Activism, agency and archive

In the late 1930s the Spanish Civil War captured the international imagination to an extraordinary degree. As in other countries British men and women were moved to intervene directly and the memory of the war, and of British participation in it, has held an enduring appeal in the UK. The Civil War was also notable for its use of the visual as a weapon of propaganda, and the Spanish Republican Government deployed visual imagery to great effect as an instrument through which it exhibited its progressive educational and welfare reforms to an international audience. This article focuses on the visual and textual representations of displaced children in Republican educational colonies in Spain that are preserved in British archive collections. Taking as its starting point a series of photographs of children in colonies gathered together as part of the International Brigade Memorial Archive in London, the paper will consider the construction, use, and circulation of these images and associated texts by British and American political and humanitarian networks and their subsequent collection and preservation in British archival institutions. The paper will assess the effectiveness of the images and texts as pedagogical and political agents and explore how their meaning shifted as they travelled through a range of performative spaces on a journey from their construction as artefacts designed initially to record and communicate the Spanish Republic’s progressive educational project, to commemorative objects in the archive.Keywords: educational colonieshumanitarian aidthe visualthe archiveSpanish Civil War Notes1 Birmingham Post, January 21 1937, p. 6.2 On the British “Aid Spain” movement see Jim Fyrth, The Signal was Spain: The Aid Spain Movement in Britain 1936–3 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986); on British and American Quaker relief during the Civil War see Farah Mendlesohn, Quaker Relief Work in the Spanish Civil War (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).3 For information on the archive and its contents see International Brigade Memorial Archive: Catalogue, Vols. 1–3 (London: Marx Memorial Library, 1986, 1990 and 1994).4 Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001).5 This paper is limited to sources for Spanish children’s colonies in British archival institutions. Further exploration in Spanish archives would constitute a further stage of the research and would undoubtedly add considerably to our understanding of the issues.6 See for example Ian Grosvenor, Martin Lawn, and Kate Rousmaniere, eds., Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom (New York: Peter Lang Inc., 1999); Paedagogica Historica special issue 36, no. 1 (2000); History of Education special issue “Ways of seeing Education and Schooling: Emerging Historiographies,” 30, no. 2 (2001); Nick Peim, “Spectral Bodies: Derrida and the Philosophy of the Photograph as Historical Document,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 39, no. 1 (2005): 67–84; U. Mietzner, K. Myers, and N. Peim, eds., Visual History: Images of Education (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005); History of Education special issue 36, no. 2 (2007); Ian Grosvenor, “From the ‘Eye of History’ to ‘a Second Gaze’: The Visual Archive and the Marginalized in the History of Education,” History of Education 36, nos. 4–5 (2007): 607–22. Beyond the history of education see for example Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001); Peter Burke, “Interrogating the Eyewitness,” Cultural and Social History 7, no. 4 (2010): 435–44.7 Edwards, Raw Histories, 9.8 John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 8.9 Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). On photographic representation and war see also Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London and New York: I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd, 2004).10 Brothers, War and Photography, 3.11 Brothers, War and Photography, 2, emphasis in the original.12 Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); “El Exilio Español de la Guerra Civil: Los Niños de la Guerra,” www.ugt.es/fflc/ninos00 (accessed April 3, 2005); A.L. Geist, and P.N. Carroll, They Still Draw Pictures: Children’s Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 17.13 Child Care Commission of the Social Workers Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, “Case Record of New Spain,” Social Work Today, November 1937, 9–11 and December 1937, 21–22.14 The Spain files of the Friends Service Council at the Friends Library, London, document a number of colonies and their administering organisations, including Asistencia Infantil, Pro Infancia Obrera, and Ayuda Infantil de Retaguardia. File FSC/R/SP/1/3, for example, includes a report by Rica Jones on children’s colonies in the province of Gerona [April] 1937.15 National Council for Evacuated Children, Ministry of Public Education, Spanish Republic, Children’s Colonies (Valencia, November 1937), IBMA Box A/5, File A/8, p. 7.16 For information on the British activist Francesca Wilson and her visits to children’s colonies in Spain see Siân Roberts, Place, Life Histories and the Politics of Relief: Episodes on the Life of Francesca Wilson, Humanitarian Educator Activist, PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 2010, chapter 4; Francesca M. Wilson, In the Margins of Chaos: Recollections of Relief Work in and between Three Wars (London: John Murray, 1944). For other accounts see also Jim Fyrth and Sally Alexander, Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1991); Cambridge University Library, Helen Grant Papers, MS ADD 8251/II, typescript report on Spain.17 IBMA Box A/2, File D/17.18 Diane Waggoner, “Photographing Childhood: Lewis Carroll and Alice,” in Marilyn R. Brown, ed., Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 149.19 IBMA Box A/2, File D/18.20 J. Evans and S. Hall, eds., Visual Culture: The Reader (London: Sage, 1999), 309; Ian Grosvenor, “On Visualising Past Classrooms,” in Grosvenor, Lawn, and Rousmaniere, Silences and Images, 91.21 Brothers, War and Photography; B. Epps, “Seeing the Dead: Manual and Mechanical Spectres in Modern Spain (1893–1939),” in S. Larson and E. Woods, eds., Visualizing Spanish Modernity (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 134; see for example the photo essay of images from the Spanish conflict by Capa in Picture Post, December 3, 1938.22 Jordana Mendelson, Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929–1939 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 125–82.23 National Council for Evacuated Children, Ministry of Public Education, Spanish Republic, Children’s Colonies, Valencia, November 1937, IBMA Box A/5, File A/8, p. 5. Another copy of this document can be found in the London School of Economics Archives (LSE), Spanish Civil War Collection, Misc. 91, volume 18/5, microfilm 513.24 Mendelson, Documenting Spain, 67.25 Children’s Colonies, 3.26 Children’s Colonies, 13–14.27 See photograph D/40 in the IBMA, Box A/2. The Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London also holds a photograph of washing clothes at the Furnes “Republic of Free Refugee Children” in 1938, which in the original album is captioned “boys were made to share this work, which was regarded as most unusual” (Photographic Archive HU33143).28 For example photographs D/106 and D/107 in the IBMA, Box A/2.29 Wilson, In the Margins of Chaos, 198. See also Helen Grant Papers, Cambridge University Library MS ADD 8251/II, 36–37.30 Children’s Colonies, 7–8 (emphasis in the original).31 Helen Grant Papers MS ADD 8251/II, 21–22.32 Children’s Colonies, 13.33 For example photographs D/31-33 in the IBMA, Box A/2.34 Children’s Colonies, 10 (emphasis in the original).35 Ibid., 11.36 New Era 29, no. 8 includes a number of articles on children’s communities with images of self-government by children; Mary Buchanan, The Children’s Village: The Village of Peace (London: The Bannisdale Press, 1951).37 Fundraising leaflet issued in Birmingham, Library of Birmingham, Acc 2008/51; see also for example IBMA Box A2: File D/51 and 52 which show injured and destitute children.38 Brothers, War and Photography, 143; Kevin Myers, “The Ambiguities of Aid and Agency. Representing Refugee Children in England 1937–8,” Cultural and Social History 6, no. 1 (2009): 29–46.39 Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 382–3.40 Tagg, The Burden of Representation; Children’s Colonies.41 Janet Fink, “Inside a Hall of Mirrors: Residential Care and the Shifting Constructions of Childhood in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain,” Paedagogica Historica 44, no. 3 (2008): 287–307.42 Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, “The Progressive Image in the History of Education: Stories of Two Schools,” Visual Studies 22, no. 2 (2007): 155–68.43 Helen Grant Papers, MS ADD 8251/II, 15–16, 19.44 IBMA Box A/2, File D/16, stamped on the verso with the words “Ministerio de Estado, Prensa Extranjera, G. Benete [or Benite] Fotografico. Cliche no ______ Fecha_____.” Both the plate number and date are blank in the original. The image is further stamped “Spanish Medical Aid Committee, 69 Great Russell Street, London WC1.”45 Mendelson, Documenting Spain, 95; Epps, “Seeing the Dead,” 133.46 See J.P.F. Aizpúrua, R. Wheelan, and C. Coleman, eds., Heart of Spain: Robert Capa’s Photographs of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Aperture, 1999); C. Capa and R. Wheelan, eds., Children of War, Children of Peace: Photographs by Robert Capa (Boston: Bullfinch Press, 1991). The best known example is probably the much reproduced photograph of a young girl lying on sacks taken in Barcelona in January 1939.47 Mendelson, Documenting Spain, 174–5.48 J. Obiols, Auca Del Noi Català Antifeixista I Humà. Comissariat de Propaganda de la Generalitat de Catalunya, Sabadell, 1937, LSE, Spanish Civil War Collection, Misc 91 volume 27/3, microfilm 514. Published in Catalan, Spanish, French and English, the English title being Life of a Catalan, Free as a Catalan’s Must Be. As in the photograph the central figure has his arms around the shoulders of his comrades; the only difference is that in the cartoon, two of them are looking in the opposite direction to that in the photograph and the boy on the right is a fairly stereotypical representation of a black child. The English caption for the cartoon is “His religion is not cheap, it’s a hearty comradeship.”49 Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph 1924–1937 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 79–85, 106–12.50 Elena R. Iarskaia-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov, “Interpreting Visual Memories of Soviet Institutional Child Care” (paper presented at ESSH Conference, Amsterdam, March 25, 2006).51 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 125, first published by the Hogarth Press in 1938.52 For example, Friends Library, FSC/R/SP/5 includes a list of negatives sent to Philadelphia. The Friends Service Council was the arm of the British Quaker establishment that co-ordinated Quaker relief in Spain and had its headquarters in London. It collaborated closely with its sister organisation, the American Friends Service Committee, which co-ordinated American Quaker relief and its headquarters were in Philadelphia.53 Friends Library, FSC/R/SP/1/2.54 Library of Birmingham, Warwickshire North Monthly Meeting, Spanish Relief Committee, minutes February 25, 1937 and March 11, 1937.55 Los Niños Españoles y Las Brigadas Internacionales,?Barcelona: Comité Pro-Niños Españoles de las Brigadas Internacionales, [?1938], LSE, Spanish Civil War Collection, Misc 91 volume 42/4, microfilm 517. IBMA Box A/2, File D/117.56 Imperial War Museum Photographic Archive, HU 33021. Winifred was the wife of the Socialist novelist Ralph Bates and worked as a journalist and for the British Medical Unit, see Jim Fyrth and Sally Alexander, eds., Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1991), 42, 63–7.57 International Brigade Memorial Archive: Catalogue 1986, Vol 1.: v.58 Fyrth, The Signal Was Spain, 1986.59 Janina Struk has identified similar repetition of visual images in British and American collections relating to the Holocaust; see Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 13–15.60 Friends Library, London, FSC Bulletin no 3, January 4, 1937, 2.61 Los Niños Españoles y Las Brigadas Internacionales, ?Barcelona: Comité Pro-Niños Españoles de las Brigadas Internacionales, [?1938], LSE, Spanish Civil War Collection, Misc 91 volume 42/4, microfilm 517.62 See for example Shurlee Swain, “Sweet Childhood Lost: Idealized Images of Childhood in the British Child Rescue Literature”, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2, no. 2 (2009): 198–214.63 Eglantyne Jebb, “Life Stories of Hungarian Children,” The Record of the Save the Children Fund 3, no. 1 (1922): 27–32.64 Including the author, suffrage activist, and humanitarian aid worker Evelyn Sharp (1869–1955) and the American Quaker journalist and author Anna Louise Strong (1885–1970), both of whom undertook relief work with the Friends in war-torn and famine areas in the 1920s and 1930s. See Siân Roberts, “’I promised them that I would tell England about them’: A Woman Teacher Activist’s Life in Popular Education,” Paedagogica Historica 47, nos. 1&2 (2011): 155–72.65 Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 13.66 The Marx Memorial Library in London is an independent library and registered charity dedicated to the history of Marxism, Socialism and the working class movement; see http://www.marx-memorial-library.org.67 Tom Buchanan, The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain: War, Loss and Memory. (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2007), 138, 177.68 Natalie Ann Stuart, The Memory of The Spanish Civil War and the Families of British International Brigaders, PhD diss., de Montfort University, 2001: 22–23, 137.69 Letter from Nan Green to IBA members, 17 August 1974, IBMA Box A-6, D138, quoted in Stuart, The Memory of the Spanish Civil War, 137.70 Ibid.; see also International Brigade Memorial Archive: Catalogue Vol 1 1986, London, Marx Memorial Library, 1986: v; for more detail on the commemoration of the International Brigade in Britain see Stuart, The Memory of the Spanish Civil War.71 Fyrth, The Signal was Spain; Fyrth and Alexander, Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War.72 Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 15

Aesthetics · Agency (philosophy · Appeal · Buckingham · Civil society · Media studies · Performative utterance · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Social science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · History of Education in Spain · Law

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