The Soviet Union gave the Republicans (especially the communists) active support; the Nationalists were given heavier support by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Many foreigners fought on both sides, especially on behalf of the Republicans, notably in the International Brigade. Britain and France were among countries that pursued a non-interventionist policy. General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) played a vital role in ensuring the Nationalist victory. From September 1936 he served as Generalissimo of the Nationalist forces and after the war became dictator of Spain. The ferocity of the war led to heavy loss of life, directly in the fighting, ‘behind the lines’, and, after the war, in retributive killings and deaths in prison (perhaps some 100,000), a total of some half-million people in all.1

On 10 December 1936, George Orwell wrote the first of a series of short letters to his literary agent, Leonard Moore, making arrangements for his journey to Spain, where he intended to fight on behalf of the Republicans. He confirmed that his bank had allowed him to overdraw to the tune of £50 (which Moore had guaranteed). He asked Moore to try to persuade the Daily Herald (a newspaper that supported the Left) to commission him to write ‘a few articles or something like that’ (327). No agreement was reached with the Herald. The next day he wrote an authorization for his agent giving his wife, Eileen, complete rights over his literary affairs and directed that all payments due to him should be paid to her (328). On 15 December he sent Moore the manuscript of The Road to Wigan Pier. This was processed very rapidly and on Saturday, 19 December, his publisher, Victor Gollancz, sent him a telegram asking him to call at Gollancz’s offices on the following Monday, 21 December, to discuss the book’s publication. Orwell telegraphed back to say he would be there at noon and they then discussed terms for the publication of the book and the inclusion of illustrations (341). Orwell endeavoured to win the support of Harry Pollitt, Secretary-General of the Communist Party, for his journey to Spain, but Pollitt, suspicious of Orwell’s political reliability (as he saw it), declined to help him. He did, however, advise him to obtain a safe-conduct from the Spanish Embassy in Paris. Orwell also obtained a letter of introduction from the Independent Labour Party (the ILP) to John McNair, its representative in Barcelona.2 Orwell arrived in Barcelona about 26 December. He described the journey (and an incident in Paris on the way) in his Tribune column, ‘As I Please’, in 1944. Jennie Lee (1904–88, Baroness Lee of Asheridge, 1970), first Minister of Arts and wife of Aneurin Bevan (1897–1960), under whose forceful leadership the National Health Service had been set up in 1948, described Orwell’s arrival in Barcelona in a letter to Margaret M. Goalby, written shortly after Orwell’s death.

[2549]

Extract from ‘As I Please’, 42 [The Journey to Spain]

Tribune, 15 September 1944

About the end of 1936, as I was passing through Paris on the way to Spain, I had to visit somebody at an address I did not know, and I thought that the quickest way of getting there would probably be to take a taxi. The taxi-driver did not know the address either. However, we drove up the street and asked the nearest policeman, whereupon it turned out that the address I was looking for was only about a hundred yards away. So I had taken the taxi-driver off the rank for a fare which in English money was about threepence.

The taxi-driver was furiously angry. He began accusing me, in a roaring voice and with the maximum of offensiveness, of having ‘done it on purpose’. I protested that I had not known where the place was, and that I obviously would not have taken a taxi if I had known. ‘You knew very well!’ he yelled back at me. He was an old, grey, thick-set man, with ragged grey moustaches and a face of quite unusual malignity. In the end I lost my temper, and, my command of French coming back to me in my rage, I shouted at him, ‘You think you’re too old for me to smash your face in. Don’t be too sure!’ He backed up against the taxi, snarling and full of fight, in spite of his sixty years.

Then the moment came to pay. I had taken out a ten-franc note. ‘I’ve no change!’ he yelled as soon as he saw the money.