‘Emphatically not cricket’: British eyewitness testimonies of revolutionary Catalonia, 1936

Abstract

In spite of significant interest in British responses to the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), the raft of eyewitness accounts which hitherto anonymous Britons relayed to the regional press during the opening months of the conflict are yet to receive systematic attention. By using Britons who were present in Catalonia between July and September 1936 as a case study, this article seeks to reconstruct the multifaceted process by which numerous eyewitness testimonies came into existence, as well as their subsequent relationship to broader debates about the Civil War in Britain. It argues that the lived encounters which were sustained between both tourists and long-term residents with the revolutionary events which took place in Catalonia following the military rising in July were fundamentally circumscribed by their status as foreigners, as well as their tendency to rationalize their experiences with the aid of pre-existing, culturally rooted stereotypes and assumptions. British reactions generated ‘on the ground’ in Spain were subsequently converted into supposedly authoritative first-hand testimonies in close cooperation with local journalists eager for sensational ‘human interest’ content, before going on to form an early input into the widespread attitude that the Spanish Civil War amounted to little more than incomprehensible anarchy.