The Experiences of British Holidaymakers and Expatriate Residents in Pre-Civil War Spain

Brian Shelmerdine The Experiences of British Holidaymakers and Expatriate Residents in Pre-Civil War Spain A poster world of gamboge and cerulean blue.1 A hotbed of political unrest, strikes and increased expenses.2 Introduction At the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the vast majority of the British public regarded Spain as remote and insignificant, her glory a feature of the past. Spanish politics were comic and incomprehensible for most. Informed by schooling which con- centrated on historic rivalries, by juvenile literature which gloried in and emphasized those rivalries, and by a British and a Hollywood film industry which saw profit in further repeating that popular image, it is perhaps not surprising that for ‘many people . Spain [was] a rather romantic country, far away, where funny things happen to funny people.’3 Of his wanderings through Spain during the months leading up to the outbreak of the Civil War, the poet and author Laurie Lee later recalled: I was in a country of which I knew nothing . My small country school, always generous with its information as to the exports of Queensland and the fate of Jenkins’ ear, had provided me with nothing more tangible or useful about Spain than that Seville had a barber, and Barcelona nuts.4 Spain, then, for the majority of Britons was distant and un- important, a country which at best was non-threatening by virtue of its reduced circumstances. Typically, the Daily Mail gossip columnist Charles Graves, introducing an account of his journey through Spain during 1935, felt able to declare that ‘the Englishman’s attitude towards Spain [is] dictated by the realisa- European History Quarterly Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol. 32(3), 367–390. [0265-6914(200207)32:3;367–390;026061] 368 European History Quarterly Vol. 32 No. 3 tion that, though once our equal and superior . she has now come down in the world . a great lady in reduced circumstances’.5 Such attitudes go some way towards explaining the general indifference of the British public towards events in Spain during the conflict of 1936–39. Despite different interpretations of the issue, in many ways both the mainstream Left and the Tory Right propagated a consensus which regarded Spain as no direct con- cern of Britain. Although undoubtedly the war aroused passions across the political spectrum and induced action from substantial sections of society, for most the purchase of a milk token was the limit of their involvement. Returning to Britain from Catalonia in the summer of 1938, one commentator noted with despair that the people she met were only slightly more interested in the bombing of Barcelona than in the bombing of Canton, and then only on the basis that ‘Spain was nearer than China’ and ‘Spaniards while only just removed from negroes, were Euro- peans’.6 However, there was a significant minority of British subjects for whom 1930s Spain was not so distant. During the first three decades of the century the peninsula had attracted a growing number of travellers, and, in the words of one travel guide, had been increasingly ‘“discovered” by holidaymakers from England and America’.7 Further contact was made through various British enterprises in Spain which provided employment to numbers of engineers and managers, and through the colonies of retired expatriates to which the country was host. At least, for this band of visitors and residents it would seem that there existed the opportunity to overcome cultural ignorance and to redress stereo- typical preconceptions. It is the intention here, developing a theme opened up in the mid-1990s by Tom Buchanan and sub- sequently expanded by John K. Walton, to examine the expectations and experiences of two of these groups — holidaymakers and expatriates — and to offer some further suggestions as to how their responses contributed to shaping British attitudes during the Civil War: most particularly, or at least most effectively, during the conflict’s early months.8 Buchanan’s focus was directed particularly at how British commentators and politicians from across the political spectrum referred to a common stock of Spanish ‘national’ images, in order to offer very different interpretations of the conflict. Taking up the theme, Walton offered an intro- Shelmerdine, British Experiences in Pre-Civil War Spain 369 ductory exploration of the expectations carried by British visitors to Spain in the years before the war. It is this latter aspect of the question which is developed here. Although this article is primarily concerned with the experiences of holidaymakers and expatriate residents, some reference to the literature of travellers is also necesary since their accounts provide the most abundant source of material; however, such reference has been kept to a minimum and used only in context. Expatriates have been subdivided into two groups: the leisured British nationals who sought a warmer climate for the winter, and those whose employment located them in Spain. The two groups had shared experiences but their interpretations of some issues varied, at least before the outbreak of war. Evidence gleaned from contemporary accounts, travelogues, guidebooks and news- paper and magazine articles suggests the common themes to which most observers subscribed. However, while many of the expatriate residents, travellers and writers who lived in and visited Spain during this period put on paper the impressions that they had formed during their time there, the view of Spain gained by the much greater number of holidaymakers was largely restricted to discussion with immediate friends and family and inevitably involves some degree of speculation. As will become evident, impressions made by holidaymakers were more preva- lent. I By the turn of the century, a small number of more adventurous British travellers had already added Spain to their list of destinations, and following the First World War this number had risen. Although foreign travel undoubtedly felt the impact of the De- pression,9 already as the 1920s gave way to the 1930s ‘Blackpool and Brighton . ceased to suffice’ for some Britons. As the decade advanced, Spain increasingly became a destination for a new breed of ‘sightseers, people who travel[led] with no motive but to peer about them’.10 In the north of the country, the Santander coast and the Basque resort of San Sebastián benefited from relatively easy access and from a close proximity to the firmly established French resort of Biarritz. In the south, Seville witnessed greater numbers of 370 European History Quarterly Vol. 32 No. 3 British visitors, and on the Mediterranean coast the ‘Spanish Riviera’ from Málaga to Almería was beginning to attract increased attention.11 By the mid-1930s with what proved to be somewhat unfortunate timing, one enterprising British couple, Nancy and Archie Johnstone, had opened a hotel at Tossa de Mar on the Catalan coast and reported being overwhelmed with bookings.12 In the south, a British presence had been evident longer in a number of holiday enterprises with British-owned pensions in Málaga and Granada, and British-owned luxury hotels in Algeciras and Ronda. Similarly, among the accommodation listed in the 1929 Blue Guide to Southern Spain and Portugal were such comforting names as Miss Laird’s in Granada and the very English Spragg’s and Slee’s pensions in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. As this guide advised, several tourist agencies were now offering ‘tours to suit all purses’ on the Iberian Peninsula.13 While the upper middle-class profile which delineated earlier visitors had by this time begun to be diluted by the increasing number of relatively low-cost tour holidays, the extent of this process should not be exaggerated. For example, one London- based coach company, Motorways Ltd, took advantage of the country’s improved road network and by 1929 was offering 32- day package tours of Spain. While these tours took place every three to four weeks from October through to April, the cost of an ‘all inclusive, first-class throughout’ trip was a limiting 98 guineas (£102/18s or £102.90) per head.14 Time and money restrictions placed tours such as these beyond the majority. However, other more affordable holidays were also becoming available. Travel guides advised prospective holidaymakers on how to spend a fortnight in Spain for only £10, while in 1932, two-thirds of the 2000 passengers who embarked on one of the Workers Travel Association’s (WTA) more exotic holidays, two weeks aboard the cruise-ship Esperance Bay, did so for £12.15 Yet even at £10 or £12, the uptake of such holidays would have been limited to reasonably affluent middle-class holidaymakers, a class which was predominantly conservative in attitude and Conservative in political leaning. Thus the numbers of all these holidaymakers must be kept in perspective. For example, it is helpful to compare the 1205 British nationals who registered in the top hotels of San Sebastián during 1933 with the 190,000 rail tickets collected from trippers to Blackpool during one August week in 1931.16 While the Spanish resort’s statistics do not Shelmerdine, British Experiences in Pre-Civil War Spain 371 include those visitors who stayed in cheaper accommodation, neither do the Blackpool figures include the many thousands who would have travelled there by means other than the railway. However, with these caveats the fact remains that during the 1930s, holidays abroad were an increasing option for the moderately wealthy.17 At this time, the most established holiday resorts in Spain were those of the Biscayan coast, a process well documented by Walton.18 San Sebastián and El Sardinero, the seaside suburb of Santander, had long been fashionable seaside destinations, thriving not on the spending power of foreign visitors but rather on a domestic demand for the more bracing atmosphere of the northern Atlantic coast.

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