Richard Baxell

The women who rallied to the Republican cause in Spain

‘I didn’t even want to go to Spain. I had to. Because’, said the American writer Josephine Herbst – just one of the sisterhood to become immersed in the struggle

The German photojournalist Gerda Taro in 1936 – a year before she died in Spain, aged 26, while covering the Battle of Brunete. [Getty Images] 
issue 25 February 2023
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  • Tomorrow Perhaps the Future: Following Writers and Rebels in the Spanish Civil War

    Sarah Watling

    Cape, pp. 320, £20

‘We English,’ the prime minister Stanley Baldwin allegedly remarked following the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, ‘hate fascism, but we loathe bolshevism as much. So if there is somewhere where fascists and bolsheviks can kill each other off, so much the better.’

Initially, many in Britain probably agreed with Baldwin, seeing no reason to be drawn into another country’s civil war.

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