Wales and the Basque Refugees: The Children's Stories

They came in 1937.

4,000 Basque children fleeing the

horrors of the Spanish Civil War.

Many were on their own,

some were as young as five.

It was the largest contingent of refugees ever to land in Britain,

the first to consist solely of children.

Earlier this year, the survivors met in Southampton to celebrate

the 75th anniversary of their arrival.

It was their last reunion, as many are now too old

and frail to attend.

This programme is one of the last commemorations to take place,

an opportunity to witness the event through the eyes of refugees

who stayed.

The British Government didn't want them.

Only under extreme pressure,

did they allow them in and refused to help them financially.

But ordinary people had more compassion, much more,

and the children who arrived in Wales received a huge

welcome from miners and their

families who were desperately

poor and hungry themselves.

It is one of the most remarkable

and telling moments in the story of Wales,

and yet, today, it's been largely forgotten.

SHIP'S HORN BLASTS

About 50 of the children came here, to Newport station.

There was a festive feel on that Saturday in early July in 1937.

The station itself was decked out with bunting, left over

from the coronation of King George VI a few weeks earlier.

This carnival atmosphere stood in contrast to

the mood of the refugees.

Many of them were traumatised by the terrors of war,

by being separated from their parents.

The children had witnessed the birth of a new form of warfare -

mass terror from the air.

A few weeks before, the Basque town of Guernica had, in effect,

been carpet bombed by German and Italian aircraft under

the command of General Franco, who led a military revolt

against the democratically elected Republican government of Spain.

It was one of the first raids in aviation

history on a defenceless civilian population.

Guernica was bombed into oblivion.

With Franco and his forces

getting nearer to Bilbao by the day,

many Basque parents made the agonising decision

to send their children abroad.

Only children between five and 15 were eligible.

For some, it was the last time they saw their parents.

In this programme, we tell the story of three who came to Wales.

Josefina Savery, 14 when she arrived,

and now nearly 90, who lives

in Risca, has raised a family there,

and never saw her father again.

Her brother Gerard, seven years younger,

who lives on the Welsh Borders,

and has rejected the chance to be a Spanish citizen.

And Jose Armolea, an 11-year-old refugee.

The memory of saying goodbye to his mother, 75 years ago, still

haunts him.

I said goodbye to her...

in 1937...

and never saw her again.

And that...

that hurts me very much.

That's a feeling that I will always remember,

even at my silly age of 87.

A man crying because of his mother,

but I never saw her again.

They said goodbye to us at the station, in Bilbao, so you can

imagine it was a very harrowing experience,

just to say goodbye.

It was the last time I saw my father.

The Habana, a cruise ship

designed to carry 400 passengers,

carried 10 times that number

across a stormy Bay of Biscay to Southampton.

Under pressure from public opinion, the British Government

belatedly agreed to allow nearly

4,000 children to enter the UK.

But only if they were paid for and looked after by volunteers.

It was a difficult journey in more ways than one.

The journey was absolutely horrendous.

The Bay of Biscay is one of the worst places in the world, I think.

The ship was rocking,

it was dreadful.

I was terribly sick.

I lost my bunk,

and I spent my time leaning overboard, I think.

-REPORTER:

-The best foreign news of the week,

from the horrors of civil war, to the peace of England,

come 4,000 Basque children,

refugees from the scenes of bombing and bloodshed at Bilbao.

When the ship docked at Southampton,

the mood combined relief,

sadness, apprehension and excitement.

First stop was a reception camp at Southampton,

hastily constructed out of bell tents.

For many, it seemed like a Boy Scout and Girl Guide adventure,

and there were regular meals,

unlike the starvation rations the children had been used to at home.

When Bilbao fell to Franco a few weeks later,

the children were deeply traumatised,

and fearful for their parents.

After about a month, the children were dispersed to more suitable

accommodation throughout the UK

and about 200 came to Wales,

to Caerleon, Swansea, Brechfa in Carmarthenshire

and Old Colwyn in North Wales.

Indeed, the children chosen to come to Wales had been told they were

lucky, because the Welsh were so

supportive of the Republican cause.

This is Hywel Davies.

Hywel, can you describe the scene here?

Yes, the great and good of Wales were here.

Almost everybody who was anybody in Welsh society was

gathered on this platform.

You had people from academia,

you had an MP from Pontypool,

Arthur Jenkins, who was the father of Roy Jenkins,

and you had people from trade unions,

you had people from the business world,

they were all here to welcome the children.

Do we know how the children reacted to all this?

They were overwhelmed,

the people I have spoken to remember this day vividly,

they remember the welcome they got here, they remember the flags that

were up, and the remember leaving here and getting on the bus, and

the crowds, it was a very big day

they thought they were coming home.

The Newport arrivals came here to nearby Caerleon.

There is nothing left of the old workhouse that was

converted into their home,

except a name - Cambria.

Cambria House,

the home that set the gold standard.

Funded by voluntary contributions from across South Wales,

Cambria House was a place of safety,

a refuge from the horrors of war.

It provided the Welsh not only with an opportunity to identify

with the Basques, but with a popular front which

united people of all political persuasions.

At first, the children were delighted to be indoors,

rather than under canvas.

But their initial impression of Cambria House was not

entirely happy,

the regime was very strict and the building still

bore signs of being a former workhouse,

and an old people's home.

We used to peel potatoes for the whole colony, 50 of us,

and I think the room where we...

peeled the potatoes was used to lay out bodies at one stage,

that's what we thought, anyway.

Nevertheless, Cambria House offered the children a lifeline at a

critical time, restoring a degree of

security to their shattered lives.

75 years on, Josefina Savery now looks back with

detachment at the moment her life changed for ever.

Was that taken in Caerleon?

Yes.

Her family life had been destroyed -

her father killed by Franco's forces,

her mother in exile in France.

Luckily, like most of the children,

Josefina soon found a substitute mother at Cambria House.

Mrs Hernandez...

was one of the most wonderful women I ever met.

When she came to Caerleon

and took over from a lady who was

so strict that one of the children asked Mrs Hernandez,

"Senorita, are we allowed to breathe?"

And when she came

she allowed people to come in,

she allowed the children to go out

and altogether the whole atmosphere of Cambria House changed

from a miserable place...

to a very happy place.

The children kept their culture alive and funds flowing in,

with activities like dancing and singing in national costume.

The Cambria house football team was a sensation,

rarely losing a match,

even playing before thousands at Ninian Park,

where they beat league champions, Moorland Road School.

Josefina was overwhelmed by the warm Welsh welcome.

There were so very kind.

From the time we arrived at Newport...

to the time we were in Caerleon,

we were taken to various places -

Pontypool,

Abertillery,

the Rhondda Valley,

and you know the miners were not

working in those days,

and yet they always gave us a wonderful welcome.

The Lady of the Lamp in Tonypandy,

she has seen more revolutionary meetings than Karl Marx.

One of the things she saw when she was in Tonypandy Square

was a meeting in the 1930s by Oswald Mosley's black shirts,

trying to recruit support for the British fascist party.

They were chased out of town by the miners.

Welsh miners were fighting fascism, at the same time

as refugees from fascism were

arriving in Wales from Spain.

Both the Basques and the Welsh had long experience of poverty

and oppression.

In the Valleys of the Thirties, mass unemployment was widespread,

aggravated by savage Government cuts to benefits.

The Great Hunger March of October 1936 was still

fresh in the memory when the Basque children arrived.

At first, the Labour Party towed the Government line

about non-intervention in Spain,

only dropping the policy in October 1937.

Likewise, the party did not want to be associated with protests

and disturbances, so, it was left to the South Wales Miners' Federation

and the Communist Party to take the lead at street level.

When the Spanish Civil War occurred,

it was merely extending the battle lines internationally,

fighting for jobs,

rioting and disturbances against the means test,

that was struggling against fascism, already.

They had already characterised the reactionary forces

opposed to them as fascism - they understood it,

so this was a long tradition of working class struggle that

extended far beyond Parliamentary politics,

this was extra-parliamentary, it was international, as well.

Internationalism struck a strong chord with the miners,

as witnessed by the numbers who

joined the international brigades on the Republican side.

The Basque children were their children, the war in Spain

was their war, but they didn't just fight on the frontline.

Throughout the Valleys, there was a tidal wave of giving, as Communist

leader Will Paynter noted, there was always the pound of sugar

the tin of condensed milk, or money from even the poorest families.

There are examples of many of these children going on holidays to

places like Abertillery,

where poverty was like, 90%, in the Valleys,

but they felt at home there,

it was not unlike the homes from which they had been taken.

A few years ago, on the front of Pendragon House,

here in Caerleon, a blue plaque was erected to record the fact

that 30 of the Basque children were moved here after Cambria House

was requisitioned for the war effort.

The plaque commemorates the community as much as the

children, as acts of kindness came from everywhere

and from all ages.

George Phillips was just 18

when he started helping out at Cambria House.

A coach driver, he used to borrow the bus for the afternoon

on Sundays, to bring about a dozen refugees back to his parents'

terraced house in Newport, for tea.

George, one of eight children,

was from a family where a little had to go a long way.

I think my father...

and his family never had very much,

so they could relate to people who

were also in those circumstances.

Those children had nothing, they'd left their families,

they'd left their mums and dads,

they'd left everything they knew, come to a strange

country and they had nothing,

so he must have thought it'd be nice if they had a little bit of

family life, and see a mum and dad

and have tea round a family table.

It wasn't just the poor who responded to the children.

Support came from across the social spectrum.

This is Emlyn House in Cardiff Bay.

Nowadays it's the Butetown History & Arts centre,

but back in the '30s it was the headquarters of a shipping line,

taking coal from Cardiff to Bilbao

and coming back full of iron ore.

The company belonged to John Emlyn Jones, a staunch Republican

supporter, and a prime mover in setting up Cambria House.

John Emlyn Jones knew how to live the good life,

a man fascinated by the technology of his time.

A former MP, John had extensive contacts in the Basque Country,

and was one of the prime movers behind Cambria House.

Here he is at the children's first Christmas party.

His son, Alun, remembers the price John paid

for supporting the Republican cause.

He knew, of course, the consequences

would be serious for his business if...

if Franco won.

He knew that, of course, but his feeling of principle about it

was so great that he went on with his crusade because

he just felt it in the heart,

it was something he needed to say.

When Franco did win,

he was put on the blacklist,

and overnight lost two thirds of his shipping business.

And I shall never forget, Eddie,

what he said to me at the time.

He said, "That, my son, is the price of principle."

Now, if you were thinking this was a bit too good to be true,

you'd be right.

People were far from united in their response to the refugees,

and there was trouble at t'mill.

One of the most infamous incidents took place here,

at Brechfa in Carmarthenshire,

right here when this place was a pub.

It even made the headlines in the New York Times.

The camp at Brechfa was everything that Cambria House was not.

Poorly organised, ill-equipped, and with

inadequate care of the children,

trouble occurred within a week.

SMASHING GLASS

A window was broken in a local pub.

A car was damaged and there were clashes with the police.

There were calls in the right-wing press for the refugees to be

sent home.

Jose Armolea was 11 when he came to Brechfa.

Now 87, he's come back to tell his son about the events of that

day, events he thinks were vastly overblown.

I felt it was a minor item

of two or three boys being naughty,

like we all are, and don't forget we had very little supervision.

There were three boys that had gone down to the village,

and the story was that they had gone into a sweet shop

and helped themselves to some of the sweets

and the storekeeper had caught

them and given them a slap across the ear

and sent them home, kind of thing.

There was a group of the older boys that started to march down to

Brechfa, "Oh, we'll show them that

"they can't treat our boys like that."

As I said, there was no discipline,

there was nobody in charge.

In the end, 15 alleged ringleaders were sent back from Britain,

but to France, not Spain as reported in the press.

The story has a happy ending.

The media storm soon blew itself out,

and local people showed their character with lots of support.

Ordinary working class people from Carmarthen came down in busloads,

on Sunday afternoons there were an awful lot of people here.

The children suddenly found

that they were supported by decent

ordinary people and it was only

a minority of the political elite,

who had longed for this experiment to fail.

They'd never really wanted the children here,

and they had wanted something like this to occur,

so they could label these children

as Christ-hating communists.

Brechfa cast its shadow over the setting up of another Basque

refugee colony at Old Colwyn,

as this letter makes clear.

Widely supported, it was the brainchild of Douglas Hyde,

the only Communist Party member between Chester and Holyhead

who lived on a small-holding with a goat called Karl Marx.

Rooftree House, the only colony in North Wales,

opened in August 1937 with 20 youngsters.

Another driving force behind Rooftree House

was journalist John Williams Hughes,

who also raised enough money

to send two ambulances to Spain

in support of the Republican cause.

His collection of children's drawings,

typical of many done by Basque children, gives an insight

into how their young minds were haunted by the traumas of war.

ARTILLERY FIRE

The fourth and final Basque refugee colony was here at Sketty Park House

in Swansea.

The house where the children stayed has long gone,

all that remains is this tower, a kind of folly.

There were over 80 children here, and like Cambria House,

it was well organised and well supported by the Swansea community.

After the crowded conditions of camp

life in Southampton,

Sketty Park House must've seemed like paradise.

It had huge rooms, and acres of parkland to run around in.

It was a happy home, and the children prospered.

Even so, memories of the war shadowed their young lives.

From the archives of the South Wales Miners' Library,

part of Swansea University, there is footage of one of the care

workers who welcomed them to Sketty Park House.

The children were very, very upset

for the first couple of weeks,

the little ones used to call me Mama,

because I was a sort of substitute and they got to know me.

The children were terrified of aeroplanes, if they were

playing in the fields after school, and an aeroplane passed over,

which of course, in those days, were very small planes,

they used to scream for help

and it took us, all the adults

and myself to tell them that they weren't enemy planes.

Perhaps the warmth of the refugees' reception in Swansea also had

to do with the exploits of local sea captain, Potato Jones,

who played a key role in rescuing hundreds of Basque

refugees from the clutches of Franco.

He became so famous in 1937 that a

musical song was written about him.

# Old Potato Jones

# Old Potato Jones

# He's a roving son of the sea

# Finest skipper as ever could be

# They toast him in the fleet

# As he roams the danger zones

# He's a grand old man of the sea

# Old Potato Jones. #

He earned the name Potato because of the cargo

he carried to the starving Basque people, and also to distinguish

him from Corn Jones and Ham and Egg Jones,

two of many other boat owners

who braved Franco's naval blockade

to rescue Republican supporters.

Now, if all this makes it appear that Wales was totally

united behind the Basque children

and the Republican cause, it wasn't.

For instance, the Marchioness of Bute visited nationalist Spain

and wrote a glowing report of life there.

It was published in the Western Mail.

And there have been rumblings recently that the children

were pawns in a game controlled by Moscow.

But perhaps the most surprising response

came from the leadership of Plaid Cymru here.

They were indifferent to the children.

In 1937, the party was still embroiled in the wake

of the attack of the previous year,

on the RAF base at Penyberth

in the heartland of Welsh-speaking Wales.

Party leader, Saunders Lewis, along with David Williams,

and Lewis Valentine, became a cause celebre

when they were imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for the attack.

Preoccupation with prison was not the only issue influencing

Plaid's response to the Basque children, as Hywel Davies explains.

They had a feeling that Europe was being engulfed by communism,

and that the struggle, the essential struggle,

was between the Christian tradition,

and what they saw as a red menace.

They failed, really, to identify with the Basques as a national

movement, as a fellow national movement.

And looking at modern-day Plaid Cymru that seems very strange

and fairly inexplicable.

Didn't Plaid realise that their stance might jar with what the

rest of Wales was thinking?

Plaid was a very small party,

and its support base was largely

in the Welsh-speaking heartlands.

I don't think Saunders Lewis, anyway,

understood or identified at all with the South Wales Valleys,

or had any sympathy for the sort of proletarian culture that was

a big feature of life there.

-REPORTER:

-The first contingent of Basque children go home again.

In 1939, after Franco had won,

the British Government began putting pressure on the voluntary

groups who'd helped the Basque children to send them back to Spain.

Many supporters of the refugees were suspicious of letters allegedly

from Republican parents, asking for the children to be returned.

Nevertheless, the majority did go back.

A lot of our parents...

erm...

they didn't want us to go back,

Franco, by hook or by crook,

was determined to get us to go back.

My sister was sent back, at the beginning of the second World War...

was sent back to Spain

and had nobody to look after her there.

Not all returned.

Out of 3,861 children who came to Britain,

around 250 settled down here.

What have been the consequences for the ones who stayed?

What impact has it had on their lives?

Gerry Alvarez, for instance, seems to have rejected his Spanish

roots and has taken out Australian and British nationality.

When Zapatero came in, he said that all the children who came

over to England could have a Spanish passport.

I really don't want one.

I've got an English...British and an Australian passport.

We became men of the world, as it were,

you know,

we were born in Spain, we will always, and even now,

I will always remember that I am Spanish,

or Basque to the core,

erm...

like a good Welshman would be...

but also I have great affection for Britain,

Great Britain as it is,

and that includes the Welsh and the English.

In this one, you were really pretty, weren't you?

Gerry's sister, Josefina, seen here with granddaughter Rachel

and son John, has created her own family in Wales after

the life of her Spanish family was blown to pieces.

Who are these two girls with you in the photo, then?

That was Maricho, I don't know if she's alive...

Resilient, and resourceful,

she is nevertheless aware that it marked her for life.

You are terrified of anything happening to your family.

And both my children grumble at me because I worry.

If they are late I worry,

if something happens, I worry.

You become too possessive in a way,

because you don't want to lose them.

You don't want...

anything to happen to them,

anything like it happened to you.

There's one more question to ask before we leave this haunting

yet illuminating story of the Basque children in Wales.

If 4,000 refugees came across the water,

asking for shelter today,

how would we react?

So much of our society has changed on the outside,

have we been changed on the inside, too?

World culture has changed.

We were taken to these places without any questions being asked.

Nowadays you would have to consult the police

and the social services, and goodness knows what,

you just couldn't do it.

I know that all sorts of issues have come up about immigration and so on,

but I think it's in the nature of

Welsh people to want to stand up for

minorities who are being overwhelmed

by larger groups of people.

I would hope that anybody who looks for asylum, wherever they go,

they would be looked after

because there must be some reason to get away.

If the circumstances were similar somewhere else,

perhaps the people would react in the same way but...

I don't know.

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