It was “the golden age of foreign correspondents,” the historian Hugh Thomas wrote, a period in the late 1930s when the literary elite descended on Spain armed with a lust for adventure and belief in a cause.
In February 1936, Spanish voters elected, by a small plurality, a center-left coalition of Socialists, Communists, Republicans and Anarchists.
By July, of the same year Gen. Francisco Franco led an uprising against the young 5 yr. old Spanish Republic -plunging the country into civil war.
Mussolini and Hitler supported Franco,
Stalin sent advisers and arms to his opponents.
The United States, Britain and France watched from the sidelines.
The writers and foreign correspondents who came to Spain invented a new kind of war journalism, reporting in first-person, eyewitness accounts the brutal feel of the battlefield.
Their two-and-a-half-year chronicle became something more, an intimate encounter with the great ideological battles of the time: between church and state; rich and poor; the aristocracy and the classless; democracy and fascism.
“The best writers came to tell the world what was happening in Spain,” said Carlos Garcia Santa Cecilia, a former journalist and curator of the recent international exhibition called, Correspondents in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939,
“They felt a compulsion to be here, to bear witness, to fight for their beliefs.
It was the first time journalists said, ‘I must write what I see, what I feel.’ ”
The aviator and author of the popular children’s book The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry flew and disappeared, in his own plane.
George Orwell took his pen to the battlefield and nearly died when he was shot through the neck.
In a two-part series headlined Spilling the Spanish Beans in The New English Weekly in July 1937, Orwell laid bare the divide among anti-Franco republicans, between the workers he defines as true revolutionaries with the counterrevolutionary Communists, who sold out to “bourgeois reformism.”
His complex, often ambiguous analysis won him the vitriol of both the left and the right and formed the basis for his book Homage to Catalonia, in which he wrote,
“As for the newspaper talk about this being a ‘war for democracy,’ it was plain eyewash.”
Arthur Koestler was locked up by Franco supporters.
Kim Philby, The Times of London correspondent, already a Soviet agent gathering information under the cover of his job as a reporter.
Ernest Hemingway posed for one report for The New Republic holding a rifle while lying on the battlefield.
Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s lover and his future (third) wife, chronicled daily life in Madrid in a four-page article in Collier’s in 1937 – it established her as a serious journalist.
Langston Hughes, the American poet, and playwright came to Spain and wrote in The Afro American newspaper. “I knew that Spain had once belonged to the Moors, a colored people ranging from light dark to dark white.”
He described the importation of Moorish soldiers from Spanish Morocco and their slaughter on the front lines, on the side of the Franco offensive.
The exhibition is part of a vast soul-searching throughout Spain over the terror of the 1936 uprising and civil war that brought General Franco to power and kept his dictatorship in place until his death in 1975.
In recent years Spain has begun to shake off the collective amnesia that gripped it, since Franco’s death.
Books, exhibitions, documentaries, television series, and films have given stark, eloquent testimony to Franco’s silent victims.
A project to locate and dig up the hundreds of mass graves, left by the firing squads of Franco rule is actively under way, and many relate to The Chicago Tribune’s, Jay Allen, at the start of his report about the massacre in Badajoz in August of 1936.
“This is the most painful story, it has ever been my lot to handle,
I write it at four in the morning, sick at heart and in body, in the stinking patio of the pension central.”
Badajoz was one of the first big towns to fall; Franco’s offensive from the south, and Mr. Allen managed to find an alternate way to send his story, after it was blocked by government censor.
“They are burning bodies,” he wrote.
“Four thousand men and women have died at Badajoz, since Gen. Francisco Franco’s rebel Foreign Legionnaires and Moors climbed over the bodies of their own dead , through its blood-drenched walls.”
In her dispatches, Barbara Alving, a Swedish foreign correspondent, known as Bang, described how schools and hospitals struggled to stay open during the war.
The Spanish Civil War was too great a temptation, and to many a fatal lure.
Though not all correspondents took the Republican side, Ernest Richard “Dick” Sheepshanks was a a 27-year-old Reuters war correspondent, during the Spanish Civil War, his life was the stuff of a Hollywood blockbuster.
Sheepshanks dated Winston Churchill’s daughter, Sarah.
Her younger sister, Mary describes him in her book, A Daughter’s Tale: The Memoir of Winston Churchill’s Youngest Daughter, as the star of all her sister Sarah’s boyfriends, and transcripted a letter about him from their mother the same year he joined Reuters.
In a letter from 1933 , their mother, Clementine Churchill noted,
” Mr Dick Sheepshanks , the nephew of Sheepshanks who was Randolph’s Tutor (Housemaster) at Eton.
Small, dark, intelligent, grubby, bolshy, impertinent. A marvelous dancer, both ball room and acrobatic , and patter dancing (tap dancing). Very good at games (tennis which pleases me) especially cricket.
This is one of Sarah’s favorites, and I think he is rather dangerous. He looks unscrupulous, but Sarah says he isn’t. He is employed by Reuters newsagency. He demonstrated his left wing tendencies by refusing to change for dinner , as Sarah recounted, “
This was ignored the first time, but did not go unremarked by my father (Winston Churchill).
“young man, what do you do ?”
I am at Reuters , Sir.
The glare softened, “Good, What department are you in?”
“Obituaries, Sir”
The family contorted themselves not to laugh.
After a moments silence, my father asked, “have you got a lot on me?”“pages and pages, Sir “They became fast friends, she recalled.
Sheepshanks was also a quick favorite of Sir Roderick Jones, Chairman and Managing Director of Reuters.
To Sir Roderick Jones, the Head of Reuters News Agency, correspondent Dick Sheepshanks had represented everything he would have liked to have been – but wasn’t.
Tall, debonair and handsome, born in 1910, to a ‘good’ Yorkshire ‘county’ family, Dick boasted an impressive academic and sports record, he also enjoyed useful personal connections.
At Eton, where he was Captain of Cricket, he shared the same school house as Sir Christopher Chancellor, Reuters Manager in the Far East.
From Eton, he followed Chancellor’s footsteps to Trinity College, Cambridge to read History.
He played cricket for Yorkshire and football for the Corinthians (amateur) club and captained his College cricket team.
He was popular with his Reuters colleagues, some of whom assumed him to be the unofficial fiancée of socialite Jeanne Stourton, daughter of Viscount Southwell.
His cousin was Anthony Blunt, another Trinity man, who, forty odd years later, would be revealed as a member of the Cambridge Five, a group of spies working for the Soviet Union from the 30s to the early 1950s.
Jones, small in stature, with shoes specially built-up to increase his height, was a hat-salesman’s son from Dukinfield near Manchester.
His parents had married five weeks before his birth, and his education went no further than the local Board School.
He had begun a long way from Eton and Oxford, and this could have made him jealous of Sheepshanks.
Instead, in some ways, he began almost to regard Dick as a son.
He already had three sons, but perhaps Dick Sheepshanks was the one he would most ’liked’ to have had.
This did not mean that Jones allowed his admiration to curtail his own personal agenda.
Jeanne Stourton, saw herself (in her words but not Dick’s) as Dick’s ‘one true love and great passion’, though she was also Sir Roderick Jones’s current mistress.
In addition, if Julia Stonor, Stourton’s daughter is to be believed, Jeann was a ‘close girlfriend’ of Lady Jones (Sherman’s Girl, 2006).
Did morally-conscious Dick have any idea just how action-packed Jeanne’s social calendar really was, or was his friendship with Jeanne really as close as she said it was?
When Dick joined Reuters as an assistant in the Editorial Department in October 1933, early promise soon seemed to be fulfilled, pinpointing him as a young man who ‘was going to be a winner’.
In 1935, he was chosen as Special Correspondent to cover the Italian Invasion of Abyssinia, but he caught dysentery the moment he arrived in Addis Ababa.
Two months later, in December, he was invalided home.
His next chance came in June 1937, when Sheepshanks was sent to Spain, then in the throes of a bloody Civil War.
Reuters sent out four correspondents; Dick and one other to report from Generalissimo Franco’s Nationalist side; the other two to report from the Republican (Government) side.
After an initial chaotic period, a strict censorship regime was introduced by Nationalist authorities and foreign correspondents were only permitted to go to the front on collective visits, organised and chaperoned by Nationalist press officers.
The consequences for entering Nationalist territory without official clearance could be severe, even for those sympathetic to Franco.
Sheepshanks headed for Spain in 1937, and killed in December, during the Republican shelling of Cudete.
When news of his death reached London, Sir Roderick Jones (who headed the Reuters News Agency and unknowingly shared a love interest with Sheepshanks) paid him all the tributes as befitted a national hero.
Then things get weird.
According to some who had known him – including Jeanne Stourton, the aforementioned love interest – Sheepshanks had become suspicious of the only one of the group to survive: Kim Philby.
If that name sounds familiar, it’s for good reason – Philby went on to gain infamy, as Britain’s most notorious traitor during the Cold War.
According to Stourton, Sheepshanks had grown increasingly suspicious of Philby’s motivations, and Philby took it upon himself to take Sheepshanks out of the picture.
A comparison between eyewitness reports and photographic evidence has raised a number of unanswered questions, and it’s been suggested that Philby may have had a hand in the attack.
What exactly happened to the Reuters journalists remains undetermined, and the death of Ernest Richard Sheepshanks has since become a compelling Spanish Civil War mystery.
Usually , if Sheepshanks death is not believed to be a true casualty of war, it is countered as a thought of deliberate action by either, Philby or Franco.
On the last day of 1937, Sheepshanks was headed to the front line…
Retired Reuters journalist, Peter Mosley, gave the facts in Thomson Reuters ‘In Memoriam’ book.
‘…..Sheepshanks joined a convoy of press cars to visit the front line near the ancient city of Teruel, in the foothills of the Sierra de Sudar range in eastern Spain.
The cars pulled into the main square of Cudete, a village about 5 kilometres (3 miles) from Teruel.
It was bitterly cold.
The journalists went to look for a vantage point from where they could observe the battle, of Teruel, but could not find one.
So four of them climbed into one of the cars and chatted, ate chocolate, and smoked cigarettes to help keep themselves warm.
Suddenly, the Republicans began shelling the village.
The first shell landed a few hundred yards from the parked convoy.
The second one exploded just beside Sheepshanks’s car, riddling it with shrapnel.
In the driver’s seat and closest to the blast, American reporter Bradish Johnson, of the Spur, died instantly.
Sheepshanks, sitting next to him, was hit in the head.
He never regained consciousness and died that evening.
In the rear of the car, another American, Edward Neil of the Associated Press, received leg wounds, from which he later died.
The fourth war correspondent in the car escaped with minor scalp wounds.
He was Harold (‘Kim’) Philby of the Times of London ….. much later exposed as a double agent who, even at that time, and throughout World War Two, was working for the Soviet Union.
Back in London, Sheepshanks’ colleagues were devastated by the news of his death.
A leading national newspaper, the News Chronicle, said in an editorial: “This is the saddest part of bringing to your breakfast table, the news of the world’s wars.”
In a tribute to Sheepshanks, at a memorial service in St. Bride’s Church, Fleet Street, Sir Roderick Jones said: “He had a magnetic gift of attracting friends of all degrees.
I cannot put into words the kind of spell which he cast upon us all.”
Sheepshanks was buried in his family’s vault, in the churchyard at Arthington, a village near Leeds in Yorkshire.
The Report by Loughborough University , British News Media in the Spanish Civil War, notes,
The intimidation of foreign journalists was systemic, in the Nationalist sector, during this period.
Threats ranged in severity from reprimands to execution threats, expulsions, imprisonment and worse.
Spanish press officers were reportedly encouraged to threaten to shoot correspondents who transgressed rules.
Such as in September 1936, René Brut of Pathé Gazette, was imprisoned for three weeks after pictures were released of the Nationalist massacre at Badajoz, Bolín repeatedly threatened to shoot him, but was unable to prove that Brut was responsible for the footage (he was).
The most notorious case involved the imprisonment of Arthur Koestler, in early 1937.
Koestler met Bolín earlier in the war in Seville, before Koestler was forced to flee, after being spotted by an ex-colleague from a German newspaper, who denounced him as a Communist.
Bolín said he would shoot Koestler, if they ever met again and fate delivered this opportunity when he arrested Koestler, as the Nationalist forces entered the Malaga, but another British national at the scene and stayed his hand, but still Koestler was imprisoned and only escaped execution after concerted international pressure.
The intimidation of journalists was not restricted to those working in areas under Nationalist control.
In late 1936, Franco issued a decree that any journalists who reported from the Nationalist side ran the risk of execution, if they were subsequently captured on the Republican side (editorial department memo, Reuters, 4 May 1937).
Specific personal threats were also made to individual journalists working in the Republican sectors.
In November 1936, Lester Ziffren, Madrid correspondent for United Press, reported that Franco’s forces failed to capture the capital because of weaknesses in their military intelligence.
A month later, he was informed by his London office, Franco told the UP representative in Salamanca, he would be ‘taken care of ’ once they captured Madrid.
After that, gaining entry was just the first barrier.
There were no blanket passes for foreign correspondents and every major trip required special permission from the military authorities, specifying points of departure and destination.
Many journalists became extremely frustrated, these bureaucratic procedures and the amount of time they wasted made it as though they were chasing paper and getting nowhere.
Nationalists authorities not only sought to control what journalists said, but also what they saw, even when permission was granted, foreign correspondents were not allowed to travel unchaperoned.
The result, few Nationalist press officers were featured, in so many journalists’ accounts, it revealed how the strict pool system was.
Their visits to the front were collective affairs led by press officers who arranged transportation, offered translation support, and censored their copy.
Aguilera, in particular, gained a reputation for recklessness, in approaching the front, but correspondents in his company often saw more action, than they were prepared for or comfortable with.
One of the problems, according to Aguilera, was “modern sewage disposal” – it had wiped out “plague and pestilance”, which had kept down the numbers of the masses.
In the face of what was happening, in Republican Spain, after Franco took power, it would be necessary to purge the country of “one third of the male population”, in order to be rid of the proletariat and fix unemployment for good.
December 1937, three journalists’ luck ran out on a Nationalist press visit to the front at Terue – their car was hit by shrapnel from a Republican shell.
No matter where the correspondents were located , the Press Bureau always took them to the flat roofed villa, supposed to have belonged to Gen Cabanellas.
The blast killed Bradish Johnson of Newsweek outright and mortally injured Richard Sheepshanks of Reuters and Edward Neil of the Associated Press.
Kim Philby, who was then Nationalist correspondent for The Times, escaped with minor injuries.
Philby, already deeply immersed in Soviet espionage, came to Spain in May 1937, as second correspondent of The London Times.
The National Press Office knew he was a son of a gentlemen and assumed he shared the prejudices of his newspaper and Philby gave no indication otherwise.
Philby ‘s cover in Spain was strengthened by his female companion with whom he lived in Saragossa.
She was an ardent monarchist and wildly pro-German.
But in My Private Life, Philby notes, a couple of times in Spain, his cover was in danger.
For example , he was arrested in Cordoba , when he went to go to a bull fight without a pass, by the Guardia Civil.
At the time, he had in his pocket, a slip of paper with Russian Intelligence Codes, which he swallowed.
Given the era, it was not considered unusual that he was interested in troop movement or sent ,from France, uncensored intel.
After the incident in Claude, in late December, John Degandt , New York Enquirer’s correspondent, noted on the spot, it was odd only a single press car was hit , when it appeared, the shell fell between two cars and exploded only in one direction.
More than 50 yrs later, The book called Franco of the Field, gave an account of an Englinshman, involved at the time, offered a more sinister interpretation.
Tom Dupree , honorary consul with the embassy at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, made arrangements for transporting coffins to France for the families.
He claimed, he always believed the Philby planted the bomb in the boot of the car, in which he was riding, in order to kill Sheepshanks, who was riding in the car behind.
By getting into the car behind Sheepshanks and Neil, Philbly he was able to protect himself and escape unhurt.
According to Dupree, Sheepshanks discovered Phibly was a Comintern agent and was about to blow his cover therefore, Philby had to arrange his death.
The truth or otherwise of this event will most likely never be known.
In any event, Franco awarded the Distinguished Military Medal to all four correspondents , Philby included.
Philby remained in Spain and continued to write for The Times until , August 1939.
The recently published UK paperback edition, of Papa Spy, subtitled, A True Story of Love, Wartime Espionage in Madrid, and the Treachery of the Cambridge Spies gives a fresh examination of Philby’s alleged involvement in the murder of English and American journalists, ahead of publication of an authorized and carefully vetted official history of MI6 by Professor Keith Jeffery of Queen’s University, based on thousands of secret papers, exposes the bitter and protracted personal battle to influence British policy towards Spain in WW2, between Philby, the head of MI6’s Iberian section, and Tom Burns, a pro-Francoist English catholic who helped run propaganda and secret operations undercover as press attaché in the British embassy in Madrid.
Both men had first crossed paths during the Spanish Civil War, Burns, a young Catholic publisher, and friend of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, had volunteered to drive an ambulance for the Nationalist side, while Philby was posted to Spain as a Times correspondent with the Francoist forces, a job he used as cover for his work as a Soviet agent.
Personal rivalry as well as ideological differences affected relations between both men competing at one point, for the affections of Lady Lindsay Hogg, the glamorous stage actress more popularly known known as Francis ‘Bunny’ Doble.
It was during the Civil War –on New Year’s Eve 1937- Philby left Zaragoza by convoy to cover Franco’s bold counter-attack, to relieve a besieged garrison near the town of Teruel.
Philby travelled in the back seat of a two-door sedan, accompanied by Englishman, Dick Sheepshanks of Reuters, and two Americans, Ed Neil of Associated Press and Bradish Johnson, a freelance photographer who was on assignment for Newsweek.
According to the account Philby later filed for The Times, the car was hit by an artillery shell in the small village of Caude.
But historian Professor Hugh Thomas is among those who have been taking special interest in probing a different version, to explain how Philby miraculously escaped with minor injuries despite sharing the back seat of a two-door car and has Philby getting out of the car before lobbing a grenade at his colleagues.
Philby’s motivation – fear that Sheepshanks, was beginning to become suspicious and was about to blow his cover.
The Reuters man was at the time a boyfriend of Jeanne Camoys Stonor, a Catholic aristocrat.
In a memoir published two years ago, Jean’ surviving daughter Julia wrote that Sheepshanks and the two other journalists had been assassinated by Philby, a claim she subsequently made to me in a conversation, but which she was unable to substantiate with any documentary evidence since most MI6 files remain classified.
The allegation against Philby however, is thought to have first been made in the aftermath of the incident by an unnamed foreign office official who was a friend of the Sheepshanks family although it never resulted in any action being taken, and a cover-up was suspected.
Philby
The unresolved questions over why the three journalists had died were lost in the fog of a Civil War that continued till 1939.
By the time WW2 broke out, Philby was well on his way to infiltrating himself into the higher echelons of British intelligence, a position from which he escaped scrutiny and final exposure as a Soviet spy until 1963 then he fled to Moscow, never to return.
The new authorized history of MI6 by Professor Keith Jeffery of Queen’s University, based on thousands of secret papers, is due to be published by Bloomsbury in September.
Jeffery had had unique access to MI6 documentary material that has remained classified for decades. Expectations that it will provide a definitive Philby story have been dashed with news that the ‘history’ will cover only the first fifty years of the spy organisation’s existence, and go no further than 1949.
Post-script by the professor notes: Have received an interesting email in response to this from an academic friend who is not unfamiliar with the history of secret intelligence suggesting that neither MI6 and MI5 will ever enlighten us on this.
He writes: ” Could anyone have foreseen the rise and rise of Philby in the late 1930s? He was just another young journalist on the make. Its a good story, and…one that will never die.”
But then again plausible deniability has been part of the spy world for decades.