writers and all these people.

And, you know, she was very beautiful. She was followed by the magazines. Everyone was interested in what she was wearing. writers fell in love with her and wrote these novels in which she sort of appears as this kind of insatiable sexually avaricious woman, you know, and all that sort of obscured her own interests and her own kind of attempts to be taken seriously. And so after the First World War, she moved to Paris, she set up her own publishing house. She also wrote her own poetry. By the 1930s, she'd become a journalist. But she is someone who, you know, she has this kind of enormous public profile. The press is really

very keen to keep her in the kind of box of being someone who wears interesting hats, you know? So she really has to make a lot of effort to kind of get the causes that she's interested to the public. And one of the early things that she's really interested in is anti-racism. So that's something that she kind of becomes. Go now soon. Yeah, I know. So she's really, she's someone who's really ahead of her time. But often, you know, that appears as just kind of absurdity to people, you know, to their contemporaries. She's an extraordinary character. And, you know, She's interesting also because she didn't always get things right, you know, when she was embarking on these campaigns. Like she wasn't always aware of her own blind spots as a, you know, extremely wealthy white woman.

With fabulous hats. With your great fashion sense. But yeah, but the reason that she kind of came to my attention was because in 1937, she organized a pamphlet called writers take sides on the Spanish War. And what she had essentially done was written, you know, she was very well connected person at this point. She'd written to, I think, almost 200 kind of writers and intellectuals in Britain. and had asked them to basically just make a public statement on the Spanish war and announced publicly whether they were on the side of Franco or on the side of the Republic. Wow.

And when she asked them to do this, she said, for it is impossible any longer to take no side. And that just really struck me as an idea that, you know, we could have these moments in history where things have got to a point where it's just not possible to be neutral anymore, you know, that things have become that important. And, you know, just as a sort of contemporary question, I was interested in this idea of, you know, how meaningful is a statement like that?

Can that actually be a meaningful intervention? You know, it was around the time that people were posting those black squares on their Instagram pages. And some people were thinking, you know, we should do this. And it's a kind of gesture of solidarity. And other people were saying, you know, what is the point? It's just meaningless. Like, it's just people kind of getting involved in something on social media.

So I was interested that she thought that just kind of saying out loud in public, which side you had chosen could be meaningful. And I was also curious to know why she thought, that writers had a particular responsibility, or even a right? You know, what right do people have to pick aside in a war that's happening in someone else's country? It is slightly weird when you think, it's very brave and balsh, and it kind of reminds me of like when you get public letters that all these people have put their names to to say that, you know, we don't like this or we do like that. But it is kind of, it's a bit bonkers to just get a letter in the post from Nancy in Paris going,

which side of the war were you on? Like, what does she want them to do? Do you want them to publish this? or just trying them to write back to her and go, definitely this one? The idea was that they would write back to her and then she compiled all the responses and then it was published as this pamphlet. I mean, you're right, like, someone like Virginia Woolf, who's getting quite a lot of this kind of post at this time, is like, you know, it's too easy to just sit down and write a few lines in support of something, you know, what meaning can that have? But actually, if you think about the alternative, you know, what if these kind of events

were met with total silence? What message does that send? You know, you are essentially telling those powers that actually you're not even willing to do as little as pick up your pen and say you think what they're doing is wrong. You know, that tells people that their war is won already. I'll be back with Sarah after this short break. Hello, I'm James Rogers, and over on the history hit warfare podcast, I bring you cutting-edge military histories from around the world. Why was Sitting Bull such a remarkable leader? What was Napoleon's greatest ever battle? How did the Cuban missile crisis almost turn the Cold War hot? And who dropped the world's largest nuclear bomb

on the Arctic. Through interviews with world-leading historians, policy experts, and the veterans who served, we find the answers to these questions and so much more. So come and join us on the history hit warfare podcast, where we're on the front lines of military history. Did she go to Spain? Or did she just sit there writing letters to everyone, write because she went, no, she did more than write letters, I'm glad to say. So, I mean, she was one of the first people in my book to get to Spain. So the attempted coup happened in July. She was there in August. Wow. Okay.

Yeah. And what was interesting was one of the reasons she went was because she was kind of reading, you know, she was living in France at this time. And she was reading the reports that were coming from Spain. And these were being published in the sort of mainstream, like more conservative leaning press. And she just felt that there wasn't a balanced picture. You know, she felt that the Republican side of what was happening wasn't really being told.

And her response to that was just to go there for herself, you know, to see for herself and report back on what she was seeing. So she could get a visa that lasted for three months. So she spent three months in Spain. Then she left the country because she had to arrange this pamphlet. And then she did go back twice more to Spain. In the First World War, there was a kind of a sense of everyone was signing up and it was going to be like, hooray, let's all go and have a go up being soldiers

and, you know, king and country and all that stuff. And then the actual reality of war was so horrific that it scarred people forevermore if they survived. Was there a sense of that with these women that went? I mean, did they, when they actually saw war, first hand. How did they react to it? I think they were shocked. I think you're right. I mean, one of the things that's particularly sort of tragic elements of the Spanish Civil War and why it was so shocking at the time was that it was the first war in Europe really where civilians were a huge proportion of the casualties. And that was partly because Franco had the use of the German Condor

Legion and Italian airmen. So this is the first time that a European capital is coming under aerial bombardment. It's before the blitz. It's before Dresden. This is just unthinkable, you know. And it's also the first war where photographers can actually get really close to the action, because by this point, cameras are much smaller, they're much lighter,

so you can get much closer to what's happening. The other thing that they're sending back is pictures of civilians killed in bombing raids and dead children, which is like something that would never have been published. And actually, many of the major newspapers still refuse to publish them. But someone like Virginia Woolf is getting sent these photos, you know,

her at home because the Republic wasn't getting this kind of support from the democracy internationally. They realised very quickly that they really needed, you know, PR was going to be a really important matter in their survival. You know, they needed to change opinions abroad to get the kind of support that Franco was getting from Italy and Germany. So they were making all of these efforts to make sure that people internationally understood what was being inflicted on the Spanish people by this war. And so journalists actually were a really important part of that. They could really make a difference. This is like a good place to ask you to tell me about Gerdr Taro, if I'm pronouncing her name right at all.

But she's fascinated. The use of photography in how that changed, how we view war, the role that PR plays in this, when you've got these images going forward, I find absolutely fascinating because you can no longer pretend that it's all, you know, honorable and heroic and it's all, you know, like the stuff now we see on the movies, they would have seen as much of it. But tell me about her and the role that she played and this getting close up and personal with the camera. Gerla Tarot, well-pronounced

and actually it's not it's a well and that is key because that was a name she picked because it was much more pronounceable because I really mean was Gerta Bajorula a German speaker would tell me I'd mangled that but it was a name she had kind of jettisoned when she was in Paris

trying to make her name as a refugee I mean she was born in a part of the world that had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire so although when that was taken apart at the end of the First World War she technically got a Polish passport she was a German speaker and she grew up with her family in Germany. So when Hitler came to power in 1933, as you said, her family is Jewish.

So she, you know, realizes that this is, you know, a terrible situation for her and her family. And she's an early opponent of fascism. So she was briefly imprisoned in Germany for having distributed anti-Nazi leaflets, like in her early 20s. When she was released, she left for Paris and tries to kind of make a life for herself in Paris. And France, you know, was welcoming a lot of refugees from Germany. but they didn't really make life easy for these people. There are these sort of concerns that refugees will be taking jobs that French people need, for example, so it's very difficult for someone like Gerda to make a living.

And one of the things that she realizes is that, you know, if she seems less identifiably Jewish and foreign, she has a better chance of making a living. So that's, you know, one of the things that plays into her changing her name. But so when the Spanish Civil War erupts and it quickly becomes understood as a war against fascism, And this is, you know, an opportunity for her to pick up that battle that she'd had to leave behind in Germany. You know, it's a really personal fight for her and the rest of it. Yeah, yeah.

At this point, the rest of her family is still in Germany trying to kind of get out to safety. So, you know, this is a chance for her in a way to defend her own family as well. You know, it comes so close to home for her. So she, again, is somebody who is in Barcelona as early as August 1936, and she makes numerous trips to Spain. They want to get the story of what's happening out there. Another one of the things that she does is she knows to kind of photograph any evidence of Italian or German machinery or weaponry that's left behind after battles.

Because, you know, like, ostensibly, the Germans and the Italians are also part of the non-intervention agreement. You know, if these journalists can prove that they're breaching that agreement. That's so dangerous. Like, the whole thing is dangerous. But, like, if they'd caught her with that, did they ever capture doing that? So, very tragically, Gerdin was killed in Spain. And that was because she went very close to the front line. This happened during the Battle of Brunette, which was an extremely bloody battle in which there were thousand, thousands of casualties, and she was injured during the retreat essentially, like fatally injured. And, you know, you have to think that it's because it had this meaning for her, that she would take those kinds of risks,

but also I'm sure there was an element of this being an opportunity for women to prove themselves. You know, a female war photographer is not a common thing. I mean, she wasn't the only female photographer there, but, you know, this is a moment for women to show what they can do. Wow. What to a family in Germany, did they get out before the Holocaust? They were all killed in the Holocaust. Oh my God. Yeah, wow. That is something that plays into how poorly her work was memorialized until very recently

because, you know, she has no heirs, essentially. She has nobody to kind of protect her record or keep her name alive. And she was a classic example of a woman who had a partnership with a more famous man whose legacy sort of eclipsed hers for a long time. Because her partner was Robert Kappa, who also died tragically. young but became very, very famous as a war photographer. And so, you know, for a long time, because they worked so closely together and because, you know, the gaps in her record, in a way, made it easier for kind of these sexist assumptions about her to prevail. A lot of her work was

attributed to him for a long time. Because, you know, it was just assumed that the best work must have been made by you. Of course it was. Oh, has that now been redressed? Is she now getting the recognition and the attribution? Of course, there was a brilliant female academic who wrote the first biography of her, and the more that kind of evidence that comes out, and the more that some negatives of both of their work has been discovered in recent years, that the kind of comparison has made it possible to prove that certain pictures were taken by GERDA. Was there any chance that Mr. Kappa at any point went, oh, no, that's not one of mine, that's Gerders, or did he just take the credit? My sense is that it wasn't

a kind of deliberate thing on his side. I mean... All right, okay. I'm being too cynical now, okay. Well, I think it's easy for us to forget how chaotic, you know, that whole wartime scenario was. I suppose that is true, isn't it? It's like, how would you know, really, if I was taking a lot of pictures at the time and I was being shot up? Well, and also the idea of a photographer being credited for their work, you know, is more recent than we think. And so often, you know, they just kind of stuck Robert Kappa over the pictures that they were receiving, or it was Kappa and Tarrow, or, you know, and after the war, Kappa had his own difficulties in kind of finding somewhere safe to and he ended up in the US where, you know, any suggestion of being kind of close to communism

or a member of the left wing was kind of very dangerous for his position. And Gerda was seen as, you know, although there's no evidence that she ever joined the Communist Party, she was seen as this kind of communist martyr because of her death in Spain. And so it may have been that it's sort of for his own, a kind of expedient move to just kind of play down her involvement a little bit and not draw too much attention to her. I can say that. When we were just started talking, you mentioned it there were lots of black volunteers to fight for the Civil War from African Americans and sort of, I assume, black people from all over Europe. And one of the women that you talk about is, I'm definitely going to get this one wrong.

Salaria Kea? Salaria Ki. Her story was absolutely fascinating. Could you tell me a little bit about who she was? Yeah, of course. So she, in 1937, when she decided to volunteer in Spain, she was a nurse working at Harlem Hospital, although she came from Akron in Ohio. She volunteered with a group of American medics who were going out to volunteer for the Republican side.

I mean, she is a really fascinating character, not least because it's now very difficult to find much information about her, but actually at the time, you know, there was this brief period when she was in Spain that she was a real celebrity. Really? Yeah, well, partly because of just, you know,

who she was deemed that she represented because she was the only African-American woman to be volunteering on the Republican side. She was a nurse. Right, okay. And, you know, that solidarity and this idea of kind of international fellowship was such a crucial concept for the Republican side

and, you know, this enormous kind of volunteer force that they had mustered that she became a kind of symbol of that, of how, you know, far reaching the Republican cause actually was when you were thinking of it as a kind of anti-fascist cause. There is this kind of beautiful love story in her tale that she met in Spain and married a white Irish international brigade called Pat O'Reilly. And so that, of course, is another kind of perfect ready-made symbol

of this kind of international brotherhood and this kind of cross-racial, cross-cultural, coming together. And so, you know, she was featured in documentaries about the Spanish Civil War. There was a photograph taken of her that was made into a postcard that was distributed very widely

through the Republican side. Langston Hughes, when he visited Spain, said, you know, he jotted in his notebook, Oh, Salaria Salude, all of the children all around know her name. But there's a sense in which, you know, she becomes an icon. And becoming an icon kind of means

that her own personal perspective, and her own personal, you know, motivations for going there, and what she experienced there kind of becomes obscured by everything that she's kind of seen to stand for. So there's not very much space in that narrative, for example, for the kind of experiences she started talking about later in life, like encountering racism from people who were meant to be her allies, you know? That kind of thing just doesn't appear in the story.

You do point out in your book that she experienced really terrible racism, but then you make the point that perhaps it wasn't that un-experienced, for a woman from America at that time. One of the objections that people made when she, you know, she said that somebody on the ship over to Spain, and so it didn't happen in Spain, but on the ship over, one of the people who was volunteering with her

allegedly refused to eat at the same table as her and through this kind of racist slur at her when explaining why he wouldn't sit beside her. When this story came out, there was quite a lot of pushback and people were saying, you know, it's just not plausible that these people who, you know, these are the goodies. So it's just not believable that one of them would have been racist.

And of course, you know, would not have been at all shocking to someone like Salaria, you know, who was living as a black woman in 1930s America that somebody would speak to her like that. You know, that was how she moved through the world. It's not the case that just because somebody is forward thinking in one way that they don't have their own prejudices, you know, and they're not carrying their own kind of burden of prejudice. And so that was very interesting to me in a sense in the way that sometimes this idea of solidarity can kind of get corrupted into this idea of actually, you know, everybody just kind of singing from the same hymn book and not being able to criticise your own side, you know, because there is

this kind of almost move to immediately silence her when she speaks up about that because it doesn't fit with this narrative of them all being the goodies and, you know, on the right side of history. That's fascinating. And what happened to her? Did she make it out okay? Did she get back to America? She did get back to the US, yeah. I mean, she had a pretty harrowing time in Spain, understandably. I mean, she, out of the people in the book, she was there, one of those who was there for the longest. She was there for, I think, more than a year. But she did get back to the US and also Pat managed to get back to the US eventually as well, so they were able to stay together. Oh, that's, oh, that's, that makes me quite happy. Thank you for that one.

Speaking of lovers, I absolutely have to ask you to tell me the story of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Valentin, Auckland. Atland, yeah. Acclund. There we go. That's the one. Can you tell me their story, please, now they ended up in Spain? I can with great pleasure. Sylvia Townsend Warner, a brilliant novelist, probably best known at this point for Lolly Willows, which was the novel that she had published about a decade before the Spanish Civil War erupted, which was this story of a kind of spinster aunt who sells her soul to the devil and becomes a witch. I relate very strongly to that story. Warner is kind of like a spokeswoman for the spinster aunt, and what she does so brilliantly

is that she's very good at kind of making use of the ways in which people tend to underestimate women of a certain age, you know, or single women. and that is kind of something that comes into play a little bit, I think, in her writing about Spain. But to go back to our actual question, she is a kind of well-established novelist at the time of the Spanish Civil War, and her relationship with Valentine-Aclan is also pretty well-established. They'd lived together for a number of years in a village in Dorset. You know, we have this kind of impression of Sylvia Townsend Juana as this kind of quirky, sort of whimsical, writer of, you know, women's fiction in inverted comments.

What's less known is that she was also a very committed communist and extremely kind of outspoken and active politically. So when the Spanish Civil War breaks out, she and Valentine are immediately keen to become involved. And they are kind of very keen if they can to actually go to Spain and volunteer their services there. Obviously they're thinking about writing journalism, but they're also planning to volunteer in kind of a practical sense as well. And one of the things that actually really inspires them is an article they read by Nancy Kouinard from Madrid. Oh.

Yeah. There's one of those kind of nice little connecting moments that you're not expecting when you're doing this kind of research. So they kind of are badgering their local Communist Party headquarters to let them go to Spain. Eventually they managed to get kind of summoned by the British Medical Bureau that's kind of gathering volunteers in Barcelona. So they head over. Their first trip, they only spend about three weeks in Barcelona. But it was clearly just an extraordinary experience for them. And Barcelona in late 1936 is one of these kind of places and moments in history that is really kind of extraordinary.

and it's what someone like George Orwell who famously passed through at that time, you know, he writes very eloquently about what an kind of inspiring moment it was. Because one of the things that had happened as a result of the coup was that essentially, you know, a society as it existed had been kind of thrown into chaos. And Barcelona was one of the places where the resistance against the coup was very strong from the beginning. So it was from the beginning of the war part of the Republican zone. But because the kind of existing government really had lost control of power,

it was this sort of opportunity for more kind of revolutionary and more, you know, in some ways more extreme political groups to kind of sort of grab the reins of power and make the kind of experiments that they had wanted to. So, you know, the anarchists are a very important political force in Barcelona at this time. You know, there are things like the Ritz Hotel has been taken over and made into a canteen that's open to everyone at this point, you know. Wow. Yeah, exactly. So it's kind of this, you know, when you arrive in Barcelona at that moment, for somebody like Sylvia Townsendona, who, who's really inspired by the USSR as well, this seems to her like a moment

where actually they are trying to build a new type of society. You know, it seems like this moment of real, like, possibility and experiment, and she finds that incredibly kind of exciting. And what's really kind of beautiful and interesting to me as well is that this clearly is operating on a kind of personal level for her and Valentine 2. You know, she writes about, you know,

they're a queer couple living in 1930s Britain, right? So they are not used to being able to be entirely open about their relationship in the way that a heterosexual couple can be. Just good friends and all that, companions. Exactly, yeah. So, you know, they consider themselves essentially to be married. You know, that's how closely committed they are to each other. But when there's a census a few years before Spain, they have to describe themselves as kind

of spinster and, you know, Valentine had been in a marriage previously that had been annulled. But, you know, Sylvia writes about, she wrote some poems after they came back from Spain, which were private poems that she wrote for Valentine. and she writes in them about them walking hand in hand through the streets together, you know, and there is clearly this sense that, you know, it's not just political and economic experiments happening, that that liberation on those levels can also operate on a personal level,

you know, that people can be liberated to live in new ways and live more freely in their personal lives as much as in their kind of political or public lives as well. And it's clearly like incredibly moving to them. I think they see themselves almost as the kind of vanguard of people living difficult lives as outsiders because they believe that that will make those kinds of lives possible for others in the future. So, you know, there is this moment

when Valentine thought that she may end up volunteering for a militia in Spain and she writes this incredibly beautiful letter to Sylvia to be read in the event that she's killed. You know, that's how seriously they think the situation could be. And she says to her, you know, it's that sort of classic thing of people in love. She says, you know, I feel like nobody else

has ever loved in quite the way that we love each other. But the crucial thing to me is that she says, you know, but she hopes that others will love in the way that they have done in the future. And she says, we've done our best to make it possible. So there is this sense that because they have lived freely, as freely as they can do in the society that they're in.

And because they've made those sacrifices, you know, they've put themselves on the outside of respectable society. It may be more possible for women like them in the future to live those lives without those restrictions. And what happened to them? Did they make it back okay? Yeah, they did. So they had that one trip to Spain and then the following year they came back for this big Writers' Congress that was held in Madrid and a few other cities. And they carried on, you know, like many of the people in the book, they never really gave up on the Spanish Republic. And even after it was defeated, they stayed in touch with Spanish writers in exile. They made a lot of efforts to get Spanish writers work translated into English, to give it a bigger audience. There was a family that were kind of trapped in Franco, Spain, that they managed to send care packages to keep them going through some really difficult years. So it was a cause that never stopped being meaningful to them.

So I could talk to you about this forever and ever and ever. I could just literally sit here and just keep giving you names that you speak about in your book and making you tell their stories. But I can't keep doing that. But my final question to you would be. So you know that game of your imaginary favourite dinner party from people from all throughout history? Who of the women that you write about or didn't write about in your book

would you invite to your fantasy dinner party if you get like three? That's really hard. I have a bit of a weakness for people who are. quite rude and outspoken. So I think I'd probably have to add Martha Gellhorn there. And also Josephine Hulps, who's an American novelist, we haven't

mentioned who's in the book, who was very acerbic, and she was very involved in the kind of radical left wing in the US, and she was very good at taking down these men who thought they were real revolutionaries for their kind of sexist prejudices, you know, kind of pointing out that equality worked on many different levels.

And then I guess because there are so many questions on left with about her because the documentary record is very thin. I think I would have Solaria just to find out a bit more about her. Yes, that would be an amazing dinner party. So you've been just incredible to talk to. I could honestly, I could keep going and going forever. But if people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you? I'm on Instagram underscore Sarah Watling underscore and I also have a website. And give us the full title of the book. It is tomorrow, perhaps the future, following writers and rebels in the Spanish Civil War. Thank you so much for talking to me today. This has just been a

fascinating. It's been really fun. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Sarah for joining me. I was fascinated by that. I knew so little about that history. It's amazing. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you have a burning question, an issue you desperately want us to look into, if there's a new history book on the loose and you're just determined that we have that guest on to talk about it, you can now email us at Betwixt at HistoryHit.com. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.