Author: nick

  • Mapa de Barcelona

    [codespacing_progress_map]

  • Spanish refugees crossing the Pyrenees

    Spanish refugees crossing the Pyrenees to France. Many would not make it. Those who did faced a very uncertain future.

  • Franco’s prisons

    Republican prisoners forming the dictator’s name. Jaén 1953. Despite improving its international image from the 1960s, the dictatorship would remain chronically violent and murderous to the very end..

  • Swiss international brigaders

    Swiss volunteers returning from Spain were treated badly, facing up to 4 years in prison for having broken the militarily penal code which banned Swiss citizens from enlisting in a foreign army. Some 800 Swiss, one of the largest groups, including a few women fought in Spain. Around 170 were killed in the fighting. In…

  • Seat car as social history

    Almeria 1977. Three generations of women sitting around a SEAT 600, seen in the 1960s as a sign of progress and today an icon of the period. The 600 began in the late 50s as a vehicle for the upper middle-class, but gradually moved down by the 1970s to becoming the car of the working…

  • Real Madrid in the Spanish Civil War

    Real Madrid was renamed Madrid Football Club in 1931 after the declaration of the 2nd Spanish Republic. The photo shows, I believe, the players lining up for a match at the start of the Civil War. Cristano Ronaldo’s great uncle third on left (not true).

  • Basque children in Bolton

    26th June 1937 refugees Basque children being given toys in Watermillock, Bolton, UK. In 1937, during the Spanish civil war, a group of almost 4,000 children were evacuated from Bilbao to England. The children left for Britain on the steamship the Habana on 21st May 1937. Each child had been given a cardboard hexagonal disk…

  • Samuel Willis

    Samuel Willis, one of the number of African-Americans to die fighting for the Spanish Republic. Born in Philadelphia, 1914, he worked as a communist party organizer, before coming to Spain in 1937 where he served first as a scout and later as a runner in the Canadian Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion. He was reported missing in action…

  • Madrid metro, 1937

    Old man sheltering from a bomb raid in Madrid metro, 1937. Note poster in the background with the city’s symbol of bear. “The bear of Madrid will destroy fascism”