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british.docx

Paedagogica Historica, 2013

Vol. 49, No. 6, 796–812, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00309230.2013.848911

Activism, agency and archive: British activists and the representation of educational colonies in Spain during and after the Spanish Civil War

Siân Roberts*

School of Education, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK

(Received 19 September 2013; final version received 23 September 2013)

In the late 1930s the Spanish Civil War captured the international imagination to an extraordinary degree. As in other countries British men and women were moved to intervene directly and the memory of the war, and of British participation in it, has held an enduring appeal in the UK. The Civil War was also notable for its use of the visual as a weapon of propaganda, and the Spanish Republican Government deployed visual imagery to great effect as an instrument through which it exhibited its progressive educational and welfare reforms to an international audience. This article focuses on the visual and textual representations of displaced children in Republican educational colonies in Spain that are preserved in British archive collections. Taking as its starting point a series of photographs of children in colonies gathered together as part of the International Brigade Memorial Archive in London, the paper will consider the construction, use, and circulation of these images and associated texts by British and American political and humanitarian networks and their subsequent collection and preservation in British archival institutions. The paper will assess the effectiveness of the images and texts as pedagogical and political agents and explore how their meaning shifted as they travelled through a range of performative spaces on a journey from their construction as artefacts designed initially to record and communicate the Spanish Republic’s progressive educational project, to commemorative objects in the archive.

Keywords: educational colonies; humanitarian aid; the visual; the archive; Spanish Civil War

Introduction

Miss Lloyd Williams, who recently returned from a three weeks’ visit to Spain, testified to the pitiable plight of refugee children deprived in many cases of both parents... Mr. Horace G. Alexander, local chairman of the Friends’ Committee, also emphasised from his experience in Spain the needs of the children, and showed a number of lantern slides to illustrate the way in which problems of feeding and lodging were tackled.1

This quotation derives from a report in the local press in Birmingham, UK. It describes a gathering at the local Meeting House of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) in Bull Street on the evening of 21 January 1937, one of many such gatherings that had been held in Birmingham and elsewhere since the

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Birmingham Post, January 21 1937, p. 6.

outbreak of the Spanish Civil War some six months earlier. The meeting’s purpose was both to raise awareness of the conditions in Spain, particularly as they affected children, and to raise money for the relief effort.[footnoteRef:1] As a description it captures two elements that are central to the focus of the article that follows – first the speakers’ use of personal, eye-witness testimony intended to mobilise support for the relief effort, and second the use of the visual, in this case lantern slides, to “prove” the truthfulness of their accounts and to illustrate the transformative power of the relief effort. [1: On the British “Aid Spain” movement see Jim Fyrth, The Signal was Spain: The Aid Spain Movement in Britain 1936–3 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1986); on British and American Quaker relief during the Civil War see Farah Mendlesohn, Quaker Relief Work in the Spanish Civil War (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2002).]

It is this visual and textual representation of displaced children in Republican Spain by British humanitarian and political activists which is at the core of this study. It takes as its starting point a series of photographs purporting to depict the lives of children in a specific educational space – Republican educational colonies in Spain – which are gathered together as part of the International Brigade Memorial Archive in London (hereafter IBMA).[footnoteRef:2] I will begin by exploring what is known of the construction of the images by the Spanish Republican authorities before going on to consider their circulation and use by British political and humanitarian networks. The images will then be considered alongside textual representations of the same educational spaces, in an attempt to situate the photographs within a broader discourse of humanitarian aid and political activism. In so doing I will draw on the model of social biography, agency and performativity of photographic images developed by Elizabeth Edwards to raise questions about their effectiveness as pedagogical and political agents, and consider their journey through a range of performative spaces across international boundaries.[footnoteRef:3] The article will conclude with a consideration of the motivations behind their subsequent collection and preservation in a British archival institution before going on to explore how this latter stage in their biography influenced their meaning.[footnoteRef:4] [2: For information on the archive and its contents see International Brigade Memorial Archive: Catalogue, Vols. 1–3 (London: Marx Memorial Library, 1986, 1990 and 1994).] [3: Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Museums (Oxford: Berg, 2001).] [4: This paper is limited to sources for Spanish children’s colonies in British archival institutions. Further exploration in Spanish archives would constitute a further stage of the research and would undoubtedly add considerably to our understanding of the issues.]

Critical engagement with the visual is now an accepted discourse within both the history of education and the broader field of historical studies.[footnoteRef:5] As a detailed discussion of this growing literature is beyond the scope of this article and has been comprehensively rehearsed elsewhere, it is sufficient for my purposes here to draw attention briefly to one or two of the main arguments that inform this study, in particular those relating to photography and the rhetoric of truth, and photography and the representation of war and conflict. A number of commentators across a range of historical disciplines have drawn attention to the immediacy and intimacy of photography and the resulting “expectancy of the real, the truthful”.[footnoteRef:6] John Tagg in particular problematised the “documentary” tradition, a discourse which was formed in the 1920s and came into its own in the 1930s, the period under study here. Tagg argued that the documentary “appropriated photographic technology to a central and privileged place within its rhetoric of immediacy and truth”.[footnoteRef:7] In his analysis of the growth and use of photography as a technology of knowledge, surveillance and power, he emphasised the context of production and deployment when analysing the visual. Building on Tagg’s work, Caroline Brothers analysed the relationship between issues of truth and the photography of war, and of the Spanish Civil War in particular.[footnoteRef:8] Brothers scrutinised the photographic representations of the war in the British and French press “not for what they literally depict so much as for how they were used, how their meanings were structured so they became elements of and stakes in the struggle instead of just witnesses to it”.[footnoteRef:9] She concluded that in the Spanish Civil War, photographs “became images not just of but in conflict”.[footnoteRef:10] [5: See for example Ian Grosvenor, Martin Lawn, and Kate Rousmaniere, eds., Silences and Images: The Social History of the Classroom (New York: Peter Lang Inc., 1999); Paedagogica Historica special issue 36, no. 1 (2000); History of Education special issue “Ways of seeing Education and Schooling: Emerging Historiographies,” 30, no. 2 (2001); Nick Peim, “Spectral Bodies: Derrida and the Philosophy of the Photograph as Historical Document,” Journal of Philosophy of Education, 39, no. 1 (2005): 67–84; U. Mietzner, K. Myers, and N. Peim, eds., Visual History: Images of Education (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005); History of Education special issue 36, no. 2 (2007); Ian Grosvenor, “From the ‘Eye of History’ to ‘a Second Gaze’: The Visual Archive and the Marginalized in the History of Education,” History of Education 36, nos. 4–5 (2007): 607–22. Beyond the history of education see for example Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (London: Reaktion Books, 2001); Peter Burke, “Interrogating the Eyewitness,” Cultural and Social History 7, no. 4 (2010): 435–44.] [6: Edwards, Raw Histories, 9.] [7: John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988), 8.] [8: Caroline Brothers, War and Photography: A Cultural History (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). On photographic representation and war see also Janina Struk, Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence (London and New York: I.B. Tauris and Co. Ltd, 2004).] [9: Brothers, War and Photography, 3.] [10: Brothers, War and Photography, 2, emphasis in the original.]

The images which form the starting point for this article are part of a group of 128 photographs gathered together as file D in box A2 of the IBMA, housed at the Marx Memorial Library in London. In addition to the specific photographs under discussion here, the file includes other images of Spanish children which will not be discussed in any detail, including photographs of model schools in Spain and a series of atrocity photographs of children killed and maimed in the conflict. The specific images upon which I intend to focus purport to depict the lives of displaced children living in Republican educational colonies. Colonies were developed by the Republican Government to provide for the care and education of large numbers of children displaced or evacuated from their homes during the Civil War. As with all movements of displaced people, it is difficult to accurately estimate the exact numbers involved, although one study estimates that by September 1937 over 45,000 children were being cared for in 564 colonies.[footnoteRef:11] Contemporary accounts by relief workers at the time appear to confirm the scale of these numbers; an account written by five American social workers published in winter 1937, for example, estimated that 60,000 children were living “in colonies or semi-colonial groups” at that point in time.[footnoteRef:12] [11: Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); “El Exilio Español de la Guerra Civil: Los Niños de la Guerra,” www.ugt.es/fflc/ninos00 (accessed April 3, 2005); A.L. Geist, and P.N. Carroll, They Still Draw Pictures: Children’s Art in Wartime from the Spanish Civil War to Kosovo (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 17.] [12: Child Care Commission of the Social Workers Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy, “Case Record of New Spain,” Social Work Today, November 1937, 9–11 and December 1937, 21–22.]

The colonies were established and administered under the direction of the Republican Ministry of Education by a number of Spanish relief and voluntary organisations, often supported by international activists and relief agencies such as the Society of Friends and Save the Children.[footnoteRef:13] They were organised in requisitioned houses, or groups of houses, where between 25 and 100 boys and girls up to 15 years old were to be cared for, educated and given medical attention as required. The intention was to replicate as closely as possible “a homelike atmosphere; [and] to treat each child with the same care and the same affection as would be given him [sic] by his own parents”.[footnoteRef:14] The colonies were popular destinations for visits by foreign activists and relief workers whose accounts suggest that on the whole they were of a high standard, although as the war progressed and supplies became increasingly difficult to obtain, conditions inevitably worsened.[footnoteRef:15] The quality of the images in the IBMA file varies considerably: some appear to be snapshots taken by foreign visitors, whilst others have been professionally produced using good-quality equipment. Contextual information is scarce; the name of the colony is known, or guessed, in only a few instances and individual children are not named. Furthermore, many of the photographs are stuck firmly to loose-leaf pages in a binder, thereby obscuring any original captions or information on the reverse. [13: The Spain files of the Friends Service Council at the Friends Library, London, document a number of colonies and their administering organisations, including Asistencia Infantil, Pro Infancia Obrera, and Ayuda Infantil de Retaguardia. File FSC/R/SP/1/3, for example, includes a report by Rica Jones on children’s colonies in the province of Gerona [April] 1937.] [14: National Council for Evacuated Children, Ministry of Public Education, Spanish Republic, Children’s Colonies (Valencia, November 1937), IBMA Box A/5, File A/8, p. 7.] [15: For information on the British activist Francesca Wilson and her visits to children’s colonies in Spain see Siân Roberts, Place, Life Histories and the Politics of Relief: Episodes on the Life of Francesca Wilson, Humanitarian Educator Activist, PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 2010, chapter 4; Francesca M. Wilson, In the Margins of Chaos: Recollections of Relief Work in and between Three Wars (London: John Murray, 1944). For other accounts see also Jim Fyrth and Sally Alexander, Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1991); Cambridge University Library, Helen Grant Papers, MS ADD 8251/II, typescript report on Spain.]

In contrast to the atrocity photographs also found in the file, the beauty and intimacy of some of the photographs of schools and colonies is striking, and it is not hard to appreciate their power as fundraising and publicity images. Indeed, when I first looked at the two photographs reproduced here as Figures 1 and 2 I was profoundly conscious of being manipulated both by their beauty and by their sense of intimacy, as well as by the clever use of recognisable documentary photographic techniques from the period. Scanning quickly through the images I was drawn by the gaze of the pretty little girl who is the central focus of the photograph reproduced here as Figure 1.[footnoteRef:16] Closely watched by two other little girls, she is the only one of the children who returns the photographer’s gaze, with a look that is both [16: IBMA Box A/2, File D/17.]

Figure 1. Girls at an unidentified colony (courtesy of the International Brigade Memorial Archive, Marx Memorial Library).

curious and knowing, displaying an acute awareness “of being looked at”.[footnoteRef:17] I turned the page and was entranced by the sunlight falling on the faces of the three boys in Figure 2.[footnoteRef:18] All three are laughing at something, or someone, beyond the frame of the image; their clothing, facial expressions, comradely body language and the rural background all suggest a healthy, hardworking and happy life. Both photographs appear to be part of a series taken at an unidentified colony and stylistically have a very different feel to many of the others in the file, which are more akin to snapshots taken by activists. If removed from the archival frame of the IBMA file, nothing in their internal composition would indicate that they are photographs of children displaced from home and family by a brutal civil war. The overwhelming impression given is of a succession of happy and healthy children living in beautiful surroundings and engaging in a daily round of lessons, meal-times, communal chores, cultural activities and play, albeit in an institutional setting. [17: Diane Waggoner, “Photographing Childhood: Lewis Carroll and Alice,” in Marilyn R. Brown, ed., Picturing Children: Constructions of Childhood between Rousseau and Freud (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 149.] [18: IBMA Box A/2, File D/18.]

On one level, therefore, these photographs can be read as a representational portrait of daily life and activities in the colonies. However, they have a sense of agency and performative intent that goes far beyond a factual representation of the day-to-day. Several commentators have emphasised the multi-vocal nature of images and the need to look to the context of their construction when exploring their multiple and often conflicting interpretations.[footnoteRef:19] As stated earlier, what lay beyond the [19: J. Evans and S. Hall, eds., Visual Culture: The Reader (London: Sage, 1999), 309; Ian Grosvenor, “On Visualising Past Classrooms,” in Grosvenor, Lawn, and Rousmaniere, Silences and Images, 91.]

Figure 2. Boys at an unidentified colony (courtesy of the International Brigade Memorial Archive, Marx Memorial Library).

frame of these images was a war in which visual imagery was deployed as a weapon of propaganda by both sides to great effect, and this provides part of the context within which they should be read. As Brothers and others have argued, the Spanish conflict was the first war to be photographed for a mass audience and coincided with the growth of documentary photojournalism in the 1930s and its deployment by newly founded magazines such as Life (1936) and Picture Post (1938).[footnoteRef:20] The Spanish Republic was very keen to promote its reputation for progressive educational and welfare reforms and the visual, including documentary photography and film, provided a key tool for communicating this message to an international audience; the Spanish Pavilion in the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, for example – popularly remembered for its inclusion of Picasso’s Guernica – also deployed film and photography to strike a precarious balance between the conflicting objectives of enlisting sympathy for an embattled government and people on the one hand, and representing stability and modernity on the other. Images of educational and welfare activities were given pride of place, with images of children reading and scenes from the Pedagogic Missions of the early 1930s included in the external and internal displays as a means of “proving” the reality of Republican reforms.[footnoteRef:21] [20: Brothers, War and Photography; B. Epps, “Seeing the Dead: Manual and Mechanical Spectres in Modern Spain (1893–1939),” in S. Larson and E. Woods, eds., Visualizing Spanish Modernity (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), 134; see for example the photo essay of images from the Spanish conflict by Capa in Picture Post, December 3, 1938.] [21: Jordana Mendelson, Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture, and the Modern Nation, 1929–1939 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 125–82.]

Reading the IBMA photographs against other archival sources illuminates their performative intent, and contributes to our understanding of their biography. In the same archive as the photographs is a pamphlet entitled Children’s Colonies which consists of recommendations for the establishment and administration of colonies, originally drawn up by the National Council for Evacuated Children, and published in French and English by the Spanish Delegation for Evacuated Children in Paris in November 1937.[footnoteRef:22] The multilingual nature of the publication is in itself interesting and reflects not only the presence of numerous foreign relief workers in Spain, but again the Republic’s desire to disseminate a progressive image to an international audience. A similar motive can be discerned in other sources for the period: Luis Buñuel’s documentary film Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread, which depicted life in the Extremadura region and was originally made in 1933, for example, was edited with sound in French and English in December 1936 with funding from the Spanish Embassy.[footnoteRef:23] [22: National Council for Evacuated Children, Ministry of Public Education, Spanish Republic, Children’s Colonies, Valencia, November 1937, IBMA Box A/5, File A/8, p. 5. Another copy of this document can be found in the London School of Economics Archives (LSE), Spanish Civil War Collection, Misc. 91, volume 18/5, microfilm 513.] [23: Mendelson, Documenting Spain, 67.]

Children’s Colonies makes very explicit the colony’s role in inculcating specific patterns of normative behaviour in the children to produce a new type of citizen for the future. These behavioural patterns touched almost all aspects of the child’s life, including health and hygiene, active citizenship, social interaction and cultural expectation. The document alludes to the importance of the visual as a means of communication, stating that the “publications, photographs and postal cards... bring out the constructive work realized in this realm by the Ministry of Education”.[footnoteRef:24]The patterns of behaviour it describes are reflected so closely in the IBMA photographs that they could almost have been produced specifically to illustrate the text. As space is limited here, I will touch on two key themes which underlie the whole educative process: the development of active citizenship within a collective, and the “civilising” benefits of training in aesthetic appreciation and personal hygiene. [24: Children’s Colonies, 3.]

The colony was to foster in the children an ethos of co-operative participation and personal responsibility within a collective framework:

Care should be taken to organize the work of all the Colonies along cooperative lines, founded on the work which directly affects the collective. For example, with the girls, the bigger ones will help the smaller ones with their sewing, each taking over direction of one of them in making table linen, handkerchiefs, etc. All the children who are old enough will make their beds and clean their rooms and will do what has been assigned to them in the way of helping with the cleaning of the rest of the house. A weekly rotating schedule for waiting on tables should be drawn up. Whenever possible, workteams should be formed to carry on the necessary work of the Colony – raising useful animals, agricultural work on the collective lands, construction or setting in order of necessary tools and furniture, laying in supplies, etc.

In short, the whole life of the colony should be given a deep sense of cooperation, which will bring out the constructive and creative aspect of working in a group.

In this way will be developed in the children the feeling for solidarity and mutual combining individual efforts to form a real working Community.[footnoteRef:25] [25: Children’s Colonies, 13–14.]

This theme is consistently reflected in the images, which show groups of children working, learning and playing together. Although the colonies were co-educational, as the above quotation and the anecdotal evidence of visitors suggests, on the whole the work was still arranged along a traditionally gendered pattern and this is also reflected in the images, with the girls undertaking housework, washing clothes and sewing and the boys engaging in agriculture, caring for animals and gardening. Occasionally there appears to be a conscious effort to present a different picture, with photographs of boys using sewing machines, for example.[footnoteRef:26] Another way in which individual responsibility in a collective context was encouraged was through self-government by the children. This again is represented in the IBMA archive, which includes photographs of children participating in committees which played an active role in the running of the colony whilst at the same time providing an opportunity for political and citizenship education.[footnoteRef:27] British activists visiting the colonies were very struck by this element of self-government, and remarked upon it; the Birmingham-based teacher and activist Francesca Wilson, for example, described “parliaments” where children as young as five gathered together to discuss and decide upon issues such as “a rearrangement of their lessons, the feeding of the chickens and rabbits, the assignment of domestic duties, the water supply”.[footnoteRef:28] [26: See photograph D/40 in the IBMA, Box A/2. The Imperial War Museum (IWM) in London also holds a photograph of washing clothes at the Furnes “Republic of Free Refugee Children” in 1938, which in the original album is captioned “boys were made to share this work, which was regarded as most unusual” (Photographic Archive HU33143).] [27: For example photographs D/106 and D/107 in the IBMA, Box A/2.] [28: Wilson, In the Margins of Chaos, 198. See also Helen Grant Papers, Cambridge University Library MS ADD 8251/II, 36–37.]

The second theme which emerges from Children’s Colonies and which is again reflected in the images is that of training the children in the basic principles of personal hygiene and health, and the behavioural norms of a cultured and civilised life. The children, many of whom were reported as coming from very poor areas of cities such as Madrid and Malaga, were to learn that attention to cleanliness and aesthetic considerations were both an essential part of the human condition, even in the most difficult of circumstances:

Whether the accommodations are luxurious or modest, the house should always have two characteristics: cleanliness and good taste. Arrange things so that even in the most rudimentary accommodations there will be some pleasing and attractive note such as a few simple pieces of pottery work or china produced in the vicinity, flowers, plants, a bookcase with books, etc. If the desire is there, means can be found to do this.[footnoteRef:29] [29: Children’s Colonies, 7–8 (emphasis in the original). 31Helen Grant Papers MS ADD 8251/II, 21–22.]

Every care was to be taken to ensure that this lesson was reinforced through the design and furnishing of the colonies. The children’s communal dormitories had to be attractive and comfortable, with bedspreads in “harmonious colours”. This again is borne out by British visitors to colonies, who describe houses with light and airy rooms situated in beautiful gardens and repeatedly stress the cleanliness and attention to design. The British activist Helen Grant, for example, describes a colony where beds were “painted pale blue with designs of ducks or boats on them” and a dining room that was particularly attractive, “with yellow chairs and flowers everywhere”.31

The organisation of the dining room was to reflect both the collective ethos and aesthetic and behavioural considerations; the children were to learn that tables were routinely adorned with attractive tablecloths and napkins (which the girls were encouraged to make) and that glasses were to be used for drinking. It was “necessary to accustom the children to using these things, and keeping them in good condition”, and mealtimes were singled out as one of the most important opportunities for informal instruction so that “the good sanitary habits and the social training which grow out of these everyday tasks will be established”.[footnoteRef:30] Again the IBMA photographs illustrate these issues, with images of clean and well-dressed children sitting at their meals around beautifully arranged tables in cheerful, bright dining rooms.[footnoteRef:31] [30: Children’s Colonies, 13.] [31: For example photographs D/31-33 in the IBMA, Box A/2.]

Children’s Colonies places great emphasis on personal cleanliness and training in personal hygiene, stipulating, for example, how often the towels and bed linen should be washed:

Particular attention should be given to the personal cleanliness of the children. They should be taught to wash their mouths daily. Their individual toilet equipment should include the things necessary for this purpose.

The morning toilette should be directly supervised by the teacher responsible for the group and likewise when the children wash their hands before meals. Twice a week at the very least they should be bathed or have a shower with hot water, if possible, without omitting the head, as this will prevent parasites. (Sunday morning may be reserved for this purpose.) In the absence of other methods, canals, rivers or other shallow bodies of water may be used by the children to wash their feet and legs every day.[footnoteRef:32] [32: Children’s Colonies, 10 (emphasis in the original).]

The stress on cleanliness is reinforced in the pamphlet by carefully chosen images: one captioned “Washing her teeth”, for example, shows a pretty and spotlessly clean young girl from Cuart de Poblet in Valencia cleaning her teeth in a scene reminiscent of advertising images for products such as Pears Soap.[footnoteRef:33] [33: Ibid., 11.]

Reading the IBMA images within this wider archival context enables us to appreciate the depth of their agency and the success of their performance as visual representations of a utopian future. It also brings to the fore their ambiguity and their potential for multiple and conflicting readings. On the one hand, they can be read as part of a progressive discourse of educational reform and improvements in child health and welfare. The images employ the relatively simplistic device, familiar to us from the iconography of the period, of using images of children to symbolise hope and renewal, and to firmly project the colonies as sites for educating the future. The colonies shared a number of elements, such as the emphasis on active citizenship and self-government by the children, also found in the children’s “communities”, “villages” and “republics” founded by progressive educationalists associated with the New Education movement as a means of dealing with children displaced, or “damaged”, after the Second World War, and this is reflected in the images, which are similar in nature, for example, to photographs of the “Children’s Republic” at Moulin-Vieux par Lavaldens-Isère in France included in a special issue of New Era in 1948, or images associated with the international Pestalozzi village at Trogen.[footnoteRef:34] [34: New Era 29, no. 8 includes a number of articles on children’s communities with images of self-government by children; Mary Buchanan, The Children’s Village: The Village of Peace (London: The Bannisdale Press, 1951).]

In addition to promoting an idealistic portrayal of the Spanish Republic’s commitment to children, the depiction of the children’s participation in labour and collective decision-making also represents the place that children could play in the evolution of a different and new world. A sense of active agency is conferred upon the children, who are represented as individual actors in their own right, contributing to the relief effort on a practical level through growing food and taking responsibility for their own care and that of younger children, and on an ideological level through their participation in the formulation of a new way of collective living. The pride and joy of the boys in Figure 2 is in direct contrast to some of the other images of children from Spain in the IBMA and in other images circulating in humanitarian campaigns, such as that shown in Figure 3, where the subjects are cast firmly in the role of passive victims of the conflict to elicit political support or humanitarian aid.[footnoteRef:35] Brothers identified a consistent representation of children and refugees as passive victims in the press photographs which formed the basis of her study, and Kevin Myers has similarly identified the same characteristic in activists’ representations of the Spanish children evacuated to Britain during the Civil War.38 [35: Fundraising leaflet issued in Birmingham, Library of Birmingham, Acc 2008/51; see also for example IBMA Box A2: File D/51 and 52 which show injured and destitute children. 38Brothers, War and Photography, 143; Kevin Myers, “The Ambiguities of Aid and Agency. Representing Refugee Children in England 1937–8,” Cultural and Social History 6, no. 1 (2009): 29–46.]

On the other hand, the images can equally be read as examples of a “controlling gaze” – a reading that situates the colonies as sites of surveillance and discipline, of “social control in the name of enlightenment”.[footnoteRef:36] The use of photography as part of systems of surveillance and control is well documented, and the colony images existed alongside a recording system that documented the child’s physical and educational condition on entering the colony and closely monitored their progress whilst they were there.[footnoteRef:37] Rather than seeing the children as active agents, as in the earlier reading, we now see passive subjects who are educated and “civilised” by ever-present teachers constantly supervising the children’s behaviour. [36: Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 382–3.] [37: Tagg, The Burden of Representation; Children’s Colonies.]

Given the important role accorded to the teachers in Children’s Colonies, there is a surprising lack of adults anywhere to be seen in the photographs. Again, this is open to multiple interpretations: it may serve to remind the viewer of the children’s vulnerable and displaced status, separated from their parents and reliant upon the altruistic care of the state. Janet Fink, in her study of child imagery in the literature of the British National Children’s Homes, identifies a similar absence of adults, which she suggests was intended to convey to the viewer that despite the promotion of a “family-like” atmosphere, these were not “normal” families.[footnoteRef:38] However, the absence of adults can equally be read as a sign of the children’s autonomy, self-reliance and agency, indication they are capable of managing their own behaviour. Burke and Grosvenor have argued that a lack of adults is a feature of the iconography of progressive education.[footnoteRef:39] Interestingly, British visitors to colonies [38: Janet Fink, “Inside a Hall of Mirrors: Residential Care and the Shifting Constructions of Childhood in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain,” Paedagogica Historica 44, no. 3 (2008): 287–307.] [39: Catherine Burke and Ian Grosvenor, “The Progressive Image in the History of Education: Stories of Two Schools,” Visual Studies 22, no. 2 (2007): 155–68.]

Figure 3. Pamphlet printed and circulated in Birmingham c. 1937 (courtesy of the Library of Birmingham).

also remarked on the children’s self-control and consequent lack of supervision which went hand-in-hand with self-government. Helen Grant, for example, on a visit to the colony in Pedralbes, was particularly struck by the fact that none of the children were in any kind of uniform and there seemed to be no obvious supervision in the garden at all – it was taken for granted that the children would behave properly.[footnoteRef:40] [40: Helen Grant Papers, MS ADD 8251/II, 15–16, 19.]

However, the trace of one unseen but ever-present adult is unmistakeable – the photographer. Even without corroborating contextual evidence, it is possible to reconstruct a sequence of photographs (to which Figures 1 and 2 belong) as potentially being part of a body of work by a single photographer. The lack of contextual information accompanying the images was remarked upon earlier and as far as it is possible to tell, only one of the colony photographs in this sequence bears the name of a photographer, G. Benete or Benite, working under commission for a government department.[footnoteRef:41] The fact that the images do not routinely bear the name of the photographer is not surprising; it was common in Spain in this period for images to remain anonymous, and for the photographers to have no control over the [41: IBMA Box A/2, File D/16, stamped on the verso with the words “Ministerio de Estado, Prensa Extranjera, G. Benete [or Benite] Fotografico. Cliche no ______ Fecha_____.” Both the plate number and date are blank in the original. The image is further stamped “Spanish Medical Aid Committee, 69 Great Russell Street, London WC1.”]

subsequent unattributed use of their images in political campaign materials.[footnoteRef:42] [42: Mendelson, Documenting Spain, 95; Epps, “Seeing the Dead,” 133.]

Comparing the IBMA photographs to other images of this period illuminates the photographer’s use of visual conventions that would resonate with the audience. The little girl returning the photographer’s gaze in Figure 1, for example, evokes Robert Capa’s iconic images of children in the Civil War, where a child’s eye contact with the camera is often used to create a sense of intimacy between the child, the photographer and the viewer.[footnoteRef:43] The images also utilise what Mendelson has referred to as “the iconic status of the peasant”, used repeatedly in photographs, documentary film, postcards and posters of the Civil War period to represent the contribution of rural labour to the struggle, to productivity and to stability.47 The agricultural labour of the young boys in Figure 2 clearly speaks to this tradition and can be seen at work in other sources from the period, such as a pamphlet of political cartoons by Josep Obiols which includes an image of three boys that is almost identical to the photograph in Figure 2.[footnoteRef:44] The images also appear to draw on Soviet iconography, both in the use of agricultural symbolism and in the style of photographing children and young people, which is reminiscent of the highly stylised photographs of young male and female pioneers by Aleksandr Rodchenko.[footnoteRef:45] Similar images were also taken in children’s institutions in the Soviet Union to illustrate the process by which the child was prepared for integration into wider Soviet society, and the themes are much the same – classroom and dining-room etiquette, culture, collectivity, regularity and hygiene.[footnoteRef:46] [43: See J.P.F. Aizpúrua, R. Wheelan, and C. Coleman, eds., Heart of Spain: Robert Capa’s Photographs of the Spanish Civil War (New York: Aperture, 1999); C. Capa and R. Wheelan, eds., Children of War, Children of Peace: Photographs by Robert Capa (Boston: Bullfinch Press, 1991). The best known example is probably the much reproduced photograph of a young girl lying on sacks taken in Barcelona in January 1939. 47Mendelson, Documenting Spain, 174–5.] [44: J. Obiols, Auca Del Noi Català Antifeixista I Humà. Comissariat de Propaganda de la Generalitat de Catalunya, Sabadell, 1937, LSE, Spanish Civil War Collection, Misc 91 volume 27/3, microfilm 514. Published in Catalan, Spanish, French and English, the English title being Life of a Catalan, Free as a Catalan’s Must Be. As in the photograph the central figure has his arms around the shoulders of his comrades; the only difference is that in the cartoon, two of them are looking in the opposite direction to that in the photograph and the boy on the right is a fairly stereotypical representation of a black child. The English caption for the cartoon is “His religion is not cheap, it’s a hearty comradeship.”] [45: Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph 1924–1937 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 79–85, 106–12.] [46: Elena R. Iarskaia-Smirnova and Pavel Romanov, “Interpreting Visual Memories of Soviet Institutional Child Care” (paper presented at ESSH Conference, Amsterdam, March 25, 2006).]

The other adult presence that hovers over the images is of course the viewer. For the international humanitarian and political campaigners for whom the Spanish Civil War became a major cause, the visual was a key method of communication, providing unequivocal proof of both the reforming and modernising zeal of the Republic and the need for action, and the photographs in the IBMA are part of this tradition. Images were widely distributed and collected and effectively used for propaganda and fundraising purposes by a range of political activists and humanitarian relief organisations. Virginia Woolf, for example, in her discussion of photographs in Three Guineas, written in the winter of 1936–7, describes receiving photographs of “dead children” with the words: “The Spanish Government sends them with patient pertinacity about twice a week”.[footnoteRef:47] Relief agencies such as Save the Children and the Quaker Friends Service Council made widespread use of photographs of children in their fundraising, as the example from Birmingham seen in Figure 3 demonstrates. References in the correspondence files of the British Friends Service Council archives show that images taken in southern Spain were sent to the American Friends Service Committee offices in Philadelphia for wider distribution.[footnoteRef:48] The files include numerous references to demand for images from America, Britain and elsewhere, such as the letter from Elise Thomsen at Barcelona to the Friends Service Council in London on 2 July 1937, stating that she and her colleague Alfred Jacob had found a helper to go around taking photographs of colonies, prompted by a regular flow of letters from Paris requesting “descriptions and pictures”.[footnoteRef:49] Similarly, the Birmingham Quakers – who were quick to respond to the outbreak of war in Spain, forming a Spanish Relief Committee in 1936 which supported two colonies for refugee children at Rubí and Caldas de Maravella in Catalonia – asked the relief worker Francesca Wilson to write a pamphlet on her return to Birmingham, specifically requesting that she should “be on the lookout for new photographs” with which to illustrate it during her stay in Spain.[footnoteRef:50] [47: Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own/Three Guineas (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 125, first published by the Hogarth Press in 1938.] [48: For example, Friends Library, FSC/R/SP/5 includes a list of negatives sent to Philadelphia. The Friends Service Council was the arm of the British Quaker establishment that co-ordinated Quaker relief in Spain and had its headquarters in London. It collaborated closely with its sister organisation, the American Friends Service Committee, which co-ordinated American Quaker relief and its headquarters were in Philadelphia.] [49: Friends Library, FSC/R/SP/1/2.] [50: Library of Birmingham, Warwickshire North Monthly Meeting, Spanish Relief Committee, minutes February 25, 1937 and March 11, 1937.]

Given the numbers of British activists visiting Spain, and their keenness to acquire photographic evidence for propaganda purposes, it is not surprising that some of the photographs found their way into archival collections in Britain, the USA and elsewhere. Images comparable to those in the IBMA appear in the papers of individual activists held among the photographic collections of the British Imperial War Museum (hereafter IWM) and in collections of propaganda such as the Spanish Civil War collection in the Archives of the London School of Economics (hereafter LSE). To explore the consumption of the photographs and their journey into British archival collections I want to briefly consider how a moment in one child’s experience of learning at Benicasim Colony in 1937 came to be visually represented in three different British collections. The photographic archive of the IWM includes a photograph showing a child sitting at his school lessons at Benicasim. An identical image is to be found in the LSE Archive, this time reproduced as part of a double-page spread on Benicasim in a lavishly illustrated, multi-lingual booklet describing the International Brigades’ work with children. The booklet employs photo-montage to juxtapose scenes of learning, smiling children and beautiful homes on the one hand, with images of battlefields, evacuations and children peering apprehensively at the skies above from the entrances of underground shelters on the other. The same child can also be seen in the IBMA, this time in a series of four photographs showing classroom scenes captioned “Children’s Colony, Benicasim: 1937”.[footnoteRef:51] [51: Los Niños Españoles y Las Brigadas Internacionales,?Barcelona: Comité Pro-Niños Españoles de las Brigadas Internacionales, [?1938], LSE, Spanish Civil War Collection, Misc 91 volume 42/4, microfilm 517. IBMA Box A/2, File D/117.]

The internal evidence in the images indicates that they form part of a series taken on the same occasion within a short space of time, but what was the route which brought them into three different British collections? The IWM photograph is included in an album of photographs collected by the activist Winifred Bates during her time in Spain.[footnoteRef:52] The IBMA is based on papers collected by the International Brigades Association (of whom more later) and subsequently added to from the personal collections of other Brigaders.[footnoteRef:53] The photographs under discussion in this study reached the IBMA between 1987 and 1990 and the catalogue states that they include “W. Bates’ pictures of refugees in Barcelona”. Although a few of the images clearly bear her name on the back, it is not possible to be certain how many in total came from this source, and some undoubtedly came from the collections of other activists – either directly from the individuals involved or their families, or collected together by the historian Jim Fyrth as part of his research for a book on the “Aid Spain” campaigns in Britain.[footnoteRef:54] As well as photographs collected by individual activists during their time in Spain, information stamped on the reverse of several of the images indicates that they passed through, or in some cases potentially originated from, agencies such as the Spanish Press Agency, Servicio Español de Información, CSI Service D’Informacion et de Propagande and Spanish Medical Aid Committee in London, a fact which again clearly points to the active collection and circulation of images for use in fundraising and propaganda publications. The duplication of particular images in a number of collections indicates a widespread practice of collection and exchange among individual activists and humanitarian and political organisations.[footnoteRef:55] [52: Imperial War Museum Photographic Archive, HU 33021. Winifred was the wife of the Socialist novelist Ralph Bates and worked as a journalist and for the British Medical Unit, see Jim Fyrth and Sally Alexander, eds., Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1991), 42, 63–7.] [53: International Brigade Memorial Archive: Catalogue 1986, Vol 1.: v.] [54: Fyrth, The Signal Was Spain, 1986.] [55: Janina Struk has identified similar repetition of visual images in British and American collections relating to the Holocaust; see Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 13–15.]

This use of the visual was part of a wider discourse of aid in which written episodes from children’s life stories were used and circulated in a similar fashion. These episodes frequently appear to directly incorporate the child’s own voice, although it is impossible to assess the degree of adult translation or mediation involved. The Friends Service Council Bulletin, for example, reprinted personalised stories of individual children reproduced from the correspondence or reports of relief workers in Spain as a means of encouraging financial donations to fund its relief activities and to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of the Friends’ work. One such instance in the Bulletin for 4 January 1937 tells of the “shattered homes” of 10-year-old Anastasio Rodriguez and 12-year-old Carmen Caras, before quoting a third unnamed child described as silent, shy and aged about five:

He uttered ingenuously the cause of his sadness in four words – “They turned me out.”

I asked from where. “From school and from home,” he answered. The poor little chap

felt a stranger everywhere, since he had lost his home. Lost homes! How much they mean, how much they account for![footnoteRef:56] [56: Friends Library, London, FSC Bulletin no 3, January 4, 1937, 2.]

Similar episodes appear in International Brigades publications, symbolising the just nature of the cause for which they had travelled to Spain. In The Story of a Spanish Child, a child’s letter is apparently reproduced in which Antonio Perez provides a brief autobiography, outlining the hardships and tragedies of his young life before his arrival in a colony where, for the first time, he enjoys a happy childhood:

I am very happy here, enough food and a good bed. I may say that my life has completely changed, we have play things, a library and affection. We take walk [sic] and study.

I am happy to feel this affection of the International comrades. My heart is also full of love for them who want to make us fit for a better future.[footnoteRef:57] [57: Los Niños Españoles y Las Brigadas Internacionales, ?Barcelona: Comité Pro-Niños Españoles de las Brigadas Internacionales, [?1938], LSE, Spanish Civil War Collection, Misc 91 volume 42/4, microfilm 517.]

Antonio’s letter is reproduced alongside another letter from an International Brigader to his own son at home explaining why he is in Spain, presumably included to ensure that the resonances and parallels between children in Spain and the readers’ own families were not lost on the audience.

Such use of a child’s life story by activists and reformers, and the apparent incorporation of the child’s own voice or testimony, was of course not new – similar techniques had been in use by philanthropic and charitable organisations since at least the early nineteenth century.[footnoteRef:58] It was used, for example, by Eglantyne Jebb of the Save the Children Fund in its campaigns to counter child starvation in Europe after the First World War. Jebb articulated the effectiveness of this rhetorical device in an article entitled “Life Stories of Hungarian Children”, where she wrote: [58: See for example Shurlee Swain, “Sweet Childhood Lost: Idealized Images of Childhood in the British Child Rescue Literature”, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2, no. 2 (2009): 198–214.]

The little autobiographies which have been written by fifty pupils in the Save the Children Fund workrooms in Budapest... explain more clearly than could be explained by any number of dry, statistical, adult written reports, both the need to bring succour to the starving children of the slums and the soundness of the system which has been adopted with this end in view.[footnoteRef:59] [59: Eglantyne Jebb, “Life Stories of Hungarian Children,” The Record of the Save the Children Fund 3, no. 1 (1922): 27–32.]

I have written elsewhere of the popularity of this device with other women humanitarians who, in their texts, display a similar tension to that seen in the visual sources, between the need to depict the children as passive victims for political or fundraising purposes and the representation of the children as self-reliant and active agents who realise that their future lies in a mutually supportive and communal way of life.[footnoteRef:60]This article has attempted to articulate the trajectory of the images from their initial creation in Spain as objects to witness and perform the reforming and progressive zeal of the Spanish Republic through their collection, use and exchange as part of the visual economy of humanitarian and political activism to raise awareness and money. I want now to conclude by turning to the later stages in their biography and looking more closely at their incorporation into the particular archive in which I first encountered them, and the subsequent implications of this archival context for their continued performance and meanings. [60: Including the author, suffrage activist, and humanitarian aid worker Evelyn Sharp (1869– 1955) and the American Quaker journalist and author Anna Louise Strong (1885–1970), both of whom undertook relief work with the Friends in war-torn and famine areas in the 1920s and 1930s. See Siân Roberts, “’I promised them that I would tell England about them’: A Woman Teacher Activist’s Life in Popular Education,” Paedagogica Historica 47, nos. 1&2 (2011): 155–72.]

Archives, as one visual historian of the Holocaust has argued, “are not neutral spaces; they impose their own meanings on photographs” through their processes of selection, ordering and cataloguing.[footnoteRef:61] The body of images that prompted this paper was incorporated into a very particular archival context as part of the International Brigade Memorial Archive, which is itself held in the Marx Memorial Library in [61: Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 13.]

London.[footnoteRef:62] The IBMA was initially assembled and organised by the International Brigade Association, an organisation formed in February 1939 by British volunteers who had fought in Spain and which was closely associated with the British Communist Party. The Association’s aims were to continue the campaign against fascism, to support veterans and to preserve and publicise the legacy and memory of the Brigade.[footnoteRef:63] The archive was presented to the Marx Memorial Library by the Association in October 1975, a month before the death of Franco.[footnoteRef:64] The Association’s intention was clearly articulated by Nan Green, then secretary and herself a former activist in Spain, who described the aim as “to build such an archive, which will remain in Marx House as a permanent memorial to the men and women who fought”, and this purpose was further reflected in the collection’s title: The International Brigade Memorial Archive.[footnoteRef:65] Since this initial deposit, the archive has been added to through subsequent gifts of personal collections amassed by individual activists and donated to by the families of International Brigaders.[footnoteRef:66] As mentioned previously, the archive also includes material gathered by the historian Jim Fyrth in the process of writing his study of the “Aid Spain” movement in Britain and his subsequent book, with Sally Alexander, on the role played in the conflict by women from English-speaking countries.[footnoteRef:67] In this final stage, therefore, with their incorporation into the IBMA archive, the performance and meaning of the images shifts: they are no longer active agents in a humanitarian campaign but rather commemorative objects, incorporated as part of an archive dedicated to addressing the historical silence about the British International Brigades and the wider “Aid Spain” movement and providing a “memorial” to their activism. [62: The Marx Memorial Library in London is an independent library and registered charity dedicated to the history of Marxism, Socialism and the working class movement; see http:// www.marx-memorial-library.org.] [63: Tom Buchanan, The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain: War, Loss and Memory. (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2007), 138, 177.] [64: Natalie Ann Stuart, The Memory of The Spanish Civil War and the Families of British International Brigaders, PhD diss., de Montfort University, 2001: 22–23, 137.] [65: Letter from Nan Green to IBA members, 17 August 1974, IBMA Box A-6, D138, quoted in Stuart, The Memory of the Spanish Civil War, 137.] [66: Ibid.; see also International Brigade Memorial Archive: Catalogue Vol 1 1986, London, Marx Memorial Library, 1986: v; for more detail on the commemoration of the International Brigade in Britain see Stuart, The Memory of the Spanish Civil War.] [67: Fyrth, The Signal was Spain; Fyrth and Alexander, Women’s Voices from the Spanish Civil War.]

In her study of images of the Holocaust, Janina Struk commented on the relationship between the past and the present in photographs which have been deposited in a range of commemorative archival institutions. Writing that “[t]he present always has its own agenda for reconstructing the past”, she prompted her reader to consider whose story, therefore, is in fact told by the photographs?[footnoteRef:68] We could ask the same question of our images – whose story do they tell? Is it that of the children depicted in them, displaced from home and family by a brutal civil war; the political and humanitarian activists for whom they became fundraising and propaganda tools; the members of the British International Brigades for whom they stand as a commemorative memorial; or the historian revisiting the circumstances of their production and performance several decades later? As the images and the entangled stories embedded within them travelled through a range of performative spaces and across international borders, they accumulated a number of multiple and intersecting histories and meanings. In the same way that they represented sites of multiple interpretations in the past, they also embed a number of contesting histories and meanings in the present. [68: Struk, Photographing the Holocaust, 15.]

Notes on contributor

Siân Roberts is Collection Curator at The Library of Birmingham and an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Education, University of Birmingham, UK. She completed her doctorate entitled Place, Life Histories and the Politics of Relief: Episodes in the Life of Francesca Wilson, Humanitarian Educator Activist in 2010 at the University of Birmingham. Her research interests include the methodologies of telling life histories, the participation of women educator activists and Quaker women in humanitarian relief and humanitarian networks and the use of visual representations of children and children’s art by humanitarian and political activists.

798 S. Roberts

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