7. Politicizing and De-Politicizing Childhood: The Case of the North Stoneham Basque Children’s Camp

Dror Sharon

Introduction

In May 1937, a “well-equipped little canvas town”[1] appeared in a feld near Southampton. The North Stoneham Basque Children’s Camp was built hastily, almost entirely by volunteers, to facilitate the initial reception of 3,861 children from the Basque Country, or Euskadi. By the time they arrived in England, the improvised camp had a medical clinic, a church marquee and a cinema marquee, a kiosk, a clothing store, a currency exchange, and about 500 bell tents divided into three main sections. More than seventy years after he frst came to England, Manuel Rodríguez still remembered the time he entered the camp:

When we arrived in the camp it was a big mistake made by the authorities, in my point of view. As you went they said, “Are you a Socialist?” . . . and then send you to one part and they send the other ones to the other one. . . . So there was two camps more or less, and which caused a lot of fghts because they’d take the pegs of the tents and they would collapse on you. Just playful.[2]

Manuel described an aspect of life in the North Stoneham Camp that appeared in several other oral histories and written recollections by individuals who came to Britain as refugee children from the Spanish Civil War: the segregation of children from Spanish Republican and from Basque Nationalist backgrounds and the hostility that emerged between these groups.[3] This chapter seeks to contextualize the party-political division in North Stoneham and place it within broader trends toward the politicization and de-politicization of childhood in Euskadi and Great Britain in the 1930s. It examines the motivations for the implementation of this camp policy and asks how the division corresponded to the children’s own understanding of the political, national, and ideological tensions of the Spanish Basque Country.

Numerous important studies have examined the evacuation of children from the Basque Country and the evacuation to Britain in particular.[4] While some of these works have briefy pointed to the political division in North Stoneham, this policy has not yet been the subject of close analysis. Drawing on a combination of archival and published sources alongside oral history, I seek to paint a fuller picture of life in North Stoneham and the relationship between the camp policy of segregation and contemporary ideologies regarding the politicization of children. The frst section of this chapter discusses attitudes toward children, childhood, politics, and ideology in Spain and Great Britain in the years leading up to the evacuation. It points to the tensions between the politicized educational projects of the Spanish Republic and Basque Nationalist Party (Partido Nacionalista Vasco [PNV]) and the British humanitarian ideal of children as innocent and apolitical. The following sections provide a brief overview of the establishment of the North Stoneham Camp and the selection of children for the evacuation. This chapter then moves on to discuss children’s recollections of the camp, drawing on a body of existing interviews, written testimonial, and studies based on this material. The fnal section addresses British media representations of the children and reactions to the identifcation of many of the children with the parties of the Spanish Popular Front. It is based on an overview of fve nationwide, mass-circulated newspapers: The Daily Express, The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror, The Telegraph, and The Times, alongside a close reading of selected archival sources.

I argue that North Stoneham was a site of collision between the progressive pedagogical ideas associated with the Second Republic, the Catholic and Conservative ideology of the Basque Nationalist Party, and British humanitarian ideal of the apolitical child. Along the nearby port of Southampton, North Stoneham was the frst point of encounter between the refugee children and their host society. It was also the last space where the entire contingent was kept together. From there, they were sent in smaller and more homogeneous groups to children’s colonies throughout England, Wales, and Scotland. By paying closer attention to the role of political and national identity in this shared space, we might gain new insights into Spanish, Basque, and British expectations regarding the politicization of children and childhood in wartime and their relation to the children’s lived experiences.

The Evacuation of Children From the Basque Country

The nearly 4,000 children who found refuge in Great Britain were part of a much larger contingent of children evacuated from Euskadi in the spring of 1937. Responding to General Emilio Mola’s ofensive on the province of Bizkaia, the only part of the Basque Country not under insurgent control at this point in the war, the autonomous Basque government arranged the evacuation of the civil population from war zones. In coordination with foreign governments and aid organizations, between 25,000 and 30,000 children were sent abroad. About two-thirds of these children were evacuated to neighboring France, and the others were spread between diferent countries, including Belgium, the USSR, Mexico, Great Britain, and a few other countries.

This endeavor was not the frst mass evacuation of children from war zones during the Spanish Civil War. Children were frst evacuated from Madrid during the Francoist ofensive on the city in autumn 1936. The following months saw the evacuation of tens of thousands of children from Madrid and other war zones to children’s colonies in the rear-guard, namely in Valencia, Catalonia, Alicante, and Aragon. In February 1937, the Ministry for Public Instruction took charge of the operation of these colonies. The children’s colonies served not only as safe havens from bombardment but also as educational centers that sought to prepare the children for active Republican citizenship. This often entailed a signifcant degree of ideological indoctrination, the nature and content of which varied according to the identity of the political party or trade union in charge of each colony.[5] The objective of these centers was not only to bring the war’s most vulnerable and innocent victims to safety but also to guarantee the future and continuity of the Spanish Republic by instilling its values in the younger generation. The objectives of the evacuation abroad of children from Euskadi were similar. However, the Basque case was complicated not only by disagreements among the diferent factions of the Spanish Left but also by the vast ideological difference between Spanish Republicans and Basque Nationalists.

The autonomous Basque government, which initiated and arranged the evacuation, was formed only a few months earlier, on October 1, 1936. Its establishment marked the culmination of a long campaign for autonomy, which had been the main objective of the PNV since the early twentieth century. Early Basque nationalism was founded upon deep Catholicism, anti-liberalism, and anti-socialism, and a strong emphasis on race in defning the Basque nation. Under the Second Spanish Republic, the PNV shifted toward a more centrist, Christian Democrat ideology, partly as cooperation with the Republic was seen as instrumental in the struggle for autonomy. This objective was not reached until the outbreak of the civil war, which led the PNV into a somewhat reluctant alliance with Francisco Largo Caballero’s Popular Front government. Despite this antifascist alliance, a deep ideological chasm still remained between the PNV and the leftist Popular Front.[6]

In terms of territory, the newly established autonomous government only presided over Bizkaia and small fractions of its surroundings, since the other Basque provinces were taken by the Francoist side in the early months of the war. Alongside four representatives of the PNV, including Lehendakari (President) José Antonio Aguirre, three Socialists and one Communist minister comprised the government, as well as one minister each for the left and center Republicans and the leftist Basque Nationalist party, Acción Nacionalista Vasca. Within this new government, refugee work fell under the Department for Social Welfare (Asistencia Social), headed by the Socialist minister Juan García Colás. Following the bombing of Durango on March 31, 1937, this work was expanded to include the evacuation of children abroad. The Asistencia Social arranged the evacuation in collaboration with other government departments, most notably the Ministries of the Interior, Health, and Culture. The latter, headed by the PNV’s Jesús María Leizaola, was responsible for the recruitment and employment of the teachers who accompanied the children abroad.[7]

Competing Educational Visions

Much like its Popular Front counterparts, the Basque Nationalist Party also sought to continue its prewar educational projects. The PNV placed its pedagogical emphasis on teaching the Basque language (Euskara) and the inculcation of Basque heritage, culture, and Catholic morality rather than on secular democratic citizenship. Given their ideological discrepancy, Basque Nationalists and the parties of the left were deeply concerned with the education of children in exile. In refugee children’s camps and shelters in the French Basque Country, Basque government departments had direct infuence on the educational agenda. Historian Virginia López de Maturana has shown how the PNV-led Department of Culture and the Socialist-held Department of Social Welfare utilized their resources and connections to implement their respective political and pedagogical ideologies. She argues that colonies maintained by the Department of Culture mostly took in the children of Nationalists and could therefore more easily immerse the children in their parents’ political culture and religion. Colonies maintained by the Asistencia Social were more heterogenous, housing the children of Nationalists, Socialists, and Republicans together, and were not able to achieve the same degree of cohesion in their educational programs.[8] The preservation and transmission of political culture and values largely depended on homogeneity.

In Britain, the North Stoneham Camp and the colonies that succeeded it were run and funded primarily by British voluntary groups and religious bodies with varying political and pedagogical outlooks. These included cooperative societies, the Roman Catholic Church in Britain, the Salvation Army, and numerous local committees, many of which sympathized with the Spanish Republican cause. As we shall see, Basque authorities were still involved in the care of the children in Great Britain, but their infuence over the camp and colonies was more limited. However, as was the case with other countries, the children were accompanied by a group of adults responsible for their care and education. The expedition to Great Britain was accompanied by 118 auxiliaries known as the señoritas and by ninetysix teachers. Most, though not all, of the auxiliaries and teachers were single and childless young women. The contingent also included ffteen Basque priests who were to preside over the religious formation of the Catholics among the group.[9]

The question of the children’s instruction in their temporary exile raised signifcant concerns among Basque Nationalist educators and politicians. In a diary entry from May 10, a Nationalist priest involved in the establishment of Basque schools in Bilbao recorded an exchange that he and a PNV politician had with a group of Basque mothers who demanded to send their children abroad. Over the phone, his colleague reproached the women for threatening to send their children to socialist colonies, declaring:

[T]he Nationalist Party will not send any of its children abroad before all the problems arising from the evacuation are resolved. No colony of ours will leave here without priests, teachers, nurses, and other necessary staf. We shall not compromise on this.[10]

Nationalist concerns over the education of children away from Euskadi were also expressed in the press. In the days following the evacuation to England, newspapers from across the political spectrum published brief reports on the children’s embarkation as well as announcements for parents. The coverage of the evacuation largely relied on statements by the British organizers and translations from the British press. However, some periodicals also published refections on the children’s exile. For example, the Bilbao edition of Mujeres, organ of the Women’s World Committee Against War and Fascism, published a short letter by a mother who sent her children to England. The writer expressed her gratitude and confdence that the English would treat her children like their own. “I remain measured and calm,” she wrote, “because I know my two little ones are sailing towards a safe haven, protected by the democratic, anti-fascist English people.”[11]

The letter published in Mujeres suggests that the writer’s gratefulness and trust in her children’s hosts largely originated from their political orientation, as she perceived it. By contrast, an article published a couple of days later in Euzkadi, organ of the PNV, voiced concern with the religious and cultural instruction of Basque children sent to Great Britain.[12] The author claimed that the evacuation could save the Basque race from destruction. Yet this salvation depended not only on the physical safety of the children but also on their spiritual and cultural instruction according to the Basque Nationalist motto, Jaungoikoa eta legezaharra (God and the old law). As fathers were forced to part from their sons, educational duties remained exclusively in the hands of the Basque teachers and priests who accompanied the contingent. Teachers were to expose the children to their heritage through the teaching of Euskara and of Basque history, art, music, games, and dances. The priests’ duties were deemed even more important, as they had to instill in the children the Catholic virtues of faith and of love of God and neighbor. However, this chapter not only laid out the duties of priests and teachers but also warned against the dangers of the child-centered pedagogy put forth by the Escuela Nueva movement. This movement’s ideas had a profound infuence on educational policies in the Second Republic as well as the teaching in children’s colonies during the civil war.[13] The article in Euzkadi stated that:

[T]here is a pedagogical stream that argues that to become a good man, the child must be educated with liberty, to his liking, according to his inclinations. This is folly. . . . The child must be accustomed to being virtuous. That is why nature endowed him with docility and softness.

The author went on to argue that “when secular education is consistent, there can be no obedience, no chastity, no reverence of the parents, [there can be] nothing except each person doing as they please.” According to this view, secular education was detrimental not only to Nationalist ideology but also to morality and virtue at large. The adults placed as in charge of the children of Catholic Basques were therefore obliged to shield them from its perils.

Non-Intervention, the Innocent Child, and the Noble Basque

The care, education, and image of all groups of children evacuated from the Basque Country during the civil war also depended on government and public attitudes in the receiving country. In Britain, Spanish Republican and Basque Nationalist eforts to incorporate children into these ideological projects were met with a third set of views and principles regarding the politicization of children. In the aftermath of the First World War, humanitarians throughout Europe and North America increasingly pushed forward an image of children as pure and innocent beings, removed from politics and national ideologies. The Save the Children Fund (SCF), established in Britain in 1919, was a key agent in this campaign. Historian Bruno Cabanes has argued that the “cult of the universal child” that emerged in the interwar period and its construction of children as innocent and apolitical victims ignored the politicized realities of the First World War, where children were not only victims but also active participants, mobilized through education and rhetoric.[14] The same holds true for the experience of children in the Spanish Civil War. As several historians have noted, the reception of the Basque children in Britain enjoyed a broader base of public support than any other initiative to aid Spain, as it was more successfully construed as purely humanitarian and non-political.[15] However, British public expectations of the young exiles rarely aligned with the ways in which they experienced and understood the civil war and their own role within it.

Since the outbreak of the civil war in July 1936, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative-led coalition government had adopted a strict policy of non-intervention in Spain, which it unsuccessfully sought to implement as an international policy. At the same time, large sections of British civil society sympathized with the Spanish Republic. In late 1936, various aid initiatives for Spain came under the umbrella of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief (NJC), which was led by Members of Parliament from across the political spectrum. While many of its constituent bodies and organizations had been vehemently pro-Republican, the NJC was committed to ensure that any activity taken under its name and using its funds would remain strictly humanitarian and non-political. Even before the evacuation of the Basque children to Britain, many relief initiatives and fundraising appeals emphasized the plight of children.[16]

The NJC began campaigning for the evacuation of children in the early stages of the Francoist ofensive on Bizkaia. However, the crucial turning point for the evacuation was the bombing of Guernica by the German Condor Legion on April 26, 1937. Two days later, British journalist George Steer published in The Times a detailed report of the attack and the destruction wrought on the small town. Steer was initially sent to report from the Spanish Nationalist zone in the summer of 1936. He was expelled within a few months and began reporting from the Republican part of the Basque Country. While there, he had become a keen supporter of the Basque struggle for regional autonomy. His report on the bombing of Guernica pointed to the town’s historic, cultural, and political importance for the Basque people. Steer noted, “[T]he objective of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralization of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.”[17]

Steer’s report indicates a distinction between Basques and “Red” Spaniards. Both the PNV and the NJC drew on this distinction to garner public support and legitimate the children’s evacuation to Britain. Another example of this approach can be found in a meeting held in the House of Commons the next day. Following a discussion of Steer’s article, the Head of the Basque Delegation in London, José Lizaso, implored a group of MPs to help his government evacuate women and children from Bilbao. Lizaso reportedly stated that such measures would not compromise Whitehall’s policy of non-intervention, as “there were no Reds in the Basque Country. They [the Basques] were a cultured and a moderate people, few in numbers, though great in spirit, who asked only to work in peace among their own mountains.”[18] From the outset, then, several key agents framed the Basque struggle as separate from the Spanish Republican one.

Alongside the Basque government and the NJC, the Roman Catholic Church also played a role in the evacuation to Britain, which further reinforced the distinction between Catholic Basques and “Red” Spaniards. One day after the bombing of Guernica, the Bishop of Vitoria, Mateo Múgica, wrote to the Arthur Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster. Writing in English, Múgica expressed his concern not only for the sufering of children in the civil war but also for the spiritual instruction of those who were departing from Spain. He entreated Hinsley to take interest and care of the children who may be evacuated to Britain, emphasizing that “certain groups opposed to the Church are seeking to proft by this occasion in order to inoculate these angelic souls with anti-Christian principles.”[19] In his response, Archbishop Hinsley guaranteed Múgica that English Catholics would do everything within their means to safeguard the spiritual needs of evacuated children.[20]

Responding to a proposal made by the NJC and to mounting public pressure, Home Secretary Sir John Simon expressed his willingness to admit a limited number of refugee children into Britain. He laid out two main conditions for the evacuation: that there would be no charge on public funds for their maintenance and that they would be repatriated to Spain when conditions allowed.[21] This announcement marked the beginning of negotiations between Whitehall and the NJC regarding the terms for the admission of the children. In this context, representatives of the SCF voiced some reservations regarding the idea of evacuating children from Spain to Britain. Its Secretary, Lewis Bernard Golden, noted that from his experience of working with the NJC that “he had been forced reluctantly to the view that the desire to get the children sent to this country was actuated largely by political motives.”[22]

Despite this position, the SCF eventually contributed to the care and maintenance of the children in Great Britain. For the reasons discussed earlier, the proposition to grant temporary asylum to Basque children was more readily framed as humanitarian and non-political. This endeavor drew in bodies that have hitherto refused to collaborate with the NJC on the grounds of its pro-Republican inclinations. Alongside the Roman Catholic Church, these included the Salvation Army and the Trades Union Congress (TUC). During the evacuation, a new body was created to handle the care of the young refugees: the Basque Children’s Committee (BCC).[23]

Nevertheless, Golden’s early warning demonstrates that the framing of this operation as strictly humanitarian and non-political was shaky from the outset. The children’s evacuation abroad had propagandistic value for both the PNV and the Popular Front, a fact of which Francoists in both Spain and Britain, as well as the Home Secretary, were acutely aware.[24] The NJC was never quite able to establish the non-political credentials it sought, and despite ofcial statements, the BCC did not operate, nor was it perceived, as an entirely separate entity. A fnal but crucial factor that undermined attempts to depoliticize the evacuation was the fact that the refugee children defned their identity and understood their plight in political terms.

The Selection of Children for Evacuation

As noted earlier, the registration of children for evacuation was managed by the Department of Social Welfare. Political parties and unions that supported the Basque government were invited to submit lists of members wishing to send their children abroad.[25] Oral histories suggest that registration through a party or union was not the only way for a parent to secure a place for their child. Rodolfo Molina, for example, explained why he and his brothers were registered for the evacuation as anarchists:

What happened was that when my father went to register us, he said that he was a Republican Socialist. They said that there weren’t any more places for Republican Socialists, but there were still some places for Anarchists. So he said, “All right then. Put me down as an Anarchist. What the hell diference does it make?”[26]

Among the children who eventually left for Britain, those of PNV families were a minority. The Roman Catholic Church ofered 1,200 places in its schools, convents, and orphanages, but of the children registered as Catholics, only 650 were sent by the PNV.[27] At least some of these children were native speakers of Euskara, although their exact number remains unclear. Basque speakers were a minority even among Nationalists and were mainly concentrated in the rural areas of Euskadi. Nevertheless, during the 1930s, Basque Nationalists made the teaching of Euskara a priority, partly drawing on educational models created in the years preceding the Primo de Rivera dictatorship. The Second Republic saw the creation of a network of Basque schools (ikastolas), private schools that provided thoroughly Nationalist and Catholic education and instruction on the Basque language. After the outbreak of the civil war, the Basque Department of Culture oversaw the establishment of institutions named Schools of Euskadi (Escuelas de Euskadi), where Basque language instruction was made mandatory at the primary level. As López de Maturana has shown, the PNV was eager to nurture the Basque-speaking children who studied in these institutions after their evacuation to France. Their segregation from children who studied in state schools and non-Nationalist private schools was crucial for achieving this goal.[28] The PNV also sought to promote the teaching of Euskara to children who left for Britain. In a letter to Juan Garcia from June 1937, José Lizaso discussed some issues pertaining to education in the children’s colonies. He noted that “there are many Euskara speakers among them” and that teachers should therefore be provided with Basque-language teaching material, in accordance with the government’s policy.[29]

To some extent, the party-political division indicated a series of other distinctions between children along the lines of religion, social class, and ethnicity. PNV families that sent their children to Great Britain were often middle class and deeply Catholic. Families afliated with Popular Front parties and unions were often working class and tended to have a more secular outlook. Many of these families had roots in other parts of Spain, from which people immigrated to the industrialized north in search of work. However, these broad generalizations might obscure the heterogenous nature of the Basque Country, and Bizkaia in particular, in the 1930s. While the PNV had traditionally defned Basque identity in terms of race, many “pure” Basque families supported the parties of the Spanish left and center. The index cards of children who remained in the United Kingdom during WWII indicate that numerous fathers registered as Basque Nationalists worked in blue-collar jobs, whereas at least some Socialists and Republicans held lower-middleclass jobs.[30] While some correlation existed between ethnicity, religion, class, and political identity, this correlation was not all-encompassing.

Contrary to statements by the BCC that sought to establish the neutrality of the operation,[31] it seems highly unlikely that parents would openly declare their support of General Franco to a Basque government agency in the context of civil war. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the claim that some of the refugees were the children of fascists sometimes resurfaced in the camp and in its coverage in the press.

The Establishment and Administration of the North Stoneham Camp

Once the Home Ofce had granted its provisional clearance for the admission of children to the United Kingdom, the NJC began preparing for their reception. The Committee decided to settle the children in a temporary reception camp upon their arrival, from which they would be dispersed into smaller centers throughout the country. The camp was to function as a site of quarantine to prevent the spread of contagious diseases and, at the same time, to help the young refugees adjust to their new environment, play, and roam freely in the open air.[32] While the decision to place the children in a temporary camp was made hastily, it drew on an existing (albeit relatively recent) tradition of encampment in Britain and its empire. Its roots lay in the nineteenth century, from Victorian workhouses, to famine and plague camps in India, to the concentration camps created in South Africa during the second Boer War.[33] According to Jordanna Bailkin, these earlier forms of encampment established a tense nexus between aid and detention, which remained a key feature of the refugee camps created on British soil in the twentieth century.[34] While the refugee camp may provide relief in times of crisis, it also facilitates the management and control of refugee populations.

NJC representatives cooperated with the Southampton Joint Council, which brought together the local Labour Party, Co-operative Society, and trade unions to establish the camp. The frst camp administrator was H. W. H. Sams of the SCF, who had experience working with Russian and Armenian refugees in Europe. He worked in close collaboration with Leslie Witt of the Joint Council, Labour politician Henry Brinton, and Jack Pavey of the CoOperative Society. A ground for the camp was quickly found in North Stoneham in the Borough of Eastleigh, with the nearby Moorhill House designated to serve as an infrmary. Alongside the Joint Council, various groups and organizations volunteered to help set up the camp. These included the Clarion Cycling Club, afliated with the Labour Party; the Communist Party; the Boy Brigades and Boy Scouts; the Rotary Club; carpenters, plumbers, and other trades people; and university students and professors. The NJC’s initial plan was to evacuate 4,000 children in two separate installments. However, NJC representatives in Bilbao urged the Home Ofce and Committee in Britain to evacuate the entire group in a single voyage, stressing the danger the children faced in the city. This meant the camp’s capacity had to be doubled within a few days.[35]

After the children arrived, their frst week in the camp was rather chaotic. By the end of that week, Sams retired from his post as administrator due to a mental breakdown and was replaced by Henry Brinton. Brinton was aided by Hope (Poppy) Vulliamy, an Ipswich volunteer who had lived in Spain and spoke Spanish and later went on the run a children’s colony in the village of Hoxne.[36] While Brinton was thought to be good with the children, his administration of the camp was subject to harsh criticism. C. E. James, the sanitary inspector for the Borough of Eastleigh, repeatedly remarked in his diary that the camp was in chaos, that the administrative staf was slacking, and that the volunteers who focked to North Stoneham were doing more harm than good.[37] The BCC was also dissatisfed with Brinton’s work, and in mid-June he was replaced by Major W. J. Irwin.[38] Alongside British staf and volunteers, the Basque Delegation in London held an ofce in North Stoneham. Its representative in the camp was Jesús de Irarragorri, one of two Basque medical doctors who accompanied the children on their journey to England. His work in North Stoneham mostly involved the representation of the teachers and auxiliaries vis-à-vis the BCC and Basque government, but he was also tasked with creating a registry of the children in preparation for their dispersal to colonies.[39]

Although the camp was supposed to be evacuated within a couple of weeks, this process was ultimately not completed until September. The frst groups of children left the camp within a few days, including a large contingent of 400 children who were sent to a Salvation Army hostel in Clapton. The evacuation of the camp continued gradually over the following weeks but was slowed down due to concerns about the spread of typhoid. By June 22, there were about 2,300 children left in the camp; by July 19, their number was down to 620, and by August 20, their number was down to 300. The last 200 children left the camp on September 19, accompanied by a kitten they had adopted as their mascot. They were sent to a holiday camp in Kent, since they could not be kept in tents as the weather got colder.[40]

Patterns of Division at North Stoneham

The Basque children sailed from the port of Santurtzi on May 21 and entered Southampton late the following day. Disembarkation began on May 23 and lasted two more days, during which each child underwent a medical examination. After this, colored tape was tied to each child’s left wrist, signifying their destination. Dr. Maurice Williams, the Port Medical Ofcer for Southampton, described this system in an article published in the British Medical Journal:

White tape indicated “clean,” and allowed the child to proceed direct to camp; red tape indicated “verminous,” and the wearer was sent to the Corporation baths for de-lousing; blue was for “infectious or contagious” conditions and for entry to the isolation hospital or other institution. Blue-and-white tapes were used for other conditions requiring general hospital treatment.[41]

Health and hygiene were the frst of several criteria applied to distinguish and better manage the Basque children. The children who were sent to the baths upon their arrival were temporarily placed in Camp II.[42] In his recollections of the North Stoneham Camp, Amador Díaz described this section as a relatively small one, located in the middle of the camp. He remembered his frst morning in North Stoneham, when he went exploring and approached the second camp:

I was told by a small group of children at its edge, that the ones with white labels should not enter that area as those these had red labels and had already been cleaned and given new clothes. I noticed that the boys and girls in this area were all wearing very un-Spanish clothes, identical jumpers and grey skirts or trousers. . . . It took a long time for this Second Camp to lose the stigma of being contaminated.[43]

The children were also split according to age and gender, although this division was less strict than others. Gender separation was limited to tents, where the children slept in same-sex groups of eight, with a teacher and señorita assigned to each one of them. While this sleeping arrangement seemed most natural to the British camp staf, it entailed the separation of sisters from their brothers. This forced separation caused signifcant distress to some of the children and especially to the older ones, tasked by their parents with looking after their younger siblings. A scene depicting such separation can be found in an autobiographical children’s novel by Blas Óscar Guerrero Uriarte. It describes the protagonist’s argument with the British staf after he and his two brothers are assigned to a diferent tent group than their younger sister:

• “Hey, listen, wait a minute!”, Blasín protested, raising his hand to ensure

no one tried to separate his little sister from the family group. “Ascención is staying with us.”

The matron behind the desk quickly and briskly marked the names of the Gerrero Uriante family with an X. . . .

• “Young lad, this would only be for a couple of days, until we assign you

to your colony.”

[Blasín] quickly thought: “What does that old lady want? Is she trying to sell me the story of “it will only be a couple of days”? She must think I’m stupid. No way, I promised my mother I would look after Ascención, and so I’ll do.” Blasín stopped thinking and resumed his protest. This time his tone was soft but resolute:

• “My sister is staying with us,” and he grabbed Ascención’s hand and held

it strongly, almost hurting her. A young helper then pulls Ascención, trying to help the matron, and Blas kicks her in response. Outraged, the English matron turns to two of the Spanish teachers:

The doctor[44] has assured me that no one would do a better job than you in convincing this . . . animal that, for obvious reasons, we cannot allow girls and boys to sleep together; that would be . . . unforgivable. Please speak to this boy and explain to him that now he is in a civilized country, whose people have long parted with certain primitive customs that we consider to be immoral.[45]

Of course, this scene may have been exaggerated to serve the book’s narrative. Nevertheless, it illustrates a sense of helplessness and confusion caused by the separation of siblings of diferent sexes in the camp.

The Girl Guides managed another small section of the camp that was allocated for the smallest children. By all accounts, this part of North Stoneham was remarkably well run.[46] About a week after the children’s arrival, camp authorities decided to create another small camp for 200 of the eldest boys. This decision was reportedly driven by the understanding that these adolescents, who took on the responsibilities of their fathers and older brothers who had gone to fght or helped dig trenches themselves, felt infantilized in their new environment. While some accounts depicted this camp as a model of self-governance, others described it as a disaster.[47]

The separation of children into groups according to age, sex, and medical condition was one method of maintaining some order in an otherwisechaotic camp. The reasoning behind these divisions varied, ranging from cultural norms regarding decency and modesty, to public health considerations, to consciousness of the unique needs of diferent age groups. The last criterion according to which children were segregated in the camp, the political afliation of their parents, will be discussed in the following sections.

Children’s Accounts of the Political Division in the Camp

In July 1937, the communist writer and translator Yvonne Kapp wrote a short book on the North Stoneham Basque Children’s Camp, which was published by the left-wing Victor Gollancz press. Writing under the pseudonym of Yvonne Cloud, she provided a detailed account of camp life and devoted the proceeds from the sale of the book to the BCC. In a chapter titled “Politics and Non-Politics,” she described the decision to split the children according to the political allegiances of their parents:

It is no wonder that, in the early days of the Camp, violent quarrels and hatred broke out in some of the tents and it was found necessary to divide the Camp into political sections: Basque Nationalist, Socialist, Communist

and Anarchist, and to change to quarters of the few suspected Fascist children so that no one would be certain where they were on any night.[48]

Kapp/Cloud’s account depicted this camp policy as a reaction to the children’s identifcation with the political parties of their parents, which clashed with the expectations created by the framing of the evacuation in humanitarian and non-political terms.

At the same time, the children themselves were sometimes bafed by this policy and uncertain as to their own designation. After assuring readers that “as far as camp ofcials can discover every one of the 4,000 children is a baptized Roman Catholic,” The Daily Telegraph’s correspondent amusedly described a scene he encountered in North Stoneham: “When the Basque priests were attempting to divide the children into groups yesterday, they asked a nine-yearold girl what her politics were. ‘I belong to the Modern Women’s party’, she replied, with a proud toss of the head.”[49] Miren Sesumaga noted:

I remember asking my cousin Begoña, who was a very good friend of mine, ‘What am I?’ and she would say ‘Socialista’ and I would say ‘Socialista’. I kept forgetting what I was but the question would come up once in a while.[50]

The segregation implemented in North Stoneham maintained the existing educational divisions between children in the Basque Country, separating children who attended ikastolas and escuelas de Euskadi from those with diferent educational backgrounds. It is likely that it also refected the diferences between urban and rural areas, with Euskara speakers hailing mostly from the latter. Such divisions were probably less clear-cut among the children of Socialists, Communists, and Republicans who attended state schools. Furthermore, children brought up in the cities most likely encountered and mixed with children from diferent backgrounds outside the school system.

In their recollections of the camp, Rafael de Barrutia and Herminio Martínez provided contrasting accounts of how the division in the camp corresponded with their own self-understanding. De Barrutia pointed to the somewhat artifcial nature of this division, noting the following:

We were diferentiated in the camp, as they said that the frst, second and third camp corresponded to Socialists-Communists, Republicans and Nationalists, respectively. And so, I had friends from the same street who were housed in other camps for this supposed ideology or sentiment. There was no physical division. The entire compound was made up of one camp, but as I said, we knew them [the camps] by this order.[51]

It is possible, however, that this account referred mainly to the Spanish Republican section of the camp, where further internal divisions were enacted between children registered through the diferent Popular Front parties. By contrast, Martínez recalled a clearer distinction between Popular Front and Basque Nationalist children, while pointing to his own difculty in understanding the concrete meanings of these ideological labels:

They tended to keep very much to themselves. But for us it was los Nationalistas and we used to look and see the priests there. There was a defnite barrier between the two sections, it must have been a diferent feld close by. They were dubbed los Nationalistas and we were the Socialistas. You didn’t understand what these things meant at all but they were, they were designated diferently.[52]

This account also points to a confation between Basque Nationalists and Francoists, not only due to their identifcation as “Nationalist” but also due to their Catholicism. This confation probably increased hostility and suspicion toward PNV and Catholic children in the camp. Some of the teachers and auxiliaries seemingly shared this attitude. Mari Angeles Jauregui recalled leaving the PNV Camp with her sister in their frst morning in North Stoneham and losing their way back:

My sister asked one of the señoritas from the Socialist camp if she could tell us where the PNV camp was and in an unpleasant tone she replied ‘Go and fnd the priests, they’ll tell you where you have to be.’ How could we know where the priests were or the monks? That was unpleasant. That’s what I mean when I say things were very politicised.[53]

At the same time, her testimony also indicates the special privileges enjoyed by Nationalist children thanks the involvement of the Roman Catholic Church:

The bishop came to see us. We had a beautiful church and Basque dances and songs were organised and the Socialists and the Communists would come and sing the Internationale spoiling it all of course.

The bishop that Jauregui referred to was probably William Timothy Cotter, the Catholic Bishop of Portsmouth, who visited the camp to conduct a ceremony on the Feast of Corpus Christi on May 27. Amador Díaz’s recollections suggest that this celebration might have been one of the motivations for the splitting of the Camp between Republicans and Basque Nationalists. He remembered that he and his brother spent their frst two nights in tent 437 in the third camp, on the eastern section of North Stoneham. On their second morning, some señoritas came into this part of the camp, “saying that this area was for those who were members of the PNV and therefore likely go to mass.” Díaz attributed this policy to the Basque priests who accompanied the contingent, noting, “I suspected then, and I still do, that this separation was thought of by the priests wanting to keep together those who were regular communicants, fearing that the less religious children would encourage apathy towards religion amongst them.”[54]

The cultural and religious activities organized by the priests and the fact that the cinema marquee was apparently placed in their section of North Stoneham also caused some envy among their peers in the other camp. One person remarked, “[T]he PNV children had chapels, priests, movies, dancing, everything you could think of, but we savages had almost nothing.”[55]

Coming to Terms With the Politicization of Children in War

The arrival of the Basque children in Britain and their frst weeks in North Stoneham drew signifcant attention from the local and national press. Kevin Myers has argued that media representations of the children emphasized the innocence and apoliticism of children, on the one hand, and the religiosity of the Basques and their aversion to the revolutionary left, on the other hand.[56] Coverage in most media outlets downplayed the presence of children from Communist and Socialist families in the contingent and their adoption of symbols such as The Internationale and the clenched fst salute. This representation was in line with the messages of the NJC and BCC and may have been seen as a useful way of garnering public support and legitimacy for the reception of the children. A striking example of this tendency can be found in a Daily Telegraph article on the children’s arrival to Southampton. The newspaper’s correspondent remarked:

[W]hen I said good-bye to this group they all replied “Adios” or, the Basque equivalent, “Agur,” which means “God be with you.” Nowhere did I see the Communist clenched fst salute, but I often heard the cry “Gora Euzkadi,” which means “Long live the Basque country.”[57]

However, this framing indicates that the question of how politicized and specifcally how “Red” the young exiles were remained a main topic of concern. The illustrated newspaper The Sphere, for example, cited an English businessman who had lived and worked in northern Spain for several years and claimed that most of the refugees “are defnitely ‘reds’, constantly using the Communist clenched-fst salute and completely revolutionary in outlook. To allow them too much freedom here would be most harmful.”[58]

The splitting of North Stoneham into sections along political lines is hardly mentioned in the mass-circulated newspapers surveyed here. A rare exception can be found in an article published by the center-left Daily Mirror about the aforementioned mass on Corpus Christi. This chapter described how the Catholic children built an altar in the open feld, while “Communist children played football, blew mouth-organs, fred pop-guns, whopped and enjoyed themselves on the other side of the camp.” Yet, as the Catholic children began to sing,

Their voices reached the ears of their comrades at play. And one by one, with footballs, popguns, dolls, mouthorgans, chocolates and halfsmoked cigarettes, the Communist children joined the service, kneeling round the altar. Behind the Bishop stood a boy holding aloft a standard from which foated the Union Jack, the Government fag of Spain, and the Nationalist fag of General Franco. Enmities were forgotten here.[59]

This idyllic description was unusual not only in indicating that there was a spatial division between children of diferent political backgrounds in North Stoneham but also in referring to the presence of “Communist children” in the contingent. However, while acknowledging their presence, the Daily Mirror presented its readers with a story of rehabilitation. This chapter seems to suggest that a few days in peaceful, moderate, and neutral England, combined with a joint prayer, were enough to draw the children of Spanish Communists back to the church and foster fraternity and understanding among children from diferent sides of the bitter Spanish confict. Their evacuation to England restored these children’s right to a safe and innocent childhood, free not only from war and want but also from politics.

Over time, the fact that most children in North Stoneham identifed with the parties of the Popular Front became more difcult to deny. On June 19, the Francoist insurgents conquered Bilbao. The news was given to the children, in both English and Spanish, through the camp’s loudspeaker van, leading to an immediate and mixed reaction of panic, grief, and anger. Some children tried to run away from the Camp, and a few others threw stones as the van. It became evident that whether they came from families supporting the Popular Front or the PNV, the children in the camp regarded the Francoist insurgents as their enemies and were convinced that the fall of Bilbao would have serious ramifcations for their families.[60]

Over the following weeks, friction intensifed between some of the children and the camp authorities. C. E. James, the sanitary inspector for Eastleigh, described the deterioration in his diary. After Major Irwin had replaced Brinton in late June, a staf member told James that Irwin was “a dictator” and that several people in the Camp described him as a fascist, adding that “the fault lay in the fact that the whole afair was a political one.” In July, James reported several incidents of rioting, with the children attacking the church marquee and threatening to burn in down. He remarked, “[T]he ‘communist element’ in the camp were causing a lot of trouble.” On July 30, the radio van was burned. James reported this with a wry comment, saying the local people would be glad, as they had previously complained about the noise.[61]

In her book on North Stoneham, Yvonne Kapp tackled the expectation of “English people whose concern is humanitarian” to encounter thoroughly innocent and neutral children in their visits to North Stoneham. Drawing on the rapid developments and growing interest in children’s psychology in the 1930s, Kapp argued that all children had a strong need for external reassurance. For the Spanish Republican children, who constituted the majority of the contingent, this need was intertwined with politics; they needed to know that their hosts were “on their side.” Although they did not fully grasp the complexities of Spanish politics, their parents’ allegiances were deeply ingrained in their own identities. Moreover, the Nationalist uprising was the very cause of their plight. Kapp maintained that “to disabuse them, to try and explain the fnesses of British policy in this matter is a waste of breath and worse.” She concluded:

An enemy attacked. As a consequence they have been through experiences to shatter the health of body and mind; seen sights to scatter sanity; known grief and fear beyond description. Then, as a further consequence, they have been taken from this monstrous daily torture into a safety made dark by loneliness and homesickness, a peace clouded by anxiety for those they love and need. The enemy who attacked was Fascist.[62]

Conclusion

The North Stoneham Camp was created as a temporary measure for the reception of the Basque refugee children who fed Bizkaia in May 1937. Plans for the children’s evacuation to Britain were shaped by competing sets of expectations and ideas about their education in exile and the role that politics, religion, and ideology should play in it. The British organizers of the evacuation, as well as politicians and large sections of the press, adopted a humanitarian ideal of childhood’s apoliticism. However, prior to their evacuation to Great Britain, the children’s education was shaped by competing Spanish Republican and Basque Nationalist visions for the region’s future citizens. The children’s politicized understanding of their identities was reinforced by months of civil war. Even if they did not fully understand the doctrines of their parents’ parties, they recognized Franco’s forces as their enemies and undermined organizers’ eforts to frame the rescue scheme as entirely neutral and apolitical.

In North Stoneham, the children were divided into sections according to various criteria, including the political allegiances of their parents. The Basque priests who accompanied the expedition seem to have played a crucial role in shaping this policy. While the internal division in North Stoneham refected and continued existing divisions in the Basque Country, it also generated a degree of friction and hostility between children from Popular Front and Basque Nationalist backgrounds. The fall of Bilbao on June 19, 1937, marked the starting point of a process of reckoning by British individuals, organizations, and journalists with the heterogenous nature of this group and how many of the children identifed with the leftist parties of the Popular Front—a process that continued to unfold long after the evacuation of the North Stoneham Camp.

Primary Sources

Archives

CDMH—Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica, Salamanca

EAH—Euskadiko Artxibo Historikoa/Archivo Histórico de Euskadi, available at https://dokuklik.euskadi.eus/

FUE—Fundación Universitaria Española, Madrid

IWM—Imperial War Museum, London

MML—Marx Memorial Library, London

TNA—The National Archives, Kew

TUC Archives—Archives of the Trades Union Congress, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, available at https://cdm21047.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/ collection/scw

Newspapers

Euzkadi

Euzkadi Roja

Mujeres (Bilbao)

The Daily Express

The Daily Mail

The Daily Mirror

The Daily Telegraph

The Sphere

The Times

Other Published Sources

Cloud, Yvonne. The Basque Children in England: An Account of Their Life at North Stoneham Camp. London: Victor Gollancz, 1937.

Gibson, Ronald G. “Four Thousand Basque Children.” The Lancet (November 6, 1937): 1091–96.

Williams, Maurice. “The Arrival of the Basque Children at the Port of Southampton.” The British Medical Journal (June 12, 1937): 1209–10.

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