Arturo Barea and Other Spanish Writers in Oxfordshire

The Times Literary Supplement's 26 April 2013 issue contains a fascinating article by Martin Murphy titled 'Pub Poets: The Exiles of Eaton Hastings'. In 1934 the socialist and pacifist Gavin Henderson inherited the Buscot estates in Oxfordshire from his grandfather Alexander Henderson, the first Lord Faringdon. Gavin Faringdon was a founder of the National Council for Spanish Relief during the Spanish Civil War, which commissioned a ship to transport four thousand refugee Basque children following the siege of Bilbao. Some of the young exiles were housed at a lodge of Faringdon's (still called Basque House) in the hamlet of Eaton Hastings, and the death of one of them in an Oxford infirmary led the poet Luis Cernuda – who witnessed the death – to write a poem: 'Elegía a un muchacho vasco muerte en Inglattera'.

In 1939 a group of adult Spanish exiles came to Basque House, among them the poets Domènec Perramon and Pedro Garfias, and the journalists Eduardo de Ontañon and Fermí Vergés. Most of them moved on to Mexico, although Perramon stayed in England and became a translator of Spanish.

Arturo Barea was the son of a washerwoman and was very proud of his working-class roots. He left Spain in 1938 but didn't arrive at Eaton Hastings until 1947, where he spent his last ten years at Gavin Faringdon's Middle Lodge. He had married the Austrian journalist Ilsa Kulcshar, née Pollak. As 'Juan de Castilla', Barea broadcast eight hundred programmes for the BBC's Spanish American service, from 1940 until the year of his death. He is most noted for his autobiographical trilogy La forja de un rebelde, which his wife (as Ilsa Barea) translated as The Forging of a Rebel (1946).

 

Barea's ashes were strewn over his garden at Eaton Hastings, and Ilsa returned to Austria, although their friend Olive Renier erected a memorial to them in the cemetery on Coach Lane, Faringdon, behind Ilsa's parents' grave above.

 

'POR ARTURO BAREA
BORN MADRID 20^TH SEPT 1897.
DIED BUSCOT 24^TH DEC 1957.
AND HIS WIFE
ILSE BAREA POLLAK
BORN VIENNA 20^TH SEP^T 1902
AND DIED THERE
1^ST JANUARY 1973.'