Lost photographs of civil war found in a suitcase
BRITAIN: A collection of photographs taken by a British volunteer during the Spanish Civil War 80 years ago has been published after it was discovered by chance in a suitcase.
Alec Wainman volunteered to work as an ambulance driver when the conflict broke out in 1936.
Between helping the injured he took hundreds of pictures of ordinary people at war.
When the war ended in 1939 with the victory of General Franco’s nationalists, Wainman kept most of the 1650 images private, only showing a few to friends. After Franco died in 1975 he attempted to publish them but the publisher went bankrupt and they disappeared.
They only came to light again when John Wainman, his son, got in touch with a woman who worked for the British publisher. Jeanne Griffiths-Hayes revealed that she had stumbled upon the pictures in a suitcase after Wainman died in 1989.
Now the photographs are to be published in Spain in the book Almas Vivas (Live Souls), which tells the story of the people behind the images.
John Wainman, 57, a writer whose pen name is Serge Alternes, said: ‘‘I knew these images existed for 40 years but I assumed they had been lost. When my father died I began to look for them. By chance I found them by getting in touch with Jeanne.
‘‘It is so important for the Spanish people to see these images. For so long they were not allowed to know about their history.’’
Among the photographs is one of Manuel Alvarez, a wounded 11-year-old who was saved by Canadian volunteers after his town had been destroyed by bombers. Forty years later, Alvarez tracked down the Canadians.
Another photograph shows Reginald Saxton, a British doctor who pioneered the use of blood transfusions during the Spanish war. Other images show a train full of wounded soldiers as the republicans faced imminent defeat.
Wainman, a pacifist, joined the British Medical Unit, which was privately funded. He served on the Aragon front and at the Battle of the Ebro.
He had previously worked for the Foreign Office in Moscow and witnessed Stalin’s rule and spent time in Nazi Germany in the early 1930s.
When World War II broke out he gave up his pacifist principles to fight Hitler, serving in the British intelligence service.
Paul Preston, an expert on the Spanish Civil War who wrote a foreword to the book, said the images were ‘‘invaluable’’.
The Wainmans come from a distinguished military family. During the American War of Indepen- dence, Samuel Wheeler, an American relative who was a blacksmith, was ordered by George Washington to make a chain to stop the British crossing the Hudson River.
William Wainman fought in the cavalry under the Duke of Wellington against Napoleon. Philip Wainman, John Wainman’s grandfather, was killed in 1915 during World War I.
About 2500 British and Irish people volunteered to fight in Spain between 1936 and 1939, according to contemporary records made by MI5.
George Orwell was perhaps the best-known among them, joining leftwing militias and the International Brigades. - The Times