Footprints in Spain: British Lives in a Foreign Land by Simon Courtauld Colin Thompson
COLIN THOMPSON Footprints in Spain: British Lives in a Foreign Land by Simon Courtauld Quartet £20
‘Spain is different’. The slogan appears to have originated in Francoist circles to justify the dictatorship to a democratic Western Europe, before being adopted to front a campaign for tourism. At the end of his entertaining account of British visitors to Spain across the centuries, Simon Courtauld evokes the popular picture of ‘a country of blood and death, heat and dust, fierce light and deep shade, passionate love and tragic loss’. True enough, just as England is a land of cricket, warm beer and Orwell’s spinsters cycling to church; but that’s only part of the story.
The book is structured as a series of chapters devoted to eleven cities in various parts of the peninsula, some, like Barcelona and Toledo, well known, while others, like Huelva and Teruel, have never been popular destinations. Its focus is as much on the flavour of each place as the British travellers who passed through
it. The Toledo chapter is typical: remarks about the city’s history and principal buildings introduce a patchwork of British connections, ranging from the influence of the ancient Mozarabic Rite (still celebrated in its cathedral) on the Book of Common Prayer to Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish Match, Charles I as a collector of Spanish art, Roy Campbell (South African), Laurie Lee, the Sitwells and the Bloomsbury Group. ‘Valladolid’ begins with a 16th-century auto-da-fé and continues with a long description of Good Friday processions, and the British appear only as members of its English College, founded at the end of the 16th century to train priests for the English mission. Its rector during the Civil War, Monsignor Henson, began as a fervent Nationalist supporter but later spied on German sympathisers for the British Embassy.
But it’s two theatres of blood – wars and the bull-ring – which are at the heart of the book. In the chapters on Badajoz, La Coruña and San Sebastián the Peninsular War takes centre stage. From the descriptions of the appalling behaviour of Wellington’s troops it’s not surprising that Spaniards have never warmed to him. Their ingratitude is a constant theme of Richard Ford’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain (1845), and one can see why they felt as they did. General Sir John Moore, by contrast, is still revered. Other chapters contain vivid accounts of actions and atrocities in the Civil War. As one would expect, George Orwell features in ‘Barcelona’, if not very flatteringly, while the fighting in Málaga gives us Gerald Brenan, more Bloomsbury, Arthur Koestler, and the splendid Sir Peter Chalmers Mitchell, founder of Whipsnade Zoo. More pedantically, the book sometimes reads as if the chapters were written to be published separately. Copy-editing should have dealt