The music of Republican Spain creeps into my Spanish Civil War novels quite often. In The Assassin's Mark, our main protagonist, Jack Telford, is introduced to the traditional Asturian mining song that became an anthem during the conflict, Santa Bárbara Bendita. It remains an anthem for Asturian miners in their struggles even today. Here's a translation of a couple of random verses, just to give a flavour. And it's a great marching song, of … [Read more...]
Spanish Civil War – Five Things You (Almost Certainly) Didn’t Know
Brief background to the Spanish Civil War Spain had voted to become a Republic in 1931 and its royal family went into exile. But, outside its major cities, life in rural Spain was still feudal, entirely controlled by the army, the catholic church and a handful of phenomenally wealthy landlords. Then, in February 1936, a left-wing Popular Front coalition was elected to power and pledged to introduce reforms which were all anathema to those … [Read more...]
Spanish Civil War – The International Women who Fought for Spain
In the three bloody years that followed Spain’s military coup in July 1936, there were certainly a small number of women from various parts of the world (Priscilla Scott-Ellis from Britain, for example) who volunteered to serve as nurses on behalf of fascist General Franco’s rebel Nationalists. But on the side of the democratically elected Republican Government there was almost a tidal wave of active support among women from across the … [Read more...]
The Portuguese Revolution – and the Music of “The Lisbon Labyrinth”
Lisbon, 1974. Journalist Jack Telford must hunt down a killer, solve a deadly riddle, renew his acquaintance with an old flame, and survive Portugal’s revolution in this taut thriller with a life-and-death finale, which Jack may survive, but only at great cost. Yet the story of the revolution is, in many ways, also the story of the music from Lisbon and Portugal that brought the country's 40-year old repressive dictatorship crashing to the … [Read more...]
Spanish Civil War – The Ebsworth Connection and a Forgotten Conflict
Whether Francis Crook Ebsworth was truly an ancestor, I’ll never know. But he died fighting for Spanish liberalism, not in the more famous civil war, which took place a century later, but in the carnage of Spain’s First Carlist War, just 180 years ago this month, in 1837. I’d already adopted Ebsworth as my pen name since it originally belonged to distant relatives and one of my cousins was researching that particular branch of the family tree. … [Read more...]
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