How I Became A Historian Of Spain

I am often asked how I became an historian of Spain. 

I was born a year after the end of the Second World War in Liverpool, a city which, as a port of entry for ships from the USA, was battered by the Blitz. My mother was diagnosed with tuberculosis when I was 18 months old and confined to a sanatorium in Wallasey on the Wirral. I was brought up by my grandparents. 

During my childhood, the adults frequently reminisced about the Blitz and games in the street were often pretend battles between the British and the Germans. By the second half of the 1950s, I’d progressed to assembling Airfix kits of Junkers and Messerschmidts, Hurricanes and Spitfires. Out of all of that came a great interest in the World War and especially its origins. 

In Liverpool, from my grandparents, I learned the sense of community that united a working-class neighbourhood, a sense which coloured my response to Spain. 

For someone with my background, getting into Oxford in those days was verging on the miraculous. Still, I can’t say I learned much as an undergraduate. The history curriculum was rather frustrating for someone keen on the Second World War. It was very traditional, centred on English domestic, especially constitutional, history from the Anglo-Saxons onwards. There was an idea prevalent that contemporary history was indistinguishable from journalism. 

Most of my contemporaries were public school educated and had no doubts about their futures, convinced that they would go into the Foreign Office or the City. Originally, the height of my ambition was to be schoolteacher. 

In 1964 when I did my exams, there was no such thing as ‘a gap year’ spent abroad but there was a scheme whereby you could be ‘a student teacher’. I got a job at a school in Huyton, Liverpool, where I taught primary and secondary pupils. I think that means I must be one of the few people with experience of teaching at every level right up to post-doctoral. Anyway, I loved it and, because Oxford terms were only eight weeks long, I was able stay there for about four years in total.

As I came near to doing my final exams, and thinking about the future, I knew that I wanted to go and do research and wanted to do something European. My college offered little by way of advice, only that maybe I should do something on British foreign policy and some incident or other. While toying with that, I saw an advertisement for the newly created Graduate School of Contemporary European Studies at the University of Reading. I was accepted and given the much-vaunted Weidenfeld Studentship. The course consisted of two taught courses and a 10 000-word dissertation for each. I chose the Spanish Civil War, taught by Hugh Thomas, and Left-Wing Literature of the Interwar period. It was wonderful being able to specialise for a year just reading on the 1920s and 1930s. 

I have to say Hugh Thomas was a great teacher and would often bring characters such as International Brigadiers to our weekly seminars, or Royal Naval officers who’d been involved in breaking the siege of Bilboa. I stayed in touch with him and later worked as his research assistant on the major revision of his book on the Spanish Civil War that came out in 1977. 

Back as a student, though, I had no background in anything Spanish, including the language. At the beginning, my interest in the Spanish Civil War was intellectual, seeing it as a rehearsal for the Second World War, and being attracted by what seemed a veritable cornucopia of everything that interested me - starring roles for Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Trotsky, Chamberlain, Churchill et al., plus all the ideologies: communism, fascism, socialism, anarchism and freemasonry. 

I had a ball and soon had run out of books to read in English and so I taught myself Spanish (discovering en route that the most useful thing I’d learned in school was Latin). I did it the hard way, reading books with a dictionary, listening to records and hanging out with Latin Americans in the student bar. The big leap forward was making my first trip to Spain in the spring of 1969. 

Spain was a very different country then, at the end of the 1960s. It was still the Spain of the Franco dictatorship and Madrid was full of reminders of the Civil War. There were buildings marked by bullet holes, Mutilados de Guerrabegging on the streets and shops around the Puerta del Sol that sold only artificial limbs. There was also a sense of dread around the Dirección General de Seguridad, or the Grises (armed agents of the Policía Nacional) and even more so with the Parejas de la Guardia Civil outside the towns and cities.

Nevertheless, I was entranced by the sounds and smells of the streets of Madrid where there were artisans working at crafts like bookbinding or shoemaking. I loved the food too. When I went and stayed in a pueblonear Malaga, I was delighted, above all, by the warmth and humour of the people. Their delight in seeing the halting progress of el inglés was a terrific encouragement to work at the language, so different from my brief experience of France. But it was in Madrid in the late 60s and early 70s, that the reality of the dictatorship was brought home to me. 

Police baton charges on the University campus were quite frequent. One day, returning home from an archive, I emerged from a Metro station into a street in which a gun battle was raging between police and members of a Maoist group (the FRAP). 

In May 1973, after clashes during a May Day demonstration, students who used to work in the same archives as myself disappeared for several days. I later discovered that they’d been arrested, beaten up and questioned. 

Inevitably, such experiences influenced my critical view of the dictatorship. It all intensified my feeling for the democratic Republic and sadness at its defeat at the hands of a Franco aided by Hitler and Mussolini.

My sympathy for the Spanish Republic also grew out of my work on social injustice in Spain and the way in which ordinary people endured incredible hardship during the war in order to support the Republic that had given them so much in the way of women’s rights and social and educational reform. Of course, you could not really be from working-class Liverpool and not be opposed to fascism. 

My views of Spain and its history have modified over the past 40 years. My anti-Francoism hasn’t diminished much, and my deep conviction that the Republic was right is still in place. But over time I’ve become readier to see good and bad on both sides, perhaps because my real vocation - if that’s the word - is as a biographer. Although I believe in the social and economic dynamics of history, I also very firmly believe in the role of individuals. 

When I began my career as a history teacher, the Spanish Civil War was very immediate. It remains so in Spain and discussion and debates can still fill lecture halls. Franco still enjoys a good press. Friends of mine who work on, say, Nazi Germany, such as Ian Kershaw or Richard Evans, don’t have to explain that they are going to be critical of the Nazis. That is obviously not the case with a critical stance on the Francoist military rebels during the Civil War or the Franco dictatorship thereafter. 

Such views are understandably more prominent in Spain given that the dictatorship carried out a forty-year long national brainwashing. Ricardo De La Cierva, Franco’s last official biographer, wrote a virulent reply to my biography of the Caudillo with the title No nos robarán la historia. It starts off something like this: 

Once upon a time, five young men were born in Liverpool. 

Four of them, who later became known as the Beatles, devoted their lives to song. 

The fifth, known as Paul Preston, devoted himself to writing rubbish about Spain.

This article was first published in The Madrid Review Volume 1, Issue 1