In July 1936, a band of disaffected army officers mounted a coup against the Spanish Republic which ultimately triggered the Spanish Civil War, witnessed first-hand by Father Alexander J McCabe. The Cavan priest kept his account in diaries, which Tim Fanning has drawn on as the basis of his fascinating new work.
Fr McCabe was Rector of the Irish College in Salamanca from 1935 until 1949, in which city General Francisco Franco - the future Generalísimo - set up his Nationalist headquarters. The priest's diaries eloquently recall a period when Nazi diplomats dallied with Spain as General Franco and Adolf Hitler sidled up to each other.
Nationalists and Republicans of every hue, spies, including the notorious Kim Philby, plus a clatter of journalists and chancy profiteers came within McCabe's sights. All were judiciously appraised with a sharp eye, although the clerical diarist destroyed about 800,000 words from his testimony.
In 1946 the priest wrote of 'crudely bitter pages, especially about the cruelty of the Spanish Civil War, and so before I went to Ireland at Xmas, I brought all these journals down to the furnace and burned the whole record.' He speculated that people might be 'shocked at my comments and judgments on this tragic period, and at the badly-expressed cynicism, with which I regarded certain aspects of it..."
General Eoin O’Duffy, who led the Irish Brigade into Spain to fight for the Nationalists, looms large in eccentricty. "The General has a silly horror of eggs cooked in olive oil. It is little ‘fads’ like this, to which the Irishmen should be quite accustomed by this time, that are helping to create mountainous troubles in the Brigade."
McCabe is clear-sighted about any kind of humbug or thinly-disguised racism. Here he is on three American ladies whom he came across as fellow passengers on a ship en route to the USA.
In his case, the trip was to be a well-earned rest from the rigours of his rectorial duties: 'There is a new type of pious Catholic in the modern world who has arrived at such a high degree of spiritual perfection that he (generally she) can afford to be supremely and profoundly uncharitable about their neighbours and their lives... All these three ladies are agreed that they want to get back to America where the male acts the part of a gentleman towards a lady and get right away from the Latin male, who is rather canine in his approach to strange females.'
He was most certainly not afraid to call it as he saw it, and described the Bishop of Salamanca, Enrique Pla y Deniel as ‘a dry little Catalan and not as expansive as his predecessor, who was a native of Murcia.’ The implication is that a Murcian would be more genial, being from the South.
Paddy Belton was deputy Lord Mayor of Dublin at the time and he doesn’t fare any better. Belton arrived in Spain with donations raised in Ireland to help rebuild bombed Catholic churches. "It takes all sorts of people to make a world, and it takes all sorts of greedy sharks and cold fish to make an Irish Christian front, " he wrote. "Belton is a boor of the first order."
This 250-page work is enlivened by such rich quotation, revealing blunt but incisive conclusions concerning the momentous events of the Spanish Civil War and its habitués. McCabe’s well-grounded assessments and observations are astutely contextualised by Tim Fanning in this 250-page work. Recommended.
Read an extract from Tim Fanning's book here
