The Salamanca Diaries

Father McCabe and the Spanish Civil War

Tim Fanning

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781785372773
• eBook ISBN: 9781785372797
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

In July 1936, an army-led coup against the democratically elected republican government ushered in the Spanish Civil War. Father Alexander J. McCabe was rector of the Irish College in Salamanca when General Francisco Franco seized power a few months later and established his GHQ in the medieval city.

McCabe recorded the arrival of the nationalist war machine in his diaries, vividly documenting the horror of the repression and his encounters with Franco, Nazi officers and diplomats, British and American spies and journalists, and adventurers and charlatans from around the world who flocked to Salamanca. He also observed the implosion of General Eoin O'Duffy's ill-fated Irish Brigade, first as one of its chaplains and later mediating between the nationalist high command and O'Duffy. He unsuccessfully attempted to dissuade a disillusioned O'Duffy from returning to Ireland with the Irish Brigade in 1937.

Historian Tim Fanning uses McCabe's diaries to provide a fascinating account of life in Spain before, during and after the war, as well as McCabe's memories of growing up in Ireland at a time of momentous change. This is the troubling and enthralling story of an eyewitness to one of the most tragic episodes in twentieth-century European history.

Chapter 1

DRUMKILLY

In a hilly piece of soft ground in Drumkilly, County Cavan, lie the remains of the McCabe family. James McCabe, his wife, Katie, and nine of their eleven children are buried in the family plot beneath a Celtic cross. Another child, Patrick, emigrated and is buried in the United States. Alexander, the eldest, as befitting his exalted status as a priest, both in life and death, is buried in a separate grave. His last resting place in the ‘new’ cemetery is marked by a simple piece of black marble, on which are inscribed the dates of his birth, his ordination and his demise. The house where Alex (or Alec), as he was commonly known, was born and raised overlooks the graveyard, although it was not yet in use when he was a boy. Today, one can see his grave from his old bedroom window. He dreamt of seeing the world but this patch of Cavan was where he wished to be buried when he returned.

The townland of Drumkilly is in the parish of Crosserlough in the diocese of Kilmore. The nearest village to the McCabe family home was Kilnaleck. In the early part of the nineteenth century, the tenant farmers living in Drumkilly were reliant on Ulster’s thriving linen industry. It was a cottage industry with all members of the family involved in its production, from planting to weaving. In 1821, nearly every resident of Drumkilly of working age participated in the linen industry, as spinners, knitters or weavers; every girl in the village was spinning flax by the age of twelve, probably even younger. By the 1830s, though, the small farmers could no longer compete with the great linen mills along the Lagan valley, and the decline in the local industry meant that these farmers were increasingly reliant on subsistence farming. By the early 1900s, east Cavan was an area of small farms and heavy tillage. The main crop was oats, and in early autumn the fields would be covered in yellow grain.

In 1886, James McCabe, then in his mid-twenties, moved to Drumkilly from his native, neighbouring parish of Denn to become the first master of the new national school, one of eight that had been built by Fr John Boylan, Crosserlough’s energetic parish priest for thirty-three years during the Irish Catholic Church’s sustained period of church- and school-building in the latter part of the nineteenth century. In 1898, aged thirty-five, James McCabe married Katie Fitzpatrick, the 26-year-old postmistress. They lived in the comfortable two-storey house opposite the school which was provided by the parish for the master. On the same side of the road was the Catholic chapel, where the local curate said mass.

Alexander was born on 12 May 1900, in the last year of Queen Victoria’s reign. In 1901, less than a year after his birth, there were thirteen families living in the townland. As the local teacher, James McCabe held an important position in the small rural community’s hierarchy: the McCabes lived in one of the best houses in Drumkilly, he was the secretary of the chapel committee, and many of his neighbours would turn to him for help in writing letters and wills. Initially, however, his neighbours had regarded him with some suspicion because he did not come from Crosserlough. When he arrived in Drumkilly, James McCabe laid out his small garden according to a plan contained in some agricultural textbooks. ‘My father hadn’t much imagination, but he was scrupulously exact, and conformed rigorously to what was laid down, whether it were instruction, rule or plan,’ his eldest child wrote later in his diary. ‘But some of the neighbours didn’t like all these nonsensical innovations, which they regarded as “swank”.’1 So one night they dug up James McCabe’s garden, spoiled the plots and covered the walkway with earth.

Bright, hard-working and curious, James McCabe was a frustrated man with a short temper. He had wanted to be an engineer but had not been able to afford the tuition fees and had instead settled on teaching, for which he had no vocation. He had trained for two years at St Patrick’s College in Drumcondra and for a year in the Albert National Agricultural Training Institution in Glasnevin. The latter had been set up in the middle of the nineteenth century to train national-schoolteachers working in rural areas on how to give instruction in agricultural methods. James McCabe worked his whole life in the school at Drumkilly, taking only one day off to buy the farm in the neighbouring townland of Corlislea to which he moved with his family upon his retirement. He did not drink, according to his eldest child, because he was secretary of the local temperance society, ‘and because it didn’t agree with him’,2 did not socialise and seldom relaxed. He was fond of bacon and raw onion, had a weak stomach and had to get up every night to take bicarbonate of soda – towards the end of his life, thanks to a new medicine prescribed by his doctor, which he took daily, his digestion improved. He did not have a sense of humour and never laughed, except when he went to see a play in the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and, according to his son, the ‘tears ran down his face’;3 it was his first holiday in years. His one pleasure was smoking a crooked Kapp pipe while reading the newspaper in the evening and, shortly before he died in 1941, he would take a small glass of whiskey in the evenings.

In his seventies, James McCabe was as ‘hardy as a wild duck’4 and could keep up with men forty years younger. He continued to cycle – he had been the first in the district to ride a bicycle ‘when the tyre was still solid. But he always mounted by the step on the back wheel. He never adopted the fashion of using the pedal and throwing a leg over the saddle.’5 His son summed up his punctilious attitude years later:

Once we began to grow up, he never took a holiday, and he never visited, though he went to an occasional wake out of respect. He brought home the clay pipe, and on the bowl wrote down, in pencil, the name of the person, and the date, of his death. He kept the pipes in a wooden box on a shelf in the room where the potatoes were stored.6

James McCabe was as scrupulous in his dealings with his neighbours as he was in the classroom. He never addressed anyone by his Christian name, according to his son, ‘the nearest approach to familiarity was to use the initial of the surname’, such as ‘Good morning, Mr S’.7 He paid all his bills on time and kept the records for the parish and the temperance society in a model way. But though he ‘gave as much attention to backward pupils as he did to his own children’ and ‘never complained of his lot’, his heart wasn’t in teaching, ‘with all its petty results and top control’.8

He used to get literature sent to him about farming and prospecting in Canada. The pictures of ‘tall, golden wheat, the height of a man’s shoulder and of rolling prairies’9 must have seemed a dream, but with a large family and a pragmatic frame of mind, it was little more. The young Alex once heard his father say that he wished he had gone to Canada. On another occasion, when he was home from school in Cavan town during the holidays, Alex showed his father some of his Greek and Latin textbooks. ‘He glanced at them, thought them a bit “pagan”, but said “I wish I had had your chance when I was young.”10 This was one of the few intimate revelations I ever heard him make.’ McCabe believed that his father felt a craving to know more about the classical languages and that teachers, ‘who had so frequent and intimate contact with the priests’, must have felt that ‘their culture was on a much lower level’.11 The eldest son was to fulfil some of the father’s ambitions regarding education and travel, if not all his own, by becoming a priest.

James McCabe never joined a teachers’ association or attended meetings, and went to school as normal during a strike, even though he risked being boycotted. He was not active in politics, but political discussion was common in the McCabe household and the young Alex heard names such as Arthur Balfour and John Dillon and the Irish Parliamentary Party discussed during adult conversations, as well as ‘obscure references to societies that had disappeared’.12 James McCabe’s family had been evicted from their farm and this coloured his political views, according to his son. ‘He wasn’t a “Rebel”, but he had social ideas and ideals,’ McCabe wrote of his father in the late 1940s, ‘and if he were a young man to-day, he would probably be Labour.’ He added that ‘he was too old to be convinced by Sinn Féin’.13

McCabe’s sympathy for his father was of an intellectual, rather than an emotional kind, and, later on, when he was reflecting on his own life, he probably saw something of his father’s plight, at least the frustration. There certainly does not seem to have been much warmth between father and son. McCabe described his father as ‘a bit odd and sour’14 and wrote that, in Ireland, there was ‘a thick, high wall between a boy and his father’ and that parents were ‘complete strangers’ to their children.15 This reflection was made in light of his experience in Spain, where ‘parents and children are almost “pals”, and know all about one another’.16 He later wrote that this was one of the beautiful features of life in Spain, while at the same time believing Spanish parents to be too indulgent of their children.

McCabe’s mother is less present in his diaries, receiving barely a mention. Katie McCabe wore steel-rimmed glasses and was a voracious reader of novels. Her eldest son remembered her discussing the characters and plots of the books that she was always reading. An outstanding memory of his parents was of his mother standing up at night under the small paraffin light that hung on the wall, reading the newspaper or a book. His father would be sitting on a chair alongside, smoking his pipe, and staring into the fire. Sitting in his room in the Irish College in Salamanca years later, McCabe wrote, ‘I can see him now folding a piece of paper, lighting it, lighting his pipe, and quenching the lighted piece of paper against the bars of the grate. As I remember it now, the scene was like one from Rembrandt, or an interior by any one of the Flemish painters.’17

Everything in the house in Drumkilly was neat and tidy and in its place, though full of odds and ends, the knick-knacks of the Victorian age. The lamp hung on one nail and was never moved. The key to the school, the keys of the farm and the saltbox all had their own nails. In the parlour hung two large pictures, one of Fr Thomas Burke, the nineteenth-century Dominican preacher, the other of a young girl holding an apple. The latter helped to give ‘life and colour to the green-distempered, rather dyspeptic walls’.18 There was a hand mirror and a couple of photograph frames encrusted with seashells. The japanned mantelpiece had two Egyptian heads, ‘which gave it an exotic appearance and interest’. On top of the mantelpiece were a couple of vases containing artificial flowers made of wire and coloured paper. McCabe wrote that ‘a poor woman, half-tramp, who lived in a broken-down, mud-wall house, rented from a Protestant’19 had made them. On the parlour window was a row of geraniums sitting in china pots. The earth in the pots was covered under a bed of moss and seashells: ‘The moss reminded one of that silly proverb about the rolling stone. It’s a good thing for stones to roll and accumulate no moss. As this proverb suggests that people should remain in a rut, or embedded in the earth, and not roll about the world, it can have a pernicious effect. Some of these proverbs – like some of our Irish songs – might have been invented by our worst enemies.’20 McCabe would clap the seashells to his ear and hear the ‘distant roar of the Irish Sea, or the wild Atlantic Ocean’.21 One of the bedrooms upstairs contained a depiction of Christ, the Virgin Mary and St John, another of the Crucifixion, a scroll entitled ‘What Is Home Without A Mother?’, and a bust used to illustrate that pseudo-science phrenology.

The house was full of books on all manner of subjects. The family bible weighed a stone, with the names and dates of birth of all the children entered on the flyleaf. There were two separate editions of Tennyson’s poems, one bound in ivory with brass edges, a collection of Pope’s poems, ‘cheap’ editions of Longfellow and Byron, and Ben Jonson’s and Shakespeare’s complete works. Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur was a favourite, as was Dickens’s Dombey and Son, the first novel read by the young Alex. Alongside the prose and poetry were volumes on agriculture, hygiene, logic, chemistry, hydraulics, electricity and the steam engine, an indication of James McCabe’s voracious appetite for self-improvement and education. The house contained a couple of encyclopedias, one of which contained illustrations. The young Alex would pore over the drawings of artillery, comparing them with the guns he had read about in reports from the Balkan Wars, which were rumbling on in the background when he was reaching adolescence. This love of learning and reading in the McCabe household instilled in Alex a lifelong intellectual curiosity.

There were always visitors in the house, though James McCabe was not fond of entertaining and would sit in the corner reading the paper when the neighbours came to hear news or to have a chat, presumably with Katie. He would get up, however, to write or read a letter for them, prepare a will, mend a clock or engrave a coffin breastplate. He also helped his neighbours with applications to purchase their farms, as the ownership of the land throughout Ireland passed from absentee landlord to ten...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Map
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Drumkilly
• 2. The Salamanca Student
• 3. The East End Curate
• 4. The Spanish Cauldron
• 5. The Road to Revolution
• 6. Escape and Return
• 7. The Two Cities
• 8. The Irish Brigade
• 9. Franco Takes Charge
• 10. The Final Battle
• 11. Back Home
• Endnotes
• Sources
• Index
• Plates