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.'

Lord Berners in Faringdon, Oxfordshire

'FARINGDON FOLLY

'THIS 100FT HIGH TOWER WAS BUILT IN 1935 BY THE
14TH LORD BERNERS. IT IS THE LAST MAJOR FOLLY
TOWER TO HAVE BEEN BUILT IN BRITAIN AND WAS
ERECTED ON THE SITE OF A MEDIEVAL CASTLE AND A
CROMWELLIAN BATTERY.

'AFTER CARRYING OUT MAJOR RESTORATION WORKS TO
THE TOWER, MR. ROBERT HEBER PERCY IN 1982 SET
UP A FARINGDON FOLLY TRUST. THE PURPOSE
OF THE TRUST IS TO ENSURE THAT THE PUBLIC HAVE
USE OF, AND ENJOYMENT OF THE TOWER AND ITS
SURROUNDINGS.

'THIS PLAQUE WAS PROVIDED BY THE FARINGDON ENVIRONMENTAL TRUST 1989'

 

'Gerald Hugh
Tyrwhitt-Wilson
14th BARON BERNERS
1883–1950
Composer, Writer, Artist
Eccentric

 

lived at Faringdon House
1919–1950
and built this tower'

 

"PRAISE THE LORD / HE SELDOM WAS BORED"'

 

The rhyming couplet above is part of a short epitaph that Berners wrote for himself and seems typical of the image he wished to project. He was an accomplished composer and the writer of three volumes of autobiography and six novels, one of which – The Girls of Radcliff Hall (1932) – was a lesbian girls' school romp, a roman à clef in which young female representations of Berners, Cecil Beaton and Olive Messel appear. The title of the novel is of course a play on the name of the writer Radclyffe Hall, who published the lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928.

Berners was wilfully eccentric. As a child he is said to have thrown his mother's dog from a window in the belief that it would learn to fly – the story being that he had heard that a dog learns to swim if immersed in water. Fortunately the dog survived, although I'm uncertain if the fantail doves he later dyed in bright colours were as lucky. He also had a pet giraffe and a horse with whom he had tea.

He was a great socialite and a friend of John Betjeman and Nancy Mitford, whose character Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love (1945) is based on Berners.

Berners delighted in the fact that he had no reason for building Folly Tower, apart perhaps from annoying his neighbours. He commissioned his friend Lord Wellesley to build a gothic tower, knowing – another story goes – that Wellesley hated this style. Building began when Berners was abroad, and returned to find most of it finished but built in a classical style. He insisted that the remaining section be completed in gothic style, which explains the rather odd mixture that is Folly Tower.

The tower was given as a birthday present to Berners' much younger boyfriend, the extroverted 'Mad Boy' Robert Heber-Percy (1911–87), who would have preferred a horse. In turn, two years before Heber-Percy's death, he gave the tower to the people.

 

A view from the Belvedere room near the top.

 

From the top of the tower, the surrounding woodland in the foreground and the town of Faringdon in the middleground.

 

An interior view from the steps, with a model blackbird.

 

There are several blackbirds in and around the tower and they allude to another writer. Henry James Pye (1745–1813) planted the outer circle of trees, the Scots pines, on Folly Hill. He is said by many to have been the worst ever Poet Laureate, even worse than Alfred Austin. One critic of the day mocked Pye's birthday poem to King George III, with its chirpy style, in what has come to be a well-known nursery rhyme about 'four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie'.